N.B. This workaround is for macOS, using Keyboard Maestro. I have not tried equivalents elsewhere. On Windows, AutoHotkey can bind a hotkey, send Ctrl+T, select and clear the address bar, then Escape. On Linux, AutoKey is the usual analogue; under Wayland you may need something like ydotool. The Firefox new-tab focus behaviour itself is not macOS-specific.

In the previous post I described Slinky, a self-hosted start page, and mentioned that I use the New Tab Override extension so Firefox opens it on every new tab. That works, but the default behaviour is a little ugly.

Firefox puts the cursor at the beginning of the address bar when a new tab opens. So if I create a tab to search for “dog food” my sequence of actions would typically be:

1. Command+T to create new tab.
2. Slinky page opens as expected.
3. Start typing “dog food” but notice that what appears in the URL bar is dog foodhttp://<slinky address>.

There’s a lot of discusson on Bugzilla about this. The bottom line is that this is intended behaviour for Firefox. They don’t want a situation where new tab creation goes to an anonymous location.

The way I work around this is to use ^T not ⌘T to create a new tab. And in Keyboard Maestro, which I’ve written a lot about, I have a Firefox-targeted macro that triggers on ^T and then:

1. Creates a new tab with ⌘T.
2. Selects the URL bar contents.
3. Deletes the contents.
4. Escapes out of the URL bar.

You can download the Keyboard Maestro macro Firefox new tab and clear URL from this site.

The rest of New Tab Override’s options — tab position, containers, a local HTML file instead of a URL — are documented in the extension and its README.

If you run into trouble, see my contact page.