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I am using Mozilla Firefox 7.0.1 on a Windows 7 computer (home basic). I usually keep the browser window opened for a long periods of time, like three to four weeks, and I have many tabs opened in the window, like 300 to 900. Recently all of the sudden the Firefox window became "always top" window. I can minimize it, but when it is maximized, no other window can be displayed in front of it, only behind it. This is very inconvenient for me. Is there any fix that I can apply without restarting the Firefox window?

Thank you.

Firebear
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  • It seems that it's not only you having this problem: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/893312 – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Nov 12 '11 at 22:46
  • Hi, Mehper! Thanks for the link. It is always good to know that I am not alone :). Unfortunately it provides no solution. I have two programs that have an option to make their windows topmost, but they can no longer beat Firefox. How does Windows know which window should be topmost? Is it set in the registry? – Firebear Nov 12 '11 at 22:59
  • @Firebear: Try upgrading to Firefox 8.0. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Nov 13 '11 at 00:43
  • By the way, the thing that bothers me about this new behavior is that it blocks the taskbar! My taskbar is always set to auto-hide, and it's supposed to pop up when I hover my mouse at the bottom of the screen. With FF maximized, it now prevents the taskbar from popping up. Super annoying! – StormRyder Apr 02 '13 at 23:52

5 Answers5

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Press Ctrl+Alt+Esc to make the window go back normal. It's a Windows bug, introduced in Win 7 or Vista. Happens to "not responding" windows at random.

Stephen Rauch
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GrayFace
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4

Restarting in safe mode, then restarting in normal mode worked for me:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/924733#answer-324367

canto I
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1

Started getting this on Win10 Home edition. Never had problems before. Restart of FF solves it for a (random) while. Just silly.

Zolee
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0

Greetings, thread-commenters of the past, and whoever lands on this page in the future from a Google search for "Firefox randomly sets always-on-top" just as I did!

If it's any help, I still, after many years, 3 versions of Windows and a gazillion versions of Firefox, haven't figured out why FF periodically goes to AoT mode (it's not my extensions, of which I just have the usual ones.. uBlock Origin, Ghostery etc) but I do have a neat & robust little workaround that I can share with you all.

I wrote this short AutoIt script. It lurks in the system tray, and every 10 seconds it checks to see if the FF window exists, and if so, sets it to Not-Always-On-Top. If the window doesn't exist (i.e. Firefox isn't running), it pops up a brief system-tray tip to let you know the script is still active.

(If you don't have it, the AutoIt3 compiler to turn this into an EXE is available for download here: https://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/downloads/)

Here's my script:

Opt("WinTitleMatchMode",2)
While (true)
    If (WinSetOnTop("Mozilla Firefox","",0)) = 0 Then TrayTip("Unset 'FF Window On Top'", "Didn't find Firefox.",2,18)
        Sleep(10000)
WEnd

Note: the ,2,18 values at the end of the third line are, respectively, the length of time for the "didn't find Firefox" tray-tip to linger, and the icon-type (yellow warning triangle in this case). You may wish to tweak them to make the script less/more intrusive.

The "Mozilla Firefox" value in the 3rd line is the unchanging part of the FF window title - at least, on my en-US version of FF 79.0 - but I can imagine that this, too, might need to be changed for non-English or other variants of Firefox.

The (10000) value on the 4th line is the interval in milliseconds between checks - i.e., with this value the script will check-and-reset the AoT-ness of Firefox every 10 seconds. Although the CPU load of this script is miniscule, I still instinctively feel it would be a bad idea to have it obsessively checking Firefox too often!

I hope this helps someone else with this issue.

David Hollway
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0

First off, you should be able to close FF without loosing all your tabs. Session restore will see to that.

AlwaysOnTopMaker is a program I use to get programs to always be on top. It works by setting and disabling the flag to tell Windows that that program should always be on top. I imagine that, if you installed and ran AOTM, you should be able to toggle the flag, which would prevent FF from being always on top.

Nick2253
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