My Favorite Firefox Hacks
Filed Under: Software
Mozilla Firefox is the web browser of choice for many a person these days, and in a world of highly customizable software and hardware, people naturally want their window to the web to be fitted perfectly to their tastes. Am I any different? Not by a long shot. Fortunately, Firefox is extremely customizable–with the abundance of add-ons available you can customize its look and functionality to best meet your needs. In addition to this, you can “hack” Firefox via its about:config dialog to make specific tweaks. This dialog is accessed by typing about:config into Firefox’s address bar. From there you can select preferences and change their values to get the desired changes. Here are a handful of my favorites.
If you’re anal about not having your software do things without your permission, then this is the hack for you. By default, Firefox automatically downloads pages from links it predicts you will click, regardless of whether you actually ever have or ever do visit the page. While I doubt it does any harm whatsoever, it gives me the same creeped-out feeling as cluztr, and therefore is something that I can do without. Setting the network.prefetch-next key to false will turn this function off.
The following hack is perfect for those who can’t live online without spell check. While Firefox does handle spell checking text areas by default, it won’t automatically check input text areas. To turn spell check on for input text, change the layout.spellcheckDefault key’s value to 2.
Last, but not least, the following hack will probably be the most beneficial to the most people, because no matter who you are, Firefox will hog your RAM if you let it. One way to avoid this is the limit the number of add-ons you’re using. Another way to prevent this is to change the value of the browser.cache.memory.capacity key. The new value will vary depending on how much RAM you have installed. If you have half a gig of RAM or less, start testing around 5000. The more RAM you have, the higher this value should be.
If you cannot find any of the keys defined here you can add them in the about:config dialog. To do this, right click anywhere within the dialog, hover the mouse over new, and click the proper preference type. If the preference value will be set to true or false choose boolean. If the value will be an integer (a whole number) then the type will be integer. For any other value choose string as the type.
For more Firefox hacks and tweaks, check out some of the following resources:
Geek to Live: Top Firefox 2 Config Tweaks
If you’re interested in learning about hacks and tricks for other applications, check out Google Hacks for Dummies and Gmail Tips and Tricks.
As Firefox is frequently updated, possible customizations are always changing, so I suggest checking out if there’s anything new from time to time. And as making changes to Firefox’s configurations is so easy, I suggest playing around to see what you can achieve; just be sure not to do anything you can’t undo if you have to!
