Firefox Tweaks [Updated]

Firefox Tweaks

Tweak Firefox to Improve the acquire lightning speed.
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these settings are optimized for broadband connections. With as much concurrent requests we’re going to open up with pipelining.

Double Click on the following settings and put in the numbers below – for the true/false booleans – they’ll change when you double click.

browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

At last Right-click somewhere on the screen & add a 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. Since you’re broadband – it shouldn’t have to wait.

Note: Connot be assured lightning experience but atleast, maximum avilable browsing speed. – Admin

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Find Updates for all Firefox Plug-ins

Find Updates for all your Firefox Plug-ins

This is about updating Firefox plug-ins, not Add-ons.

If you select Tools -> Add-ons from the Firefox menu bar, you’ll get a list of all extensions, themes and plug-ins that are currently installed in your copy of Firefox.

The same add-ons dialog has a “Find Updates” feature to help you figure out if you are running any out-dated extensions but that doesn’t work with your plug-ins. How do you then find out that you are running the latest versions of all plug-ins?

It’s simple now. You can open the Firefox browser and visit the Plugins Check page hosted on mozilla.org. This will create a list of all plug-ins that are installed on your system and will match that data with its own list to determine if you are running an older version that has been marked out-of-date.

In case this online check fails for a particular plugin, you can click the “Research” button to perform a search on Google using the plug-in name as the search query. This is not always accurate but you’ll at least reach the vendor’s website that is officially hosting the plug-in.

It makes sense to visit the plug-ins checker page occasionally because older plug-ins not just make your browser insecure but they also make it more unstable. David Tenser of Mozilla says 30% of the reported crashes are caused by old plugins.

Download the latest version of Firefox here.

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Keyboard Shortcuts to your Favorite Websites

Assign Keyboard Shortcuts to your Favorite Websites

We all have our own list of favorite websites that we like to visit several times a day. Now the point is how do you quickly access these frequently visited pages without having to type the URLs in the address bar ?

One of the best options in Firefox is keyword bookmarking – you basically save the website to your Firefox bookmarks and then assign a (memorable) keyword to that bookmark.

For instance, I have assigned the keyword “w” to the Wikipedia homepage bookmark as in screenshot above. The next time I want to visit the Wikipedia site, I simply go the Firefox address bar, type w and hit Enter.

That’s the default method of doing things but if you are too bad at memorizing shortcuts and need something more simple , check out Site Launcher.

You hit a shortcut key and there you have a list of all your favorite pages presented in a clean overlay window – press another key and the associated website will open in a new Firefox tab. The keyboard shortcuts works even while you are browsing the web in full-screen mode.

This visual appearance of Site Launcher overlay window is actually very similar to the help window of Gmail or Google Reader (see screenshot below) that’s invoked when your hit the Shift + ? keyboard shortcut and disappears on pressing the Escape key.

You can add as many number of sites to the Site Launcher menu as you want and it will auto-download the corresponding favicon so you can recognize sites more quickly.

And while you can manually add any web page to Site Launcher using the menu, the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + S will quickly add the current web page to the Site Launcher menu in one click.

Download the latest version of Firefox here.

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Save All Open Websites in Firefox

Save All Open Websites in Firefox

Option 1. Press Ctrl+Shift+D or go to Bookmarks and select “Bookmark all Tabs”. This will save all the open tabs into one folder and you can resume surfing the next day by select “Open All in Tabs” from the bookmark folder.

Bonus Tip: Name this folder something like “Feb25” or “022508” so it becomes easy for you to guess the date from the folder name itself.

Option 2. Send Tab URLs – This extension helps you send URLs of all open tabs to any other email address tabs using your default email program – it could be Gmail, Microsoft Outlook or anything else. Very handy if you are working from home and need to access the same websites from office the next day.

If you don’t want email, use Tab URL Copier to copy URLs of all open tabs to the clipboard and paste them inside any note taking software like Google Notebook.

Option 3. Google Browser Sync – If you have a Google Account and work across computers, this Firefox add-in from Google is a perfect way to save your Firefox tabs and open windows. Unfortunately, Google Browser Sync is not supported on Firefox 3.

Option 4. Session Manager – This is probably the most popular solution for save your browser session in Firefox. It will even restore your windows and tabs incase your browser crashes.

Firefox, even without any extensions, will prompt your save the tabs if you decide to quit the browser when multiple tabs are open. This sounds like a good idea but if you are sharing the computer with other family members, you run the risk of losing work if someone else logs in the next day before you do.

Download the latest version of FireFox here.

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