Firefox Tips & Tweaks

Here's a few tips and tweaks to help you optimise and customise the Mozilla Firefox web browser. See also Best Firefox Extensions.

Tweaking Options

While the most common options are available in the Options dialog, there are hundreds of hidden options which may be altered in two ways. One is to type about:config into your URL Bar. Alternatively, you can make a user.js file.

HTTP Pipelining

Get a significant page load speedup on broadband using HTTP pipelining. Note that this is not the default setting because it can potentially lead to problems.

Auto Find-As-You-Type

Tools > Options > Advanced > General > Search for text when I start typing.

Open External Links / New Windows in Tabs

Your best bet is to install the Tabbrowser Preferences extension. Then go Tools > Options > Tabbed Browsing > Links > General.

Streamlined Toolbars

Right-click anywhere on the toolbars and select Customise.... Drag the URL Bar onto the menubar (after File, Edit, View etc.) Now drag the Bookmarks Toolbar Items to where the URL Bar was. Click Done. Now right-click anywhere on the toolbars again and this time uncheck Bookmarks Toolbar. (You may also wish to ditch the Search Box - see next item.)

Firefox screenshot with the menubar and URL bar on the top row and toolbar buttons and bookmarks on the next row.

Auto Google

When you enter search term(s) (instead of a URL) in the URL Bar, the default behaviour is to use Google's I'm Feeling Lucky to take you directly to the #1 result. Of course, this is not always what you wanted - just doing a standard Google search might be better. To change it, enter about:config and filter by keyword. Then double-click on keyword.URL and change it to

http://www.google.com/search?q=

(or whatever else you want it to search.)

Automatic Session Restore

To have your tabs, windows and form values from the previous session brought back to life every time you open Firefox, Tools > Options > When Firefox starts > Show my windows and tabs from last time.

All Tab Close Buttons Must Die

They're great for new users and people with impoverished mice, but if you can middle-click, the tab close buttons are just a space-wasting hazard. Grab the all-powerful Tabbrowser Preferences extension, and then go Tools > Options > Tabbed Browsing > Display Options > Show tab closure buttons.

Reduce Tab Width To Prevent Scrolling

From version 2.0 having lots o' tabs open will cause them to side-scroll. It's a quite a good implementation but just a bit too keen - tabs only reduce to as much as 100px wide before scrolling kicks in. Utilising your trusty Tabbrowser Preferences extension, go Tools > Options > Tabbed Browsing > Display Options > Minimum width of tab. 60px gets you the favicon plus a couple of characters; you can try lower (as far down as 0 to disable scrolling) or higher than that to taste.

Activate Spell-Checker In All Fields

In about:config, set layout.spellcheckDefault to 2 to have spell-checking in input fields as well as textareas.

All Go Buttons Must Die

In about:config, set browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to true to ditch the Go button.

Tips

How to Disable Snap Preview Anywhere

There's nothing website owners love more than pissing off their users, and some have starting adding little popup previews when you hover over a link to show a thumb of the destination. The key word here is "popup"; I think we already know people don't like this? Anyway, the people at Snap have kindly offered a way to disable it from the user-side - and it's very easy. Just hit this link to set a cookie that will disable it.

Quicksearch Bookmarks ("Lookup")

In Firefox, each bookmark can have a keyword associated with it. You can simply type that keyword into the URL Bar to be taken to that page. However, there is another powerful feature associated with these - if you type the keyword, followed by a space and a search term, it will perform the search that the bookmark refers to. For example, by default Firefox comes with several of these (which you can find in the Quick Searches bookmarks folder.) Try typing google rambleschmack into the URL Bar, or dict bartleby. (Open each bookmark's properties and change the keywords to g and d respectively to make them faster to type.) You can easily add your own: right-click on the search text box (examples: Google Image Search, Acronym Finder, IMDb, PHP Functions) you wish to turn into a Quick Search bookmark. Choose Add a keyword for this search. Give it a name and a brief keyword. Now you can invoke it by typing that keyword into the URL Bar followed by your search term.

Adobe Speedup

Adobe Reader 6 opens slowly because it loads lots of unused plugins at startup. You have two options to fix this

Upgrade to Adobe Reader 7 (here's a few tweaks.)
Refer to an Inquirer article for a quick and easy fix.

Faster Launch of Firefox at Startup

I find the Firefox program takes about 10 seconds to load on my PC (WinXP, ~2GHz.) Many others report similar times, while some report dramatically quicker startup. One possible cause (as noted in the comments of a post on Asa's blog) is an "on access" virus scanner like McAfee Virus Scan (disabling the scan will remedy the problem.) At any rate, if you have trouble with slow Firefox loading times then you can try the MinimizeToTray extension, which offers a 'turbo' speedup - similar to the great Quick Launch feature of Mozilla/Netscape - which does most of the necessary loading at system startup. Unfortunately there are a few minor issues with this extension - but it is certainly worth a try. (There is also Firefox Preloader.)

Fixing the Window Icon in Win 98

See JohnHaller.com for this.

Portable Firefox

Run Firefox from a removable/USB drive. See JohnHaller.com.

UserChrome.css / UserContent.css

Modifying these files gives you a great deal of control over the presentation of the interface (chrome) or webpages (content). Mozilla provides general guidelines on editing these files. There are only a few (fairly trivial) changes I have made myself:

[chrome] Remove the Go menu
[chrome] This is no longer necessary in Firefox 2, see new tip further up the page. Remove the tab close button. However note that will also take away the sidebar close button - I suggest the following instead:
```
.tabbrowser-tabs .tabs-closebutton { display: none !important; }
```
[content] This is no longer necessary in Firefox 1.5, but I have left it up as some may find it to be a useful sample. Nicer XUL error pages. Use this sample userContent.css file to improve the look and usability of the built-in error pages. (Based on a similar one by Chris Pederick.)

Optimised Builds

One broad method to enhance Firefox's performance is to download an optimised build from someone who has built the program from source using both general and processor-specific optimisations. We recommend builds from Moox (Use M2 for AthlonXP - instructions.)