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130 Comments
- Ngai, on 10/11/2007, -6/+131say that to my grandma...
and that "ever" part is killing us all... - EchoSpree, on 10/11/2007, -7/+39I knew most of it, but I did find a few handy tricks I wasn't aware of or forgot before i learned they were useful.
Don't assume there aren't any new people learning FF, that makes you elitist :) - Higgins, on 10/11/2007, -2/+33The neatest trick would be to finish loading the page.
- notman, on 10/11/2007, -2/+24Why do you assume it needs comments to be popular? People can digg and view a submission without a comment... Imagine that
- nodong, on 10/11/2007, -4/+25I didn't know about changing the config file to change the pipeline request numbers. That made the rest of the stuff I already knew worth trudging through.
- tvh2k, on 10/11/2007, -7/+28 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.
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” 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.
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) - Al3x, on 10/11/2007, -1/+21Most is, but there are a few interesting ones.
I went to IMDB, and right clicked the search bar and added a keyword for "movie"...so now when I go to the address bar at the top and type "movie spiderman 3" it searches spiderman 3 in the IMDB search bar.
I love checking ratings there, etc. - godofpumpkins, on 10/11/2007, -5/+21I never knew I could _maximize_ my firefox browser! *faint*
- tvh2k, on 10/11/2007, -4/+19"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"
Not commonly known??? Perhaps you weren't expecting this to be read by the digg community?!? - kahlessreborn, on 10/11/2007, -2/+16#14 Seems really useful for gamers.
- BryanJK, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9@scanman20:
People digg the stories up, so if it hits the front page, its for a reason... just because you don't like it, doesn't mean somebody else doesn't - Travisty2012, on 10/11/2007, -0/+9I'd like to add one to the list of mouse short cuts that I love...
Scroll click on the Home button and it will open a new tab AND load your default homepage on it. - greenlight2001, on 10/11/2007, -12/+19First... to block you.
- zouhair, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7It's not speeding up FF that is my first priority, it's his memory leaks
- Izzio, on 10/11/2007, -3/+9Some glaring issues..
1. The browser.cache.disk.capacity setting doesn't affect memory usage at all, only hard disk. The author is probably confusing it with browser.cache.memory.capacity. Lowering this to the recommended 15MB is just going to slow you down considerably.
2. Even if he did find the actual setting, which is browser.cache.memory.capacity, it wouldn't be the best idea to limit that, because its default is already set to dynamically change itself depending on how much RAM you have installed for optimal performance.
3. Setting config.trim_on_minimize to true is also bull, because it will just be relocating your RAM constantly causing more problems than if you had kept it in memory in the first place.
The author should have looked at this page first: http://www.tweakguides.com/Firefox_1.html
Personally, I don't see the complaints about Firefox's memory usage as valid. If you don't let your number of extensions get out of control and you have a fairly recent computer, it will be just as fast as IE7, sometimes even faster. (I switch between both occasionally and the newest version included in Vista is either horrible or the release of Firefox 2 has surpassed it with some new optimizations under the hood, because every time I use it I end up waiting forever for things to load.) The moral of the story is, if you are really one of those people who is obsessed with the memory consumption of all your programs, either:
A. You are disregarding real-world performance and only looking at the numbers in your task manager, in which case stop because you probably have a lot of free memory going to waste, and what modern programs are starting to do is take advantage of that by caching things into it which will result in greater speeds (This is especially true of Vista, don't know why it has gotten a bad rap about memory usage, sure the numbers are higher but it is actually faster.)
or B. Your complaints are actually valid as you are running on vintage hardware with a really low amount of RAM, in which case you shouldn't even be using Firefox in the first place. Try Opera instead.
My computer is far from a powerhouse - only 1 GB of budget, DDR400 RAM, but I can still appreciate where these new programs are headed in terms of speed. - Tredici, on 10/11/2007, -2/+8@Ngai
Grandma's mobile number please? - g0blin, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6"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."
I never new this. Now I can hide all of those pr0n site URL's so the missus can't find them :-D - amish, on 10/11/2007, -7/+13One really good tip is to just type some keywords for a site you wanna visit. (It will do a google search and get the appropriate web address for you)
e.g.
1) You want to go to bill gates personal home page on microsoft.com
Enter in the address bar: "microsoft bill gates"
2) You want to download windows xp powertoys from microsoft.com
Enter in the address bar: "microsoft xp powertoy" or "xp powertoy"
If it doesn't find the best link then it will just display you the google search results.
Try it you will love it. - geoffreyireland, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6The second one is seriously badass and very handy...
