Firefox tweaks

[allingeneral]

Today, I installed a shareware program against my better judgment and sure enough,the Bing search engine hijacked my browser! My default search was set to Bing, new tabs came up with Bing...I was PISSED! So, I uninstalled the program, but the browser hijack was left in place. So, I went searching around and found some really great tweaks for Firefox.

First, to get into the browser internals (the Firefox team is awesome for allowing this!)

Open a new tab and in the address bar, type -> about:config

This will open a list of Firefox internal settings. Double-click a setting to change it. Boolean settings (True/False) will toggle, text and integer settings will open a dialog box for you to enter a value.

Here are a couple of interesting ones:


// This one sets the default action to take when you type a search term in the address bar. Here is what I have mine set to after getting rid of bing.

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keyword.URL  -> http://www.google.com/search?ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&q=

// This one allows multiple tabs to download content simultaneously. Since I have 5 homepages that open when the browser opens...this REALLY speeds up the process of opening each of the pages all at once!

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network.http.pipelining  -> TRUE

// This sets the number of concurrent connections when using pipelining

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network.http.pipelining.maxrequests -> 20

// This tells the browser to ignore the "system" setting for scroll numlines to allow the next setting to be effective

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mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines -> FALSE

// This one sets the number of lines for the browser to scroll with each click of the mouse wheel - Default is '1'. Set it to '6' for faster scrolling on long pages

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mousewheel.withnokey.numlines -> 6

// Create a new setting to allow pages to be displayed immediately instead of waiting for Firefox to download a specific amount of content before displaying. THis speeds up page rendering. To create this setting, right click anywhere inside the window and select New->Integer and fill in the blanks as follows:

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nglayout.initialpaint.delay -> 0

If you search around and find any other good ones, please post them here. The settings above have made my browsing experience much better with Firefox.

Enjoy!

[OakRidgeStars]

Good stuff... Thanks Rick

[allingeneral]

...and here's a firefox knowledge base page about all of the settings and what they do

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

[allingeneral]

And... user settings (the ones that are bold in about:config) are all stored in the prefs.js file in your Mozila user directory. On Windows 7, my prefs.js is located here:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\khba0m2z.default\prefs.js

[Palladin]

Just me and my keyboard on a Fri nite - yup, no life here!

[OakRidgeStars]

Keep your gun handy. Those dang computer viruses can attack at any time.

[CowboyT]

And this kind of thing is why I prefer Firefox over Internet Exploder, and GNU/Linux over Microsoft Windows. Such is the value of Free/Open Source Software that you can do tweaks like this, and that such tweaks are published for all to be able to use.

[allingeneral]

In order to get this one to work

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mousewheel.withnokey.numlines -> 6

You have to set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to FALSE, otherwise the system setting will trump your user setting. i.e., the sysnumlines property tells the browser whether to use the system setting or the browser setting.

12 seems to be a pretty good setting on the numlines - a little less than a half page at a time , so you can see where you're going