It’s hard to imagine life without tabbed browsing. Before Chrome and Firefox made tabbed browsing a mainstream feature, users had to open multiple windows. This not only took a huge toll on system resources but the many windows were hard to manage. With tabbed browsing, users can distribute their tabs to just a few windows. Browsers are less resource hungry these days, and hardware is more capable today. What’s even better is that you can drag tabs out into their own window or move them to another one. That said, you can still end up with one too many browser windows. Merge Windows is a Firefox add-on that lets you merge all Firefox windows into one.
Merge Windows Extensions
Install Merge Windows in Firefox and go about your usual bit of browsing. When you have one too many windows open or you want to gather all your tabs in one window, right-click inside any window. From the context menu, select ‘Merge all windows’. All other windows will be merged into the current one.
Merge Windows With Elbow Grease
Elbow grease is not a Firefox add-on. If you don’t want to use the Merge Windows add-on to merge all Firefox windows, your only other option is to do it manually. Firefox doesn’t have a move tabs options that lets you move tabs from one window to another. Instead, it has drag and drop.
Go to the Firefox window you want to merge with another one. Select a tab and drag it to the other window you want to move it to. Repeat for all tabs in all windows you have open.
Firefox appears to have a serious shortcoming in regards to moving tabs. In Chrome you can select multiple tabs by holding down the Shift key. Once you’ve selected all tabs, you can drag them out and onto a different Chrome window to merge them into one. It’s shocking that Firefox doesn’t support this natively though you can use an add-on called Multiple Tab Handler to select multiple tabs in Firefox.
With the add-on installed, you can select multiple tabs the same way you can in Chrome. Just hold down the Shift key and click on tabs to select them. You can then drag them out and move them to a different window. It’s still a manual way to merge all Firefox windows however, it’s easier than doing it one tab at a time.
Manually moving tabs and merging windows like this has one advantage the Merge Windows add-on doesn’t have. You can merge select windows instead of merging them all into one.