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.
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). 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.
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)
0 comments:
Post a Comment