Firefox Tips and Tricks from Circle Six

Note: This post is over a year and a half old. You may want to check later in this blog to see if there is new information.

How much do you love Firefox? Do you know all the tricks in the book? Circle Six has put together a few of our favorites to help you get the most out of browsing with Firefox.

Cool new (and recently updated) extensions

A great way to find new Firefox extensions is to subscribe to the extensions feeds provided by mozilla.org. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/feeds.php and choose your feeds. The Recently Updated and Newest are the most interesting to me. Here’s a few of the plugins I’ve picked up lately:

Sourceforge Direct Download: This sweet little addon will let you specify a favorite Sourceforge mirror and automatically choose it for you. I am not longer redirected to the mirrors page and then the following download page when I grab a Sourceforge file. It’s just click and go!

TableTools: Tables still have their place for organizing data (not layout!) on the web. This addon lets you sort tables in place, as well as copy the data into Excel for making charts and graphs and anything your heart desires (within the realm of data manipulation, anyway.)

Advanced Dork: Just a shortcut to the handiest advanced Google search options for the currently selected text. Handy.

In The News: Gives you a right-click (⌃-click) listing of recent news items related to the currently selected text. Hovering gives you a summary, clicking takes you to the full text. Great for researching a blog post!

Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets, as you probably already know, are handy little javascripts in the form of a bookmark that you can put in your toolbar to perform tasks such as searching, form filling, outlining elements, etc. I use a couple on a daily basis that open the current page in external applications, namely WebNoteHappy and Xylescope.

A bookmarklet, this one for running a search on Wikipedia, looks like this:

PLAIN TEXT
JavaScript:
  1. javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection(); if(!q){void(q=prompt(‘Wikipedia keywords:’,”))}; if(q)location.href=‘http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=’+escape(q)})()

To find bookmarklets, just search google for bookmarklets and add a keyword for specific functionality. Lorelle has a great post on bookmarklets, including links to tutorials on writing some of your own.

userChrome.css

By editing (and usually creating) the file userChrome.css, you can customize many aspects of Firefox on any platform. The location of the file depends on what operating system you’re using:

Windows 95/98/ME
c:\windows\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\[profile-name]\[#s].slt\chrome\
Windows NT
%UserProfile%\Application Data\Phoenix\Profiles\[profile-name]\[#s].slt\chrome\
Windows 2000/XP
C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.tea\chrome\
*NIX
~/.phoenix/[profile-name]/[#s].slt/chrome/
Mac OS X
~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[profile-name]/chrome/

Here are some quick edits you can make to get you started:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. /* Add a keyword when adding a bookmark */
  2. #keywordRow { display: -moz-grid-line !important; }
  3.  
  4. /* Multi-row bookmarks toolbar */
  5. #bookmarks-ptf {display:block}
  6. #bookmarks-ptf toolbarseparator { display:inline }
  7.  
  8. /* Remove Menus */
  9. (You can insert any menu name in place of “Go” or “Help”) */
  10. menu[label=“Go”], menu[label=“Help”] {
  11. display: none !important; }
  12.  
  13. /* Make the Search box flex wider */
  14. #search-container, #searchbar {
  15. -moz-box-flex: 400 !important; }

There is also a file called UserContent.css that you can customize with edits such as:

PLAIN TEXT
CODE:
  1. /* Change cursor for links that open in new window */
  2. :link[target=”_blank”], :visited[target=”_blank”],
  3. :link[target=”_new”], :visited[target=”_new”] {
  4. cursor: crosshair; }

For more on these edits, check out Firefox Tips & Tweaks and UserChrome Customizations.

Speed Up and Tweak

This tip appears in several places on the net, I took it from lifehacker:

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
 network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly 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 recieves.

For more info on about:config, see MozillaZine.

Misc. Shortcuts

There are a ton of productivity enhancing shortcuts in Firefox. I can’t list them all and the resources are many, so Google (or Technorati) a little and you’ll find a plethora of knowledge. More than you’ll ever actually put to use. Here are some interesting and useful shortcuts.

If you ⌘-click on a section of a web page (PC: ⌃-click), that section will be highlighted. Selecting View Selection Source from the context menu will show just that portion of the source code.

Drag the favicon (icon to the left of the url) to a bookmark folder in your toolbar to bookmark the page. Or drag a link or text file or picture from the current page to your address bar to open it. You can also drag this icon to the desktop to create a shortcut to the current page.

⌘-click a link (mac) to open it in a new tab. I’m not positive what the equivalent is on a PC, but it’s probably ⌃-click.

Like I said, there are a ton of these. A great place to look is, again, Mozillazine. There’s a post in their forum that collected a whole slew of tips from users.

Other Tips

You can set multiple homepages in Tools->Options->General by separating them with a pipe (|) symbol.

Right clicking in a search box on a site will give you a context menu option: "Add keyword for this search". Adding a bookmark with a keyword shortcut will allow you to search in your address bar just like the built in search shortcuts (in case you didn't know, typing 'google firefox' will search google for the keyword firefox.) So if you create a shortcut for 9rules Search with the keyword 9search, you can just type '9search firefox' in your address bar. Of course, you can always add to your search bar as well.

Tip of the (cliche) Iceberg

I hope that’s enough of a taste to get you started. The resources linked in this post should provide at least 10 minutes of additional Firefox Tips and Tricks browsing time. For me, the hardest part is keeping my 3 main computers synced up with all of the hacks that I find useful as I browse. I hate getting used to a new hack on my laptop and then not having it on my G5 when I go to use it. Or worse yet, having to figure out how to use it on my PC. FoxMarks Bookmark Synchronizer at least helps me get back to where I was, even across platforms.

Enjoy!

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  1. Emiliano 11.17.06 / 1pm

    Please add firefox cookies/bad web sites immunization in next version!
    Firefox 2 cannot reject third party cookies!!!!!!!!