lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live-top-firefox-2-config-tweaks-209941.php
homepage calls the web browser "fully customizable to your online life," and that's not just marketing claptrap. Beyond the extensive options available in its menus and dialogs, there's a lengthy set of advanced Firefox preferences that can customize the browser to your specific needs. Sure, your brother-in-law's not likely to edit Firefox's default configuration, but you? You're a power surfer and you want your web browser your way.
Firefox 20 release yesterday, today we'll dive deep into the bowels of the fox's config with a handful of my favorite Firefox 2 (and older) tweaks. How to modify Firefox's configuration (about:config) All this "advanced config" talk got you worried? Here's the deal: Firefox's configuration is a long list of keys and values. To view this list, type about:config into the Firefox address bar. Then, enter the name of the key you want to update in the "Filter" field. The list will narrow to only the entries that match your keyword as you type, as shown. Session restore Fx 20 only: As a blogger and web mail user, it breaks my heart to recount how many times I've composed a long post or email message, then accidentally closed the tab or browser and lost all my work. page key to 3 to restore your browsing session - with form entries intact! Note: By default, Firefox 2 automatically restores your session if your browser crashes - but this does it every time you restart your browser normally.
points out that doing it this way is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. To do it the normal person way, from the Tools menu choose Options, and in the Main area, select "Show my windows and tabs from last time" from the "When Firefox starts" dropdown. Tab width before scrolling kicks in Fx 20 only: The biggest interface changes in Firefox 2 involve tabbed browsing. Power surfers who open more than a dozen tabs will notice that Firefox 2 minimizes tabs to a certain width, then sets the excess to scroll off the tab bar with left and right arrows. As someone who often has more than a dozen tabs open, not being able to see them all made me crazy. One solution is to reduce the minimum tab width so that more tabs fit in the bar before the scroll kicks in. I found that 75 worked better for me - page titles were still readable, but more tabs could fit.
tabMinWidth * Modified Value: 75 (fit in more tabs before overflow enables scroll) * Alternate Modified Value: 0 (disable scroll entirely) * Default: 100 Tab close buttons Fx 20 only: Another tab interface change in Firefox 2 is the addition of a close button on each individual tab.
some hate it, saying it causes them to accidentally close a tab when just trying to switch to it. closeButtons value to 3 This will not display close tabs on individual tabs, and turn on a single close tab button at the right end of the tab bar.
Computerworld: For RAM sizes between 512BM and 1GB, start with 15000. png All versions: I have an irritating Firefox problem on my Mac When I try to drag a bookmark into one of my bookmark toolbar folders, the tool tip gets in the way and prevents the drop from working. Like you, I already know what all the buttons on my browser chrome do, so the tool tips aren't necessary. Bonus is, it solved my Mac's bookmark drag and drop problem.
put off that annoying Unresponsive Script dialog on Javascript-heavy web pages. spellcheckDefault = 2 turns on Firefox 2's spell-checking in input fields as well as textareas. hideGoButton=true turns off the rarely-used Go button at the end of the address bar, for more room to see long URLs.
I've reformatted and reinstalled stuff recently, but I guess when I grabbed all my old Firefox junk some other old crap came with it. It wasn't causing a problem, but that's something to watch out for.
com has a useful guide on speeding up firefox for broadband users. basically after getting to the hidden config settings you set the browser to request more data that it usually does. maxrequests Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!
Firefox caps out at 8 pipelined requests, which is the max allowed by the HTTP spec. Furthermore, if you could do 30 pipelined requests we'd have sites with a high population of FF users being brought to their knees pretty quickly. Some sites will even block your IP if you try to pull a stunt like that.
invid says: Is there a value that would display the new tab close buttons in both places (on the tab AND in the top right)? I like the new buttons, but I also like the top right button for closing more than one tab quickly etc.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor says: @oobogart & Rob P: I think Rob's right on this one; I didn't include that tweak (which we have posted before) for the reasons Rob cited.
jdsmn says: I recently installed the "tiny menu" extension that was on lifehacker a couple of days ago. There are a couple extensions I regularly use the icon for (greasemonkey, noscript) If I could move them, then I could turn the statusbar off completely, giving me more "real-estate" for browsing.
LonPhillips says: One thing I found out by accident that some Fox newbies might like is that by changing the name of Firefox, you can have multiple versions loaded. Otherwise, if you downloaded a new version, it replaced the previous one. As soon as new versions of my can't-live-without extensions are upgraded, I might dump the old ones, but NOT UNTIL THEN!
css hack to get rid of the tab pulldown - it's part of the pre-final 20 solution for getting rid of tab scrolling - I've had it installed and it still works well on 20 final.
I too thought ff2 would solve some of the things that extension controls but looks like i was wrong. There is a beta version of the extension out there you can download.
mookieproof says: My right-click context menu seems to be completely out of hand with 20--I hate having to scroll to get to the things I actually need. Is there an extension or configuration that controls this?
Hopefully the update to TMP will get rid of the drop-down tab menu, and reinstate the close tab button. I'd like to have both the close tab button as well as the individual close buttons on all of the tabs.
I tried turning it off earlier today to see what the "raw" 20 tabs were like. But Tab Mix is WAY better - more control over close buttons, restore closed tabs, visual cues for read and unread tabs, multi-lining instead of pull-down if you have too many tabs for a single line.
grayrest says: Firefox has this wacky little feature that downloads pages from links it thinks you may click on pages you view, like the top result on a page of Google results. This means you use up bandwidth and CPU cycles and store history for web pages you may not have ever viewed. To stop that madness, Couple points: 1 It doesn't just download what it "thinks" you want, it downloads what page authors say is where you're probably going to go next and then only when it won't slow down anything else. Good thing you're saving it all up for later when you'll really need it.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor says: @grayrest: I get the goal of the feature, but I don't want site authors putting web pages into my history that I haven't viewed myself. I find it bizarre that prefetching is turned ON by default.
grayrest says: It's on by default because the Firefox devs consider it to be useful to the majority of users. The point is to pick reasonable defaults and (power users excluded) I'd wager that most people don't care that a few extra pages are in their history. From a practical perspective, it doesn't do much good NOT to turn it on by default because then only geeks will be able to take advantage of it. That being said, I think it should populate the cache but not tweak your history. The adding to the history thing is just using the default page access code path. I remember it being annoyingly difficult to grab pages without triggering the history (pages including proces...
|
http://csua.com/feed/