Firefox 3 About:config tweaks

Credit for this great tut goes to TheDuke once more

How to use About:Config

Here’s a small course on hows to use About:Config, as it will help you in making the adjustments for tweaking your FIREFOX.3.

1. Start Firefox.
2. Type about:config into the address bar and press Enter. When you’re presented with the warning screen click the I’ll be careful, I promise button:

You should see a long list of hidden settings that look meaningless and confusingly complicated

4. Now comes the main part of actually modifying and/or creating new values:

If it is told that the key already exists then you can type the name of the preference in the Filter box, and it will instantly show only the matching results. Once you find the preference you’re looking for just double-click on it to change the value.

If it is told you that the key does not exist you will need to create a new value manually. Just right-click on any entry on the about:config screen, go to the New menu, and choose either string, integer, or boolean depending on what the demand is.

5.You may need to restart your browser for some of the options to take effect.

6. Now if you want to go back to the original state. Any of the preferences can be reset to their default values in the
event that something doesn’t work the way you expected it to. This can be done by right-clicking on the particular option in about:config, and selecting Reset. Values that have been changed at one point or another will appear in bold text they have been reset they should no longer be bold.

Session Restore Saving Frequency

Whenever Firefox crashes it will try to restore all of your open tabs to the way they were. This has come in handy several times for me before, but sometimes I notice that it isn’t able to restore all of my tabs for me.

That’s because Firefox, by default, only saves the session restore data every 10 seconds, but you can configure that time interval to whatever you would like.

* Name: browser.sessionstore.interval
* Preference Needs to be Created: No
* Preference Type: Integer
* Default Value: 10000
* Possible values:
* o The number of milliseconds between session restore saving. For example, entering in 1000 would cause the session restore data to be saved every 1 second, whereas a value of 20000 would make it happen every 20 seconds.

Increase the Number of Results in the Address Bar

By default the address bar will always show 12 results in the drop-down menu, which is probably more than enough for most people. If you prefer to see more (or fewer) results you can alter how many items can be displayed with the following setting:

* Name: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
* Preference Needs to be Created: No
* Preference Type: Integer
* Default Value: 12
* Possible values:
* o The number of results you would like to appear in the address bar drop-down menu.

Enable Advanced Color Profile Support

Those of you that are photo enthusiasts might enjoy the fact that Firefox has advanced color profile capabilities. It’s not enabled by default because it can cause a 10-15% performance hit for the browser, but if image quality is that important to you this might be something you want to enable. Here’s a great comparison between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 (with the color profile turned on)

# Name: gfx.color_management.enabled
# Preference Needs to be Created: No
# Preference Type: Boolean
# Default Value: False
# Possible values:

* True – Enables color profile support so that the colors appear richer
* False – Disables color profile support so that you have better performance

[Get Notified when a Website Redirects You]

Some websites redirect users from one address to another, and it often happens so quickly that it can be difficult to catch. This could be a bad thing because the site could try to redirect you to a malicious or inappropriate site, but you can setup Firefox 3 to alert you when things like this happen. To enable this feature open up the Firefox preferences, switch to the Advanced -> General tab, and then check the box labeled Warn me when web sites try to redirect or reload the page. Then whenever a site tries to redirect you from one page to another you should see a warning bar like this one:

Disable Antivirus Scanning

For Windows users when Firefox 3 finishes downloading a file it will initiate a virus scan using any antivirus application that the user has installed on the computer. If you download a lot of files (especially large files) this can become a bottleneck for you as you wait for each file to be scanned, especially when many antivirus applications will automatically scan all incoming files. That means each file you download might get scanned twice.

By jumping into the about:config you can enable or disable this setting at your leisure:

# Name: browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone
# Preference Needs to be Created: No
# Preference Type: Boolean
# Default Value: True
# Possible values:

* True – Scans each download with the installed antivirus application
* False – Does not scan each download with the installed antivirus application.

Happy Tweaking

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