Firefox about:config, customising Firefox the easy way

Firefox is an extremely flexible browser allowing users to control preferences through an easy to use menu system. The Firefox homepage even goes as far as labeling the browser ‘fully customizable to your online life’. More than just the simple configuration Firefox also allows you to control its inner secrets with the advanced preferences of about:config.

But hang on, this sounds complected and prone to bugs I hear you exclaim. But no no, the Firefox developers have made it easy. To get to the advanced configuration simply type ‘about:config’ into the Firefox address bar. This will show a list of configuration options each with its name, status, type and value. You can also use the filter field to narrow down only to the entries which match your keywords. OK so now we know how to get to the advanced configuration, following are two configuration options that I found extremely useful.

Spell check input fields

Firefox has built in spell checking, however by default they only come up on textareas. This can prove to be problematic, as I have found on many occasions  as I have had to edit the titles of my blog posts after they have gone live. To overcome this and force Firefox to spell check inputs as well as textareas once on the about:config page filter by:

layout.spellcheckDefault

Then double-click on the item in the list and change the value to 2.

Perfecting

Firefox has a strange feature called ‘Prefetching’ that downloads pages that it thinks you are going to click on. Very weird, I don’t know how it thinks it can work this out, but to save your CPU and bandwidth turn off this behavior by going to the about:config page and filter by:

network.prefetch-next

Then double-click the item in the list and change it to false.

Happy customising!

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Bookmarks:
  • Digg
  • Technorati
  • del.icio.us
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Reddit
  • Netscape
  • StumbleUpon
  • NewsVine

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 5:22 pm and is filed under web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

« Windows System Restore: how it can save your PC
6 Google specific web search features - why Google is the best search engine on the internet »

5 Responses to “Firefox about:config, customising Firefox the easy way”

  1. Jay Says:
    June 13th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    James,

    Check rel=next If your site is organised in such a way that you can use it… do it! When I’m coding I try to add next meta when I have a next page link. After a few analytics are run and you see that 90% of people always click on the top article, or your about link, you can add next meta for that.

    Prefetching

    http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-xhtml2-20040722/mod-metaAttributes.html

    Cheers!

  2. James Oppenheim Says:
    June 23rd, 2007 at 6:58 pm

    @Jay - Thanks for the info. I will look into it, sounds like an interesting way to organise your data. This could definitely be used for pagination. If I was on dial up though, I would not want Firefox to download those pages. Interesting to think about though.

  3. Jason Goodman Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 3:21 am

    Could you please send to me the contacts of developer of your site? It like it so much!

  4. Nick Ritchie Says:
    December 30th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Good one Oppy. Any other juicy Firefox tricks?

  5. How to view Firefox's default internal CSS stylesheet | James Oppenheim’s blog Says:
    July 6th, 2008 at 10:44 pm

    […] Firefox about:config, customising Firefox the easy way […]

Leave a Reply