Firefox – How to have Firebug only open in one tab

Since this is a firefox extension you have to install it into firefox. Cross-check in your addon settings.

Then you should see a small firebug icon in the lower right of your window in the status bar. Click it to open the interface. Usually F12 also opens it.

What kind of redirect? There are Firefox addons outside of Firebug you can use to stop redirects. Firebug does not seem to provide this functionality itself.

Redirects based on the HTML "Meta refresh" (also HTTP "Refresh") can be blocked by setting accessibility.blockautorefresh to true in about:config. In fact, this corresponds to the "Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page" option in Options > Advanced > General. Alternatively, addons such as RefreshBlocker can be used.

For JavaScript based redirects, JS can be completely disabled or addons such as NoScript can be used.

There generally isn't much you can inspect on a page that is redirected using HTTP 3xx response codes. In case anyone wants to know, setting network.http.redirection-limit to 0 in about:config causes all of these to show a Firefox error page.

JS redirects

JS-based redirects are difficult. I'm not aware of a method to stop them from within the browser. However, you can intercept the responses with a debugging proxy like Fiddler2, and replace it with your own modified response (the AutoResponder in Fiddler2 is one way). In this modified response, you'd want to remove any references to window.location and location, the usual ways to change the page from JS [you might be able to get away with replacing them with a dummy variable, e.g. var thisIsAMadeUpVarName]. That way, the redirect would never get to the browser. See the "Search and replace in HTML." section of this document (you may wish to also filter JS files if they are served separately).