Dustman is a free Firefox Extension to automatically close unused or inactive Firefox Tabs on the interval you set. Dustman is almost similar to tab wrangler extension of Google Chrome. This Firefox extension could be very helpful when you open too many tabs in same window or in multiple windows. It automatically closes the unused or inactive tabs after the specified time of inactivity. This extension is very small and you don’t need to restart your Firefox browser to start using it.
How to Automatically Close Inactive Firefox Tabs:
There are various settings that you can configure in this extension to automatically close tabs
- Minimum inactivity time in minutes: This lets you set that after how much time of inactivity a tab should be closed.
- Minimum number of tabs per window to be ignored: If a window has less tabs than this number, then the tabs will not be closed. They will be closed only if you have more tabs opened.
- Number of closed tabs shown in History panel: You can configure how many closed tabs should be shown in its history panel.
It also has a setting to not to close the tabs which were not yet viewed. This is a very useful setting, as you might open a tab to refer to later, but might take time to get to it. In that case, the tab won’t be closed unless you have viewed it atleast once.
Pinned tabs are also ignored, so in this case if you don’t want to close any particular tab, you should pin it (right click on any tab and choose option to Pin).
In case some website shows a warning message when you try to close the website, then such websites will be stuck at the warning box, and will not be closed by this extension.
Pausing Auto Close feature:
There is also a feature to pause the auto-close process. For this, click the Dustman icon on the toolbar. Click Pause auto-closing button to pause the process of auto closing of tabs.
There is also one more good feature I like is, that it saves the history of last closed tabs in its panel. You can easily restore the closed tabs or any particular tab by clicking on its icon on the main toolbar, as shown in the above screenshot.
This auto-closing feature does not works in Private Window of Firefox.
Final Words:
Dustman is a nice Firefox extension which manage your unused tabs easily. This feature of closing unused tabs at a given interval is very helpful to those people who open too many tabs in a Firefox browser and forget to close.
There are a couple of features I wish it adds in future enhancements:
- Option to whitelist websites that should not be auto-closed. Currently this can be done by pinning them.
- Some visual indication about the tab that will be auto-closed. Could be by changing its tab color, or some small notification at bottom.
You can get Dustman Firefox Extension from here.
