2 min read

Solving Firefox "window sent to back" when opening new window

Since I’ve had Firefox on my Windows 7 machine, I’ve noticed that with certain websites when you open a new window, it will be opened, but then moved behind the current window. Not life-threatening, but an annoying quirk. Tonight I finally was annoyed enough to find the solution.

I found an answer on this post at the support forum for Mozilla - which in turn pointed me to this article from Adobe.

Short answer: disable “protected mode” on Flash to prevent this behaviour. It’s frustrating to have to make Flash less secure to solve this, but I rationalize it by saying it’s no less secure than Flash on XP.

How to do this? From the Explorer, navigate to c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe and select “Run as Administrator”, then open:

C:\windows\system32\macromed\flash\mms.cfg

(or c:\windows\system64\flash\mms.cfg if you’re on Windows 64 bit). Add the following to the end of the file:

ProtectedMode=0

Save the file and you’re done.