Friday 9 November 2012

Some FireFox "about:config: Trick

The "about:config" page where all the setting enumerated in prefs.js and listed in alphabetical order. prefs.js is the file where firefox keeps its all the setting instead of the window's registry. Modification could be done for any purpose like personal, professional and even for the use of selenium. 


To do the modification just open the "about:config" page on url address of firefox. It gives you the power of do the modification as per your requirement. Each setting, or preference, is given a name and stored as a string (text), integer (number) or Boolean (true/false) value as mention in windows registry.




Here are some tweaks which may be useful:
1. Disable Antivirus Scanning

This is mainly for Windows users. By default, Firefox 3 automatically scan the downloaded file with the default anti-virus application to make sure it is free of virus. If you download a big file, it could take a long time for the whole scanning process to complete. To increase the performance of the browser, you might want to consider disabling the anti-virus scanning via thebrowser.download.manager.scanWhenDone key.
Config name: browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone
Default: True
Modified value: False (if you want to disable it)
2.  Configuring The Scrolling Tabs
When you opened many tabs, Firefox will not keep on reducing the tab width. Instead, it shows a scrolling bar so that the min width (100px) is conserved and you can scroll to find your tabs. If you are those who don’t like the scrolling tab function and prefer Firefox to show all the tabs, regardless how small it is, you can set the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 to disable it. Similarly, if you want Firefox to display more tabs before showing the scrolling button, you can reduce the default value to a lower value, say 75 pixels.
Firefox-scrollingtab
Config name: browser.tabs.tabMinWidthDefault: 100
Modified value: Configuring The Scrolling Tabs
 3. Autofill Address in URL Bar
Other than the smart location feature, you can also get your URL bar to autofill the address as you type the URL.


Config name: browser.urlbar.autofill
Default: False
Modified value: True (Have Firefox autofill the address as you type in the URL bar)

4. Select all text when click on the URL bar

In Windows and Mac, Firefox highlights all text when you click on the URL bar. In Linux, it does not select all the text. Instead, it places the cursor at the insertion point. Regardless which platform you are using, you can now tweak it to either select all or place cursor at insertion point.

Config name: browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
Modified value:
  • False – place cursor at insertion point
  • True – select all text on click