!!! 23 coolest firefox tricks !!

!!! 23 coolest firefox tricks !!


23 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever 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 thisto 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’sabout: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) 16. 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.
Building your own Firefox
search engine.
Note that as of this writing, OpenSearchFox doesn't work
properly with Firefox v.
2.0.0.10 or 2.0.0.11, although it
may be fixed as you read this.
When you use the add-on in
v. 2.0.0.1 or 2.0.0.11, you'll get an error message after you
click Finish, although in some
instances, even if you get the
error message, the search
engine will still be added. 17. Use keywords to speed up
your searching Don't want to go to the
trouble of adding your search
engine -- or you can't get
OpenSearchFox to work
properly? Here's another way
to do an instant search. When you're at a site, right-click on
its search box and select "Add
a Keyword for this Search."
Type in a name for it and an
easy-to-remember shortcut
(for example, hp for the Huffington Post blog site).
Then click OK. Now, to search
the site, go to the Address
Bar, and type in your
shortcut, followed by a search
term, such as hp Clinton. You'll search the site, just as if you
were there. Note that on
occasion, the search won't
work properly, but it will on
most sites. 18. Use keywords to speed up
bookmarks Visiting your favorite sites
using Firefox's bookmarks is
far too much of a chore -- do
you really want to do all that
mousing around? Instead,
you can use keywords to instantly jump to any site
you've bookmarked. To do it,
after you bookmark a site,
right-click on the bookmark,
select Properties, type in a
short keyword (or even just a letter or two) in the
keyword field and click OK.
Now, to visit the site, type in
the keyword in Firefox's
address bar, and you'll jump
straight to the site. Adding a keyword to a
bookmark. 19. Put your own graphic on
the Firefox tool bar If you don't like the plain
background of Firefox's tool
bar, don't worry -- you can
put your own graphic there.
Type the following into the
userChrome.css file and put the graphic that you want to
use, background.gif, in the
same directory as
userChrome.css. The graphic
can be any name and any
type of image file supported by Firefox.
Here's the code to use:
/* Change the toolbar graphic
*/
menubar, toolbox,
toolbar, .tabbrowser-tabs { background-image: url
("background.gif") !
important;
background-color: none !
important;
} The graphic you use will
automatically be scaled to fit
the tool bar. For example, if
it's small, it will be tiled. 20. h__/\__(__|< the stop,
back and forward buttons Are you a minimalist? Does it
annoy you that there's a big
fat Stop button on the Firefox
tool bar, even when there's
nothing to stop? And how
about the Forward and Back buttons -- if there's no place
to go forward or back, would
you like them simply to
disappear?
You're in luck, because it's
simple to do. Add these lines below to userChrome.css.
Note that even after this
trick, the buttons will appear
when there's a use for them.
For example, when a page is
loading, the Stop button will appear, so that you can stop
loading the page; it just won't
appear when a page isn't
loading. And the Forward and
Back buttons will appear
when there's something to go forward or back to:
/* Remove the Stop button
when content isn't loading*/
#stop-button[disabled="true"]
{ display: none; }
/* Remove the Back button when there's nothing to go
back to */
#back-button
[disabled="true"] { display:
none; }
/* Remove the Forward button when there's nothing
to go forward to */
#forward-button
[disabled="true"] { display:
none; } 21. Move the sidebar to the
right Firefox has a sidebar for
viewing your history or
bookmarks. It normally
displays on the left-hand side
when you choose View--
>Sidebar. If you prefer, though, you can have the
sidebar instead appear on the
right, by typing this code into
the userChrome.css file:
/* Place the sidebar on the
right edge of the window */ hbox#browser { direction:
rtl; }
hbox#browser > vbox
{ direction: ltr; }
After h_a*c!k_in*g userChrome.css,
you can make the Sidebar appear on the right, instead of
on the left. 22. Change the search bar
width Don't like the width of the
search bar on the upper-right
hand corner of Firefox? No
problem -- it's easy to change.
All you need to do is specify
the width you want, in pixels. Use this code in
userChrome.css to tell the
search bar to be 600 pixels
wide, but you can, of course,
use whatever size you want:
/* Make the Search box wider (in this case 600 pixels wide)
*/
#search-container, #searchbar
{
max-width: 600px !
important; width: 600px !important; } 23. Remove menu items Are there menu items -- for
example, Help -- that you
never use? If so, you can
easily make them disappear.
To remove the Help menu, add
this to userChrome.css: /* Remove the Help menu */
menu[label="Help"] {
display: none !important; }
You can remove any of the
other menus as well. Use the
same syntax as above and substitute its name (File, Edit,
View, History, Bookmarks or
Tools). So, for example, to
remove both the Help and
Tools menu, you'd add these
lines to userChrome.css: /* Remove the Help and Tools
menus */
menu[label="Tools"], menu
[label="Help"] {
display: none !important; }
Here's Firefox with the normal complement of
menus ...
