With Firefox 3 already at version 3.0.7, and version 3. 1 (or 3.5 if the rename rumors are true) just around the corner, I think it’s time to take a short break from all the netbook news and focus on a tweak guide for our favorite browser.
This compilation is not, in any way complete, but I will try to keep it regularly updated. If you have a guide or blog post that you think is useful and should be added to the list, feel free to contact me with the details and l’ll add your post to the this list.
If you still don’t have it installed, Get Firefox 3 now.
Starer Guide for Firefox 3
If you need an in depth starter’s guide to Firefox 3, read up DRIA’s Field Guide for Firefox 3 for a detailed view of features Firefox 3 brings with it. Not feeling up to reading up all that? Read up Lifehacker’s highlight of the top 10 Firefox 3 features to get you started.
If you don’t feel that the starter’s guide is for you, why not start out with Lifehacker’s Firefox 3 power user guide. Note that if you’re a beginner with Firefox, or computing mainly, this will be a source of headaches.
Read all that? Now that you’re up-to-date with the features that Firefox 3 carries, let’s start tweaking.
Tweaking the Smart Location Bar
Admit it, not everyone LIKES the Smart Location Bar AKA Awesome Bar. Sure it’s intuitive but most folks would want the old Location Bar over the confusing jumble of suggestions given by the Awesome Bar. Most of folkswould be satisfied with just filtering the results to ignore some sources (like history, bookmarks, etc)
Here are 7 easy tweaks you can try to tame it. Edit these entries in about:config as follows:
- Make the autocomplete menu show only typed addresses and not visited or bookmarked
browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped = TRUE - Set the autocomplete menu to single line suggestions by installing the oldbar extension.
- Change the number of suggestions displayed in the autocomplete menu
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults - Hide the star button if you prefer to use the Bookmarks menu or a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + D)
- Open your userChrome.css file located in your profile folder.
- Add this line to the end of the file: #star-button {display: none !important;}
- Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.
- Always show the Go button. By default it is only displayed when you are editing the current web address.
- Open your userChrome.css file located in your profile folder.
- Add this line to the end of the file: #go-button { visibility: visible !important; }
- Restart Firefox for the change to take effect.
- If you enter firfox in the location bar and you try to correct it, the autocomplete menu won’t suggest anything because it only keeps working as you edit the last characters. Install the Edit Middle extension, developed by harikaried, to make it work with edits anywhere.
- To hide the web feed icon from the location bar, add this line to your userChrome.css file: #feed-button[feeds] { display: none !important; }
Pinoy Tech Guy’s recommended Addons
Addons extend the functionality for Firefox 3 to do almost anything we do online. Sure, having too much of them will bloat your browser to the point of no return but having a reasonable number of usefuk addons really help enhance the experience. Here’s Pinoy Tech Guy’s top picks:
- Adblock Plus - Don’t go online without an adblocker. Yes. Ads are the bread and butter of most bloggers (like me) and you can disable Adblock for us but 99.9% of the time, you need an adblocker to keepthe popups and all sorts of attention grabbing nonsense like screaming ads or push the button ads. Be sure to put Pinoy Tech Guy on the white list when you install this :).
- No Script - Secure’s your browser by removing scripts from any site that is not in the white list. No more malware for you. Again, be sure to put Pinoy Tech Guy on the white list when you install this :).
- DownThemAll - want to save all the pictures but they’re thumbnailed and you have to click them one by one to save the original? Not anymore. DownThemAll or DTA for short saves you from trying to painstakingly download all files from a page of links or images. It will download all links or images in a single click. How’s that for convinience?
- Tab Mix Plus - Tab Mix Plus gives you full control of Tabs on Firefox. From how they open and close, the order of tabs, auto reloading tabs etc.
- Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer - Got multiple installation of Firefox on several computers and you need to sync them all? Or do you frequenly loose your bookmarks when ever Firefox crashes? Formark’s Addon is of excellent help against these two problems. It even allows you to backup your bookmarks manually to a file if you ever need to import it to another browser.
- All-In-One-Sidebar - contains all relavant menus and contexts onto an easy access sidebar. It contains Bookmarks, History, Add-ons, Downloads, a multipanel window and even menus from other Addons like FireFTP.
Performance tweaks
Firefox 3 is swift and snappy but since we performance junkies want more from it, here’s a few tweaks to improve page loading time.
