February 1, 2008 by Vincent

How To Get The Most Out of Your Firefox

Firefox by default is already very powerful internet browser, but you are probably not getting the most out of it. Getting the most out of Firefox basically means doing more on Firefox with less time. That will definitely increase your productivity.

Speed up Firefox

You have probably seen this else where as it has been posted millions of times on the internet. But in case you are still using the default Firefox settings, then these tips might help in speeding up your Firefox.

Type “about:config” in your address bar and hit enter.

In the filter, type “network.http”.

Set network.http.proxy.pipelining to ‘true’
Set network.http.pipelining to ‘true’
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to ’25’
Set network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server to ’22’

Now right-click anywhere, select New → Integer. Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set its value to ‘0’.

You should see the difference now in website loading speed on your Firefox. There are still a lot of tweaks in this area, you might want to Google for more.

More Room, Less Junks

Now you have a faster loading Firefox, but it’s still time consuming to scroll so much. There are a lot of buttons and menus on Firefox, and most probably you haven’t been using some of them ever since you installed Firefox.

Follow this guide on Lifehacker to eliminate useless items on your Firefox and squeeze all the useful ones together. The difference:

Before

After

From 4 huge toolbars, you will only have 3 compact toolbars now. That’s quite some space restored. What? 3 compact toolbars is still too much for you?

What about auto hiding your bookmarks toolbar when it is not in use? It will appear when you mouse over it, and collapse when you don’t. Like this:

Follow this guide for this awesome tweak.

Handy Extensions

One of the reason why Firefox is so popular is because it has a very large library of extensions. Some extensions will make your Firefox more powerful and resulting in higher productivity.

One of the most useful extension that I think will benefit just anyone:

DownThemAll! – It is a download manager for Firefox that you will love to have. Why? Because you will be pleased to have your download speed to be increased up to 400% faster and download a whole bunch of images or files off a website within clicks. It’s logic that faster file downloading speed will save you more time.

Quick Online Tips has a great list of 50 Firefox Extensions for power surfing. Pick some of them that you think will be handy, or you can alternatively look through the whole extension library.

Hotkeys! Shortcuts! Whatever you call it…

Trust me, getting used to shortcut keys can really save up a lot of time and can lead you into getting things done much faster. Below are my favorite hotkeys that I use frequently:

Ctrl + T – Open a new tab
Ctrl + Shift + T – Open last closed tab
Ctrl + N – New window
Ctrl + W – Close current tab
Ctrl + + – Increase font size
Ctrl + – – Reduce font size
Ctrl + Tab – Next tab (just like Windows’s Alt+Tab)
Ctrl + U – Open page source
F5 – Reload
F11 – Full screen

Middle click on link – Open link in new tab
Middle click on tab – Close tab

For the full list, keyboard and mouse

Do you know any other tips that can make Firefox more useful? Let us know by posting a comment below.

#Firefox#Mozilla#tweak#Web Browser