firefox tricks

by **Rothus** Fri Jun 19, 2009 3:41 am

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.

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) and see this example user.js file
that you can modify. 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. See Mozillazine's about:config tips and
screenshots.

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