Open Links in Silent Tabs in Mozilla Firefox

Sometimes, when I am browsing the web I start to hear some strange sounds – music, news, TV shows etc. Unlike the Poltergeist movie, these sounds do not come from the ghosts hiding in apparitions. But these are the sounds coming from tabs that opened up in Mozilla Firefox browser. Some of the web pages load up videos and music that starts to auto-play in the background. This not only makes the web browsing slower, but interrupts you through all the music and sounds coming from these tabs. The solution is simple – a browser extension called Open Link in Silent Tab.

The Firefox extension does what its name says – it opens a link in a silent tab. That tab does not load the target web page automatically. But as soon as you switch to that tab, the page starts to load. This way you browse the internet much more efficiently as all the bandwidth is used on the web pages in focus.

Open Link in Silent Tab

The extensions works in a very simple way. You just have to right-click on a link and then select Open Link in Silent Tab to open it in a silent tab. The tab shall be opened, but Firefox will not automatically switch to that tab. It is up to you to switch to that tab or close it without switching to it.

In the options for this extension, you can enable prefetching of the web page content for faster browsing, enable the hotkeys for opening a silent tab and customize the right-click menu label to your own preference.

Open Link in Silent Tab

Firefox extension “Open Link in Silent Tab” can make web browsing experience better by not auto-loading the web pages opened in new tabs. This is especially useful when browsing multimedia rich websites.

You can get the Open Link in Silent Tab from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/open-link-in-silent-tab/.