Firefox Hacking

Unless you are a Firefox power user, you may not be familiar with the about:config settings. It’s a pretty powerful configuration settings page and not always as simple to use. In the about:config page, you have to know what you are doing or you can really screw things up.

To reach the page enter about:config in the address bar and press enter. There are entries in each line that handle various types of firefox configurations all entries are searchable. Before you start to reconfigure the settings keep in mind that if you mess up your configurations and firefox is fubar’d you can still fix it in two ways:

• Make a backup of your prefs.js file before you start editing. Then if something goes wrong, you can restore it by copying it over the corrupt file.
• You can also exit firefox and use the command firefox -safe-mode to bring up the firefox safe mode screen. Reset all user preferences to firefox defaults.

1. Speed up Firefox

This hack requires a few steps. Search for pipelining in the filter and you should see:

network.http.pipelining: Change this to true.
network.http.proxy.pipelining: Change this to true.
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: Change this to 8.
Now search for max-connections and you should see:
network.http.max-connections: Change this to 96.
network.http.max-connections-per-server: Change this to 32.

2: Disable antivirus scanning

This is only for the Windows version. If you’re downloading large files, this scanning can seriously slow things down. Since you will most likely scan the downloaded file anyway, you’ll probably want to disable this.
To disable antivirus scanning, search for scanWhenDone and you should see:

browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone: Change this to false.

3: Open Javascript popups as tabs

If a popup window lacks the features of a browser window, Firefox will handle it like a popup. If you would prefer to open all windows, including popups, as new tabs, you need to tell Firefox in about:config. Search for newwindow and you will see three entries. Of those three entries, you will want to modify:

browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction: Change this to 0.

4: Spell checking in all fields

By default, Firefox checks spelling only in multiple-line text boxes. You can set it to check spelling in all text boxes. Search for spellcheckdefault and you should see:

layout.spellcheckDefault: Change this to 2.

5: Open search bar results in new tab

When you use the search bar, the results display in the current tab. This can be a nuisance because you will navigate out of the page you are currently in. To make sure Firefox always opens search results in a new tab, search for openintab and you should see:

browser.search.openintab: Change this to true.

Do you have other hacks that make Firefox more useful? If so, share them below.