Win8: funky undesired split tab view in firefox

I'm a Linux guy who's trying to find a solution for my lady's daughter who bought a win8 laptop. She has been getting frustraited with her firefox window suddenly changing to a split view displaying two browser tabs at the same time.
One above the other. She doesn't know what she did wrong to cause it. But she wants it to stop.

I often use firefox in several flavors of Linux. And have used it in Winxp, Vista, and Win7, but I've never encountered this behavior.

Is this some Win8 feature?

Is there a way to disable it?

 

This link may help: http://browserland.com/how-to/restore-firefox-default-settings-without-uninstalling-it/

 

Thanks for the link. I have serious doubts that Linda tweaked any settings herself. «Just yesterday, she even needed help to find the "window maximize" button...» And when I tried to help her with this split tab view problem I couldn't find any applicable settings in the preferences dialog. Though I'll admit I forgot to peek at her about:config.

It is possible that she clicked on something somewhere that installed some add-on.

I think I'll look at those manually before automatically resetting defaults via the method in the link... Mostly because I'd still like to know just what it is that keeps happening to her. I mean her Firefox doesn't open like that. She can usually read some of her e-mail, or some of her Facebook news-feed page before it suddenly happens.

I'm not familiar with any browser setting that resizes the active tab, leaving a view of the lower portion of another tab of the same browser window in place... :confused

It visually resembles having two separate browser windows open, then vertically resizing one so that it's page viewing area was cut in half, and then overlaying it over the top half of other window. Except that they are separate tabs, not separate windows.

 

Has she perhaps dragged the browser to the side of the screen where it will automatically resize vertically and occupy half a screen. This is the case another browser window can be opened and the two can exist side by side. I don't think they would stay like that after a reboot though.

 

I don't think so. But it does make me review my memory of what I saw when Linda stayed over Wednesday night. When she is here she spends most of her time sitting on the couch, reading her email, or facebook, or some dating site. My first clue that she had this problem was when she handed me her laptop to ask me if I could fix it, there were two "tabs" showing so I don't think it was two separate windows. Though I suppose that it would have looked that way if the resized one itself had two tabs. And the full sized firefox window was actually a 3rd page. But she would have had to reposition the resized window so that both it's left & right borders aligned perfectly with the other browser window. And I remember moving the mouse pointer along the bottom edge and corners of the smaller {window/or/tab} trying to get the pointer to transform to a resize arrow without success.

So I pulled up her preferences dialog from the menu & poked around looking for a setting that could possibly be responsible... Ultimately I closed the small tab{ctrl+w} After which I found it in her "recently closed" history. When it was reopened, it was full size. That worked for an hour or so.

Then she suddenly started cussing at her computer. Only this time she manged to make it go away herself. {Though she didn't know how she did it} But when it did, her browser window had shrunk. Normally her browser nearly fills the screen, but what I saw from across the room showed over an inch of the windows background image on all 4 sides of it. Neither of us felt like jumping up at the time, so when she couldn't seam to resize it, I suggested she maximize her firefox window. Thats when I had to explain that there were a couple of other buttons next to the one with the "x" on it...

She is supposed to come back over on Sunday. So I'll get a chance to check her about:config, and add-on list for anything I'm not familiar with...

If it happens while she is here, I'll suggest trying the {alt+tab} keyboard shortcut to see if there are in fact, two separate browser windows...

 

It is a bit of a mystery for sure, keep us posted and if you can glean from her what she thinks she may have done lets have it,, every little helps!

 

She don't have any firefox add-ons. And If there's a clue in her about:config, I'm not good enough to find it. But if/when I find out what's doing it, or a reliable quick way out of it when it does happen, I'll revive the thread to say so... But for now I'm done wrestling with :*** win8...

 

Try: firefox -p
That should bring up the profile manager. Create a new one, and see if it happens again.
I'm running windows 8.1, have yet to see that happen, though, I'm running the nightly version.

 

Actually firefox -p doesn't bring up the profile manager!

 

The exact line is
firefox.exe -p

If that doesn't work then you need to indicate the full path enclosed in quotes
32-bit Windows: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p
64-bit Windows: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p