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html - chrono13, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Missing form the list: Set spell checking to all text fields:
about:config / layout.spellcheckDefault / set its value to 2 - Rekzai, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7i didnt know the user.js stuff
- yamyogurt, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6EVERRRRRRRRRRRR!
- demodawid, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Actually, writing just words on the adress bar does a 'I'm Feeling Lucky' google search, and takes you to the first page found.
- neuropsychguy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Double click on the tab bar to open a new tab.
- Freonce, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Pretty solid list...most I knew, but I learned some too.
- mattcoady, on 10/11/2007, -3/+7"# Ctrl+= (increase text size)
# Ctrl+- (decrease text size)"
Also, holding control and rolling the mouse wheel will do this as well.
*edit* oops it was mentioned. Digg me down. - rjam710, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5I CTRL+D'ed it.
- voidgame, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4They forgot the most useful shortcut.
If you accidentally closed a tab an you want it back, you don't have to go the history panel. Just press:
Ctrl+Shift+T
and it will restore the most recently closed tab..Very useful. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -4/+7Nice, i knew a few of these, but i can't wait to try some of these out. The user.js i will have to check into .
- flarn2006, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4How to maximize Firefox (look at the description/summary):
Click on the Maximize button on the title bar. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Everybody talking about this feature seems to be getting the instructions WRONG.
You go to imdb.com or amazon.com, then you right click in the search box ON THAT page and set your keyword - not in your own browser search box.
After that, when you type "Keyword search phrase" in the ADDRESS BAR (NOT the search bar), it will search in imdb or Amazon - cr4ft, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Just a question...if I were to limit the ram usage to 15,000 (instead of the default: 50,000) will that just make Firefox go slower? And if so...how much slower?
Not really a comment, just a question, im sure others would like to know - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3My grandpa is friends with the owner of Geeks on Call (I know...), and I talked to him today. I mentioned firefox, and he heavily inferred that IE was just as secure as firefox. What's that *****? WHAT'S THAT?! Blasphemy, I do say.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3I've never heard that you need to upgrade your computer to just web browse. I tried Firefox 2 and 100MB of memory is a lot when you only have 512MB. 512MB is fine for e-mail and a web browsing with a efficient browser, unless of course you're running Vista.
- drivers99, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3They forgot a few useful keyboard shortcuts. alt-left arrow and alt-right arrow for back and forward. And you can use the slash / to search instead of ctrl-F which is nice (and very "vi").
- eliasg, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Some of these have alternates...
You can also reload a page with Ctrl+R and you can also switch tables with Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown. - AltruiSisu, on 01/13/2009, -0/+2one many might not know of, but is priceless on a site like digg (and a thread like this) is the 'middlemouse.scrollbarPosition' option in about:config.
set it to 'true' and one can middle-mouse click anywhere on a scroll bar to go directly to that spot. - unusualbob, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2interesting the mouse settings for me are different. double click on empty space opens up a new tab, middle click opens an accidentally closed tab. Probably due to the fact that I have tab mix plus, which is totally sweet btw.
- skillian, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2You can also type (for example): "youtube/categories" in the address bar, hit Ctrl+Enter and it will auto-complete it to www.youtube.com/categories.
Shift+Enter works for .net, and Ctrl+Shift+Enter works for .org too. - webtroy, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4i have an even faster computer with no bottlenecks, and firefox is slower than IE6. and IE7 .. nice try though.
Memory has always been an issue with firefox, runs fine on my PC, but still is considerably slower than IE. (although it could be because it is "standalone" rather than integrated within the OS) - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3That works for any button, including back, forward and even reload. You can even middle-click from the drop-down history under the back button and open a new tab.
Also, a middle-click on empty space in the tab bar will reopen the most recently closed tab. - searayman, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3but opera only works with liek half the websites on the web.....
- APHughes, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2What I want to know is how to make it so more then 15 tabs are at the top of my page
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Fizix, you might check out the "Scrollbar Anywhere" extension. I used to use the middle mouse, but this extension has converted me to using the right mouse button. It's so intuitive that I constantly try to use it in other applications out of reflex. If I could port it over to ever application with a scrollbar I'd do it in a second.
- coder_cotton, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2they miss "/" for find... much faster for us vi hackers...
- estacado, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Help! My FF doesn't have smart keyword when I right click on search boxes. How do I add keywords?
- suprchunk, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Not for reload.
- Fracture98, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Not if you're a touch typist.
- FizixMan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Thanks for the info detlev! It's not half bad, I might just use it. =] Nice to get the advice instead of another digg-down. >.>
- Fracture98, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I prefer F11 (full screen mode toggle).
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