- Enter about:config in the location bar:
- Alter the entries as follows:
- To enable/disable Single Click Select URL of address bar
browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll = True
browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll = False - To auto Complete URL while typing in the address Bar
browser.urlbar.autoFill=True - strong> To set the number of auto complete URL in the address bar
browser.urlbar.maxRichResults = # - To disabler Browser Toolbar Tip
browser.chrome.toolbar_tips = False - To paste copied content by clicking the center button on the mouse
middlemouse.paste = True - To disable blinking text
browser.blink_allowed = False - To create a single close button to for all Firefox Opened Tabs.
browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3 - To increase number of recently closed tabs.
browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo=15 - Right click view source in your editor
(# indicates the number of auto complete URLs shown. The default is 12)
view_source.editor.external=True
view_source.editor.path= Path of Editor - To enable/disable Single Click Select URL of address bar
- To enable fast scrolling across tabs
toolkit.scrollbox.scrollIncrement =75 - To stop displaying website icon in address bar and on the tabs
browser.chrome.site_icons = False - To enable spell check in text fields
layout.spellcheckDefault = 2 - To speed up the browser
network.http.max-connections 30 to 96
network.http.max-connections-per-server 15 to 32
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 6 to 8
network.http.pipelining false to true
network.http.proxy.pipelining false to true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 30 to 8
network.http.pipelining.ssl false to true
network.http.proxy.pipelining false to true - To disable annoying browser behavior
Change the followowing values to ‘false’dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar
dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar
dom.disable_window_move_resize
dom.disable_window_open_feature.toolbar - To show more tabs on single window
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 75 - To display search results in new tab
browser.search.openintab=True. - Right-click anywhere and create a new Integer named nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to 0. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
Session Restore Saving Frequency
Whenever Firefox crashes it will try to restore all of your open tabs to the way they were. This has come in handy several times for me before, but sometimes I notice that it isn’t able to restore all of my tabs for me.
That’s because Firefox, by default, only saves the session restore data every 10 seconds, but you can configure that time interval to whatever you would like.
- Enter about:config in the location bar.
- Look for browser.sessionstore.interval
- The default value is 10000 which is 10000 milliseconds. Change this to any value you want. For example, entering in 1000 would cause the session restore data to be saved every 1 second, whereas a value of 20000 would make it happen every 20 seconds.
Tweaking the Full page Zoom
Firefox 3 introduces full page zoom, that is, instead of just making text bigger or smaller, it resizes the full page including images and layout.
- If you just want to zoom text, in the View menu, select Zoom and mark Zoom Text Only.
- Firefox 3 remembers what zoom level you used for viewing pages in a domain and will automatically zoom them the next time you visit any page in the same domain. If you prefer Firefox not to remember it:
- In the location bar, enter about:config to access the advanced preferences
- Look for browser.zoom.siteSpecific and double click it to set it to false.
- Another change you may quickly notice is that in Firefox 3 pressing Ctrl (or Cmd on Mac) and scrolling up and down, zooms the page in and out, unlike Firefox 2 and previous versions which used to work the opposite way.
- By default when you press Ctrl + = and Ctrl + - to zoom in or out a page (Cmd + = on Mac), Firefox magnifies to 30%, 50%, 67%, 80%, 90%, 100%, 110%, 120%, 133%, 150%, 170%, 200%, 240% and 300%. If you want to define more or less fine steps or need to zoom to larger levels you can customize Firefox full page zoom:
- Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences.
- Look for toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues and replace the default values with your preferences. For example to set quicker values like 10%, 50%, 100%, 200%, 300% and 500% you will need to enter .1,.5,1,2,3,5.
- You will also need to increase the default 300% zoom in level. Look for zoom.maxPercent and set it to 500 to match the highest step set above.
- You may need to to do the same with the lower limit. Look for zoom.minPercent and set it to 10 to match the lowest step set above.
Note that the zoom steps only affect zooming in and out with the keyboard or via View>Zoom>Zoom In/Zoom Out. Mouse scroll zooming uses its own steps but respects the maximum and minum zoom levels.
As stated above, the list is in now way exhaustive or complete. If you want to contribute or want to share something that’s already posted and would like it to be included here contact me or leave a comment.
P.S: This is just a compilation of information for Firefox 3 users, if you feel that your post not should be here send me a holler and I will remove it.
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