Firefox 3 Tweaks

Hello everyone

I have decided to keep the home page of this blog clean and use snippets instead of displaying full posts. I hope this won’t effect the things much…ok then…off to the post. Enjoy

Here are some of my firefox tweaks that I use. These include both ‘about:config’ tweaks AND ‘usercrome.css’ tweaks. Enjoy

Userchrome.css Tweaks

For these tweaks, you need to edit your ‘userchrome.css’ file which is located in the folder: <windows_drive>\Documents and Settings\<your-username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<some_random_characters>\chrome

If in the chrome folder, you have a file named ‘userchrome.css’ then its well and good. But if you dont, then rename the file ‘userChrome-example.css’ to ‘userchrome.css’.

Open the file in notepad (or your preffered text editor). And then start adding the tweaks from the end of the file (well, its your choice, but I prefer to add them to the end).

Hiding ‘Edit’ and ‘History’ Menu’s

I prefer to use shortcuts for simple things like copy (ctrl+c), paste (ctrl+v), Find Text (ctrl+f) etc. So, I don’t have any use of the ‘Edit’ menu. And, I don’t use the ‘History‘ menu either, I prefer to use the shortcut Ctrl+H for displaying the history items. And as for the ‘Help’ menu, I don’t use it either. Lets make ‘em dissapear, shall we?

OK, so open up ‘userchrome.css’ in a text editor of your choice. Add the following lines at the end:

/*
Remove Edit ,Help and History menu items from menubar.
*/

#history-menu { display: none !important};
#edit-menu { display: none !important};
#helpMenu { display: none !important};

/* End */

I think the CSS code above is pretty much self-explanatory. The first line removes the ‘History’ menu, the second line removes the ‘Edit’ menu and the third line removes the ‘Help’ menu.

If you ever want to enable these menu-items. Then just open up your ‘userchrome.css’ file and either comment out (/* Code */) or remove these lines altogether.

Here is a screenshot of my Firefox window, before applying the tweak:

Firefox before CSS tweak

After the UserChrome.css tweak…

Firefox after UserChrome.css tweak

About:Config Tweaks

The tweaks mentioned below are to be used as follows…

1. Type about:config in the firefox address bar.

2. Click the ‘I’ll be careful, I promise!’ button.

3. Search for the tweaks mentioned below and change the value as mentioned. You can right click the value and change the value accordingly. If any value doesn’t exist, you can create it by right clicking and selecting the appropriate option. Eg: If you want to create a new ‘true or false’ value then right-click and select ‘New->Boolean’ , for numbers ‘New->Integer’, for strings ‘New->String’.

NOTE: Create new values ONLY if any previous value of that name does not exist.

4. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

PS: Here I have only mentioned the tweaks that I use. And you only need to apply those tweaks that you want

Enable spell check in text fields:

layout.spellcheckDefault = 2

Speed up page loads:

network.http.max-connections to 96

network.http.max-connections-per-server to 32

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to 8

network.http.pipelining to true

network.http.proxy.pipelining to true

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8

network.http.pipelining.ssl to true

network.http.proxy.pipelining to true

nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 100

Show more tabs in a single window:

browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 75

Other Things…

I followed a great tutorial on Firefox 3 Color Profile Support by Dria.

The theme that I am using is Camifox, you can get it here.

And, here are some other tutorials where you can find some more tweaking stuff.

Firefox 3 Hacks And Tweaks and TweakGuides.

OK, so that’s all for this guide. I hope it helped, and you enjoyed reading it

Any kind of comments are always welcome.

Thanks for reading…

Cya

- gastly