COSIMS Blog

After using Internet Explorer for many years, I have to say that I really wish I would have switched to Firefox a lot earlier than I did! Firefox is by far the most customizable browser out there, with thousands of extensions and addons that you can download and plug in. Not only are there many third-party extensions to enhance Firefox, there are also tons of configuration settings that can be tweaked in Firefox itself.
Over the last few months, I’ve tweaked a good number of settings in Firefox and I thought I would share it with my Firefox readers. That way you can truly make Firefox YOUR browser. I’m going to go through a couple of Firefox about:config settings that you can change that made my browsing experience more enjoyable.

How to backup about:config file

Before you begin editing the about:config file in Firefox, you should back up the file in case you make a change that messes everything up. You can back it up by making a copy of the prefs.js, which is in the Firefox profile folder. For Windows, you will have to show Hidden Files and Folder by opening Control Panel, double-click Folder Options, select the View tab, select “Show hidden files and folders” and click OK.
For Windows XP
\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ .default\
For Windows Vista
Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\.default\
For Mac OSX
username/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/profile.default/
For Linux
~/.mozilla/firefox/profile.default/

How to modify the about:config configuration in Firefox

First off, it’s probably a good idea to mention how to actually modify these advanced configuration settings in Firefox for those non-techie users. The configuration settings are simply a table of key names and values. You can access all of them by typing in about:config into your browser address bar.

Configure close button on Firefox tabs

0: Display a close button only on the currently active tab. A good way to prevent the closing of other tabs.
1: Display close buttons on all tabs (default).
2: Don’t display any close buttons; you have to press Ctrl-F4 to close a tab.
3: Display one close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x’s default).

Increase number of tabs that can be displayed

Tabbed browsing is great and I’m such a big user of it that I end up having about 20 tabs open most of the time. By default, if you have more than 12 tabs open, Firefox will set the tabs to a specified width and then scroll the rest with arrows. One way to see more tabs if you’re a power tab user is to decrease the width of the Firefox tabs so that more can fit before scrolling starts. The default is 100 pixels, so you can choose something less to see what works best for you.
browser.tabs.tabMinWdith
100 pixels default value

Open search results in a new tab

This tweak is pretty cool and one of the best out there. Basically, when you perform a search from the search box at the top right in Firefox, it normally loads in the current tab. However, if you set the value of this setting to TRUE instead of FALSE, then every time you perform a search, a new tab will come up with the results, thereby leaving your current tab alone!
browser.search.openintab
False - Default value, set to True to load results in a new tab

Download and cache only pages you actually view

Firefox has an interesting feature whereby it tries to determine which links on a page you might click on and then downloads them so that it can load the pages faster. For example, it will try to download the top result from a Google search automatically. However, this eats up bandwidth and CPU cycles and saves web history of pages you may have never even visited! To turn it off, set the value to false.
network.prefetch-next
True – Default value, set it to False

Increase number of simultaneous downloads and connections to a server

From the networking point of view, you can increase a couple of different settings to increase network performance. network.http.max-connections controls how many simultaneous network connections Firefox will make at any one time to any number of Web servers. Default is set to 24, but you can knock it up to 32 to see if that has any effect. Anything above that will not do much.
network.http.max-connections-per-server controls how many separate connections Firefox makes to the same server, which allows for multiple elements to be download in parallel. Only do this if you have a fast connection and don’t raise it by too much otherwise you will be blacklisted. The default is 8 and you should only increase it by a few.
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server controls the number of persistent connections allowed per server. The default is 2 and this is generally the value people list when they are say you can increase the number of simultaneous downloads in Firefox. Again, don’t go more than 1 or 2 above the default as you could be temporarily blacklisted.

Turn off those annoying tool tips

Finally, you can get rid of all of those annoying tool tips that pop up every time you hover your mouse over a button by changing the config file. Personally, I already know what every single button on my toolbar does and it annoys me when they pop up and cover something else!
browser.chrome.toolbar_tips
True – Default value, set it to False to turn off tool tips

Use a custom search engine for the address bar

By default, if you type in a phrase that is not a web address into the address bar, Firefox sends the query to Google for a web search. You can change this so that it uses a different search engine if you prefer.
For Windows Live search:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=
For a Yahoo search:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=
To go back to the default:
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=
keyword.URL
Change to any of the following above to use a different search engine.
You can also check out the Mozilla page for a complete list of configurations that you can change with descriptions at about:config wiki page. Any other about:config changes that you like? Post a comment!