... and here it is, minus the
Help and Tools menus.
Thats all guys!!!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 thisto 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’sabout: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) 16. 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.
Building your own Firefox
search engine.
Note that as of this writing, OpenSearchFox doesn't work
properly with Firefox v.
2.0.0.10 or 2.0.0.11, although it
may be fixed as you read this.
When you use the add-on in
v. 2.0.0.1 or 2.0.0.11, you'll get an error message after you
click Finish, although in some
instances, even if you get the
error message, the search
engine will still be added. 17. Use keywords to speed up
your searching Don't want to go to the
trouble of adding your search
engine -- or you can't get
OpenSearchFox to work
properly? Here's another way
to do an instant search. When you're at a site, right-click on
its search box and select "Add
a Keyword for this Search."
Type in a name for it and an
easy-to-remember shortcut
(for example, hp for the Huffington Post blog site).
Then click OK. Now, to search
the site, go to the Address
Bar, and type in your
shortcut, followed by a search
term, such as hp Clinton. You'll search the site, just as if you
were there. Note that on
occasion, the search won't
work properly, but it will on
most sites. 18. Use keywords to speed up
bookmarks Visiting your favorite sites
using Firefox's bookmarks is
far too much of a chore -- do
you really want to do all that
mousing around? Instead,
you can use keywords to instantly jump to any site
you've bookmarked. To do it,
after you bookmark a site,
right-click on the bookmark,
select Properties, type in a
short keyword (or even just a letter or two) in the
keyword field and click OK.
Now, to visit the site, type in
the keyword in Firefox's
address bar, and you'll jump
straight to the site. Adding a keyword to a
bookmark. 19. Put your own graphic on
the Firefox tool bar If you don't like the plain
background of Firefox's tool
bar, don't worry -- you can
put your own graphic there.
Type the following into the
userChrome.css file and put the graphic that you want to
use, background.gif, in the
same directory as
userChrome.css. The graphic
can be any name and any
type of image file supported by Firefox.
Here's the code to use:
/* Change the toolbar graphic
*/
menubar, toolbox,
toolbar, .tabbrowser-tabs { background-image: url
("background.gif") !
important;
background-color: none !
important;
} The graphic you use will
automatically be scaled to fit
the tool bar. For example, if
it's small, it will be tiled. 20. h__/\__(__|< the stop,
back and forward buttons Are you a minimalist? Does it
annoy you that there's a big
fat Stop button on the Firefox
tool bar, even when there's
nothing to stop? And how
about the Forward and Back buttons -- if there's no place
to go forward or back, would
you like them simply to
disappear?
You're in luck, because it's
simple to do. Add these lines below to userChrome.css.
Note that even after this
trick, the buttons will appear
when there's a use for them.
For example, when a page is
loading, the Stop button will appear, so that you can stop
loading the page; it just won't
appear when a page isn't
loading. And the Forward and
Back buttons will appear
when there's something to go forward or back to:
/* Remove the Stop button
when content isn't loading*/
#stop-button[disabled="true"]
{ display: none; }
/* Remove the Back button when there's nothing to go
back to */
#back-button
[disabled="true"] { display:
none; }
/* Remove the Forward button when there's nothing
to go forward to */
#forward-button
[disabled="true"] { display:
none; } 21. Move the sidebar to the
right Firefox has a sidebar for
viewing your history or
bookmarks. It normally
displays on the left-hand side
when you choose View--
>Sidebar. If you prefer, though, you can have the
sidebar instead appear on the
right, by typing this code into
the userChrome.css file:
/* Place the sidebar on the
right edge of the window */ hbox#browser { direction:
rtl; }
hbox#browser > vbox
{ direction: ltr; }
After h_a*c!k_in*g userChrome.css,
you can make the Sidebar appear on the right, instead of
on the left. 22. Change the search bar
width Don't like the width of the
search bar on the upper-right
hand corner of Firefox? No
problem -- it's easy to change.
All you need to do is specify
the width you want, in pixels. Use this code in
userChrome.css to tell the
search bar to be 600 pixels
wide, but you can, of course,
use whatever size you want:
/* Make the Search box wider (in this case 600 pixels wide)
*/
#search-container, #searchbar
{
max-width: 600px !
important; width: 600px !important; } 23. Remove menu items Are there menu items -- for
example, Help -- that you
never use? If so, you can
easily make them disappear.
To remove the Help menu, add
this to userChrome.css: /* Remove the Help menu */
menu[label="Help"] {
display: none !important; }
You can remove any of the
other menus as well. Use the
same syntax as above and substitute its name (File, Edit,
View, History, Bookmarks or
Tools). So, for example, to
remove both the Help and
Tools menu, you'd add these
lines to userChrome.css: /* Remove the Help and Tools
menus */
menu[label="Tools"], menu
[label="Help"] {
display: none !important; }
Here's Firefox with the normal complement of
menus ...
... and here it is, minus the
Help and Tools menus.
Thats all guys!!!