Mozilla Firefox | Tips and Tricks

Mozilla Firefox | Internet browser | Tips and Tricks

More Screen Space:

Make your icons small. Go to View - Toolbars - Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.

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.

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

F5 - Reload

Alt-Home - Go to Home Page

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.

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

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 - In Text Size

Middle Click on a Tab - Closes Tab

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.

Speed Up Your 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.

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.

Build your own Firefox Search Engine:

Want to power up Firefox's search box? It's easy to create your own search engine, so that you can rifle through any site from right within Firefox. Adding a search engine that has already been written, of course, is easy. Click the down arrow to the left of the search box, select "Manage Search Engines," then click the "Get more search engines" link at the bottom of the screen. From the Web site that appears, click the search engine you want to install, and you're done.

There are plenty of sites that don't have prebuilt search engines, though. No problem: It's easy to build your own search engine. First install the OpenSearchFox add-on. Then, when you're on a search site, right-click the search box and choose the Add OpenSearch plug-in. From the screen that appears (shown below), type in the name that you want to be associated with the search engine, add a description of the search engine and click Next. Then click Finish, and the site will be added as a search engine that you can choose like any other -- by clicking the arrow to the left of the search box and selecting the engine.

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