Today we are seeing a lot of animations and effects integrated into operating systems and third party software to provide a more visually appealing feel to the user. Obviously we won’t want to go back to the Windows 95 era where the graphical user interface is so boring and I get sleepy by just looking at it. However, too much effects and animations gets on my nerves as well. For example, minimizing or maximizing a folder that is already opened in Windows 7 can be nice as it doesn’t put on any extra load on the system. Although I do have that few milliseconds to spare, but I personally prefer things to work snappy.

If you haven’t noticed, there is animation when you open a new tab in Firefox. It is obviously there to make the browser more visually appealing. If you are like me that prefer things to be snappy, fortunately there is an easy way to disable the Firefox new tab animation.


Type about:config at the URL bar and hit enter. Click the I’ll be careful, I promise button. Type browser.tabs.animate at the filter bar and hit enter. Simply double click on the browser.tabs.animate to change the value from true to false.

This change takes effect immediately without restarting the Firefox browser. You should now feel that opening a new tab is slightly faster when the animation is disabled.

As a test, I captured the the action of opening tab in Firefox with HyperCam and extracted every frame from the video. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are 4 frames that shows the animation when opening a new tab in Firefox.

After disabling the animation, I did the same by recording the screen and extract every frame from the video. I couldn’t find any frames that shows half opened tab.