out of the box. And by
adding some of the awesome extensions
available out there, the browser just gets better
and better.
but look under the hood, and there are a bunch
of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks
available that will crank Firefox up and pimp
your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more
efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.
1) More screen space. Make your icons small. Go to View – Toolbars –
Customize and check the "Use small icons" box.
2) Smart keywords. If there's a search you use a lot (let's say
IMDB.com's people search), this is an awesome tool that not many
people use. Right-
click on the search box, select "Add a Keyword for this search", give
the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut
name (let's say "actor") and save it. Now, when you want to do an
actor search, go to Firefox 's address bar, type "actor" and the name
of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can
do this with any search box.
3) Keyboard shortcuts. This is where you become a real Jedi. It just
takes a little while to
learn these, but once you do, your browsing will
be super fast. Here are some of the most common
(and my personal favs): Spacebar (page down) Shift-Spacebar (page up)
Ctrl+F (find) Alt-N (find next) Ctrl+D (bookmark page) Ctrl+T (new
tab) Ctrl+K (go to search box) Ctrl+L (go to address bar) Ctrl+=
(increase text size) Ctrl+- (decrease text size) Ctrl-W (close tab) F5
(reload) Alt-Home (go to home page)
4) Auto-complete. This is another keyboard shortcut, but it's not
commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and
type
the name of the site without the "www " or the ".com". Let's say
"google". Then press Control- Enter, and it will automatically fill in
the "www " and the ".com" and take you there – like magic! For .net
addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org
addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.
5) Tab navigation. Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs
that you have open, use the
keyboard. Here are the shortcuts: Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab) Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number
to jump to a specific
tab)
6) Mouse shortcuts. Sometimes you're already using your mouse and it's
easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master
these cool ones: Middle click on link (opens in new tab) Shift-scroll
down (previous page) Shift-scroll up (next page) Ctrl-scroll up
(decrease text size) Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size) Middle
click on a tab (closes tab)
7) Delete items from address bar history. Firefox's ability to
automatically show previous URLs you've visited, as you type, in the
address bar's drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you
just don't want those URLs to show up (I won 't ask why). Go to the
address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-
down menu will appear with the URLs of pages
you've visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go
down to an address you
want to delete, and press the Delete key to make
it disappear.
8) User chrome. If you really want to trick out your Firefox, you 'll
want to create a UserChrome.css file and customize your browser.
It's a bit complicated to get into here, but check out this tutorial.
9) Create a user.js file. Another way to customize Firefox, creating a
user.js file can really speed up
your browsing. You 'll need to create a text file named user.js in
your profile folder (see this to find out where the profile folder is)
and see this example user.js file that you can modify. Created by
techlifeweb.com, this example explains some of the things you can do
in its comments.
10) about:config. The true power user's tool, about.config isn't
something to mess with if you don't know what a setting does. You can
get to the main configuration screen by putting
about:config in the browser's address bar. See Mozillazine's
about:config tips and screenshots.
11) Add a keyword for a bookmark . Go to your bookmarks much faster by
giving them
keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then
select Properties. Put a short keyword in the
keyword field, save it, and now you can type
that keyword in the address bar and it will go to
that bookmark.
12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband connection (and most of
us do), you can use
pipelining to speed up your page loads. This
allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at
once, instead of one at a time (by default, it's optimized for dialup
connections). Here's how: Type "about:config" into the address bar and
hit return. Type "network.http" in the filter field, and change the
following settings (double-click on
them to change them): Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true" Set
"network.http.proxy.pipelining " to "true" Set
"network.http.pipelining.maxrequests " to a number like 30. This will
allow it to make 30
requests at once. Also, right-click anywhere and select New->
Integer. Name it "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 receives.
13) Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much memory on your
computer, you can limit
the amount of RAM it is allowed to us. Again, go
to about:config, filter "browser.cache" and select
"browser.cache.disk.capacity ". It's set to 50000, but you can lower
it, depending on how much
memory you have. Try 15000 if you have
between 512MB and 1GB ram.
14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox
is minimized. This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when
you minimize it, taking up
much less memory. And there is no noticeable
difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so
it's definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click
anywhere and select
New-> Boolean. Name it
"config.trim_on_minimize" and set it to TRUE. You have to restart
Firefox for these settings to take
effect.
15) Move or remove the close tab button. Do you accidentally click on
the close button of Firefox 's tabs? You can move them or remove them,
again
through about:config. Edit the preference for
"browser.tabs.closeButtons". Here are the meanings of each value: 0:
Display a close button on the active tab only 1:(Default) Display
close buttons on all tabs 2:Don't display any close buttons 3:Display
a single close button at the end of the
tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)
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