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: 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+Shift+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) 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 it is allowed to us. Again, go
to about:config, filter “browser.cache” & 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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