Opening a new tab in Firefox through the terminal

I want to open a new tab in an existing Firefox instance through bash. Older answers point towards the -remote command line option, but this switch has been depreciated since Firefox 39. The new way to accomplish this is by using the --new-tab option:

firefox --new-tab

However, on Ubuntu this opens a new window instead.

1 Answer

What's completely undocumented is that Firefox expects a --url parameter and will launch a new window otherwise. If you don't want the new tab to navigate to a url, give about:newtab as the url parameter.

firefox --new-tab --url about:newtab

6

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