Atomic Avenue: Searching from ComicBase With a Single Browser Tab

Searching for comics on Atomic Avenue using the “Buy this Comic” or “Buy Issues of <title>” right-click commands is slick, but it has one annoyance: each search launches its own browser tab. This is the default behavior of both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 when an external application(such as ComicBase) asks it to open a web page, but over time, it can add up to a lot of excess browser tabs that need closing.

Although no workaround currently exists for Internet Explorer, Firefox users can change this behavior so that new web page requests from outside programs reuse the last browser tab, instead of opening a new one.

To do this:

1. Launch Firefox
2. In the location window, type about:config and press Enter. This opens up Firefox’s internal preferences, where all manner of settings can be tweaked.
3. Scroll down to “browser.link.open_external” and double-click that setting. Change the setting to 1 and click OK.

From now on, all browser requests lauched by external applications will re-use the current browser tab, if one exists. If you ever want to change the setting back to its default, repeat steps 1–3, but change the value to 3 in the final step.