When it comes to browsing the web
the most favourite brwoser of all is of course Firefox. An open source browser
which is best suited for all with a large no of add-ons coming frequently. Here I am going to list some tips and tricks that you may or may not be knowing. But these tips will surely add to the experience of browsing with Mozilla Firefox.
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 Google 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 “search”) and save it.
Now, when you want to do
a "Google Search" ,
go to Firefox’s address bar, type “search” and the key word you want to search and
press enter.
Instant search!
You can do this with any search box of any website.
3) Keyboard shortcuts:
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 key board short cuts:
- 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. 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) 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.
9) 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 enter. 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.
10) 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, search “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.
11) 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.
12) 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)