Everybody’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, is great right 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.
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.
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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mozi
