Customizing Firefox

extensions - speed tweaks - misc tweaks - memory tweaks

Extensions

Extensions are plug-ins that add new functionality to Firefox. I recommend the following extensions:

• Google Toolbar - Google's official GoogleBar now works in Firefox. The new version comes with a spell checker and AutoLink. GoogleBar is an excellent clone that works with Firefox.
• FlashBlock - This blocks a Flash files and replaces them with a button that you can click to load the Flash file. Flash animations are usually advertisements and sometimes they can be very nasty (ugly, distracting, or cover up useful information).
• BugMeNot - This plugin connects to the BugMeNot.com servers when you right-click on a log in box and will (hopefully) get a username and password for the site. This is great if you do not want to sign up on a site just to read the news or download a program.
• Redirect Remover - This removes redirects from links. This is when one site sends you to another, but does not link to it directly. This is usually only to keep track of how many people click the link, but can be used for evil.
• Location Navigator - This captures the numeric portion of the URL and increments it or decrements it by clicking a button. It can also created a slide show. Location Navigator used to be called URLnav.
• Bookmark Sync and Sort - This lets you synchronize and sort your bookmarks to your website by using FTP or WebDAV. This is a great way to share bookmarks between different systems and keep a backup in case something bad happens.
• Fasterfox - This extension provides a nice graphical interface to many of the tweaks below. One feature that it has that has caused some controversy is link prefetching, where your computer downloads all of the links to a page in the expectations that you may click one of them. This causes some wasted bandwidth for websites and has upset many webmasters (as bandwidth costs money). I suggest you turn it off.

Network Speed Tweaks

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type http in the filter bar.
    Double-click on network.http.pipelining to set it to true.
    Double-click on network.http.proxy.pipelining to set it to true.
    Double-click on network.http.pipelining.firstrequest to set it to true.
    Change network.http.max-connections to 48.
    Change network.http.max-connections-per-server to 16.
    Change network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy to 16.
    Change network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to 8.
    Change network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8.

Note that pipelining can break compatibility with some websites. If a page begins to load and then stops, you may have to disable this feature.

Misc Tweaks

These settings are for things like the user interface, etc.

Stop Firefox 2 from automatically resizing images.

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing into the filter bar.
    Double click on browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing to change the value to false.

These will help reduce the number of popups you get in Firefox.

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type dom.popupmaximum into the filter bar.
    Double click on dom.popupmaximum and change the value to 2.
    Type privacy.popups.disable_from_plugin in the filter bar.
    Double click on privacy.popups.disable_from_plugin and change to 2.

Link Prefetching is where Firefox will try to pull down the next logical page you will visit as instructed by the web server. Servers can specify <link rel="next" href="Page2.html"> and Firefox will download that page in the background while you are on Page1.html in anticipation of you going there. While this will shorten the time you have to wait when you click on the Page2.html link, it eats up bandwidth on pages you may never visit.

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type network.prefetch-next in the filter bar.
    Double click on network.prefetch-next and change it to false.
    

These are just two settings that control what happens when you double click on a word. These are probably not useful to anyone else, but I like to have control over things such as this.

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word in the filter bar.
    Double click on layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word and change it to false.
    Type layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation in the filter bar.
    Double click on layout.word_select.stop_at_punctuation and change it to true.

Allow input boxes to accept multiple lines when cut and pasted instead of just a single line.

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type singleline in the filter bar.
    Double-click on editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines.
    Change the value to 2.
   

Memory Tweaks

I only recommend the following tweaks if your computer has a limited amount of RAM. These may become outdated with newer versions of Firefox.

Let Windows reclaim memory when all Firefox windows are minimized. (I believe this tweak no longer works in Firefox version 1.5 or higher.)

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Right-click on the background and click New->Boolean.
    Enter config.trim_on_minimize for the preference name.
    Set the value to true.

Disable Fast Back and Forward buttons. This will stop Firefox from caching recently viewed pages in memory, which will cause Firefox to re-render them the next time you visit.

    Type about:config in the address bar.
    Type viewers in the filter bar.
    Double-click on browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers.
    Change the value to 0.

 

Still want more... try tips from the Firefox crew themselves.