As Firefox has already created history being the most used web around as well as the most download i.e. 8.3 millions copies in a single day. Now today you will learn apart from being the most popular of the world it has lot more to offer, only thing you need to know some cool tips which will let you handle you favorite browser well easily. So to help out the millions of users find useful information in one place, I have created some list of tips and tricks for Firefox written by talented bloggers from around the blogosphere.
Hidden Tips to enhance browsing with Mozilla Firefox
1. Ever wish to have smaller icons to have more space, yes. you can do that via View – Toolbars – Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.
2. Creating a Keyword for a Search: If you very often do a particular type of search then do you instead of typing the same keyword every time in the Search Input box you can just “Add a Keyword for this search”, give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name (let’s say “actor”) and save it. Now, when you want to do an actor search, go to Firefox’s address bar, type “actor” and the name of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search box.
3. Have you tried the keypad shortcut to get your browsing faster, using shortcuts are one of the fasted way to reach to desired menu than using a mouse. But the problem not everyone is familier with the keyborad shortcuts used in Mozilla Firefox, here goes the list
- Spacebar (page down)
- Shift-Spacebar (page up)
- Ctrl+F (find)
- Alt-N (find next)
- Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
- Ctrl+T (new tab)
- Ctrl+K (go to search box)
- Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
- Ctrl+= (increase text size)
- Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
- Ctrl-W (close tab)
- F5 (reload)
- Alt-Home (go to home page)
4. Auto Complete feature is one of the most useful feature when you very often have to deal with form filling but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there – like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.
5. If your habbit to use several tabs at a time than instead of using mouse every time why not just use the tab-switching; here are the shortcuts…
- Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
- Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
- Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)
6. Mouse shortcuts: Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:
- Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
- Shift-scroll down (previous page)
- Shift-scroll up (next page)
- Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
- Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
- Middle click on a tab (closes tab)
7. Delete your browsing history: If you very much conscious about your browsing privacy then how about deleting when you have finished. As Firefox has the ability to automatically show previous URLs you’ve visited, as you type, in the address bar’s drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you just don’t want those URLs to show up then just Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go down to an address you want to delete, and press the Delete key to make it disappear.
8. about:config. The true power user’s tool, about.config isn’t something to mess with if you don’t know what a setting does. You can get to the main configuration screen by putting about:config in the browser’s address bar. See about:config tips .
9. Adding bookmarks are also one of the easiest way to get to your favorite pages or websites but do you know you can Go to your bookmarks much faster by giving them keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then select Properties. Put a short keyword in the keyword field, save it, and now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will go to that bookmark.
10. Having a broadband connection then why not just tweak out Firefox for better page loadsThis allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:
- Type “. onfig” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
- Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
- Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
- Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
- Also, 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 receives.
11. If it seems you that Firefox is using more RAM thus making complication to other programs running then why not just limit the RAM usage Again, go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.
12. Reduce RAM when minimized: This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.
13. Do you accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:
- 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
- 1:(Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
- 2:Don’t display any close buttons
- 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)
