Firefox

Back to home

Jump to:

• Extensions
  
• Deleting entries in a text field
  
• Bluepages plugin
  
• Pop-up ads using Flash
  
• Ad Blocking
  
• Speedups
  
• Acrobat plugin
  
• Windows cannot open Web site
  
• New tabs open in the background
  

Extensions

Here are the extensions I currently use:

• Google Toolbar
• Yahoo Toolbar
• Tab Mix  Plus -- tabbed browsing extension
• IE View -- adds a link to the context menu to launch IE
• Download Manager Tweak
• FireFTP -- FTP client
• Tommy! -- Easy BluePages lookups  (IBM internal only)
• OpenDownload -- lets you run EXEs without explicitly downloading them first
• GreaseMonkey -- extension where you can install DHTML scripts
• Diggler -- adds a button next to the location bar to make it easy to navigate to parent directories  (unofficial 0.91 version that works with FF 1.5)
• LiveLines -- adds to the LiveBookmarks feature for subscribing to RSS feeds
• Sage -- RSS aggregator
• InfoRSS -- Displays RSS feeds in the status bar
• ForecastFox -- add the temperature to the status bar, and more
• Signature -- lets you maintain boilerplate text which you can insert into text fields
• IBM Really Simple Sign On -- saves you having to enter your IBM Intranet Password everytime
• LiveSpell -- Spell checking of text fields, from Webahead
• View Rendered Source Chart -- A nice display of the HTML source of a Web page
• Pearl Crescent Page Saver -- saves a PNG of the entire Web page, not what's currently visible
• Web Developer  -- adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools

The GreaseMonkey scripts I use are the following. Right click on each and click Install User Script to install

• Bluepages business card (IBM internal only) -- Adds function to search field in w3/bluepages (more info)
• Linkify -- forces URLs to be clickable
• Allow Password Remembering --  Forces the browser to prompt to keep passwords
• Add Swiftie's Relationships to Bluepages -- adds fields inline to w3.ibm.com/bluepages that can show the working relationship between two people.
• Add ALT tags -- copy ALT tags to the TITLE tag for image tooltips  (more info)

Here's a good directory of scripts

Deleting entries in a text field

If you double click a text entry field, it will display all your previous entries in a drop-down list. You can delete any entry in that list by highlighting it and pressing Shift-Delete. [22-Aug-06]

Bluepages plugin

If you want to use the Add to NAB (Notes nname and address book) button, then you have to install a plugin. The standard (non-IBM customized) version of Firefox can't find the plugin. So you have to go to this bluepages help page to install it. [5-Sep-05]

Pop-up ads using Flash

Firefox includes the ability to block pop-up advertisements, but it will still let in Flash-based ads. Pete Bevin has the solution:

1. Type about:config into the Firefox location bar.
2. Right-click on the page and select New > Integer.
3. Name it privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
4. Set the value to 2.

The possible values are:

• 0: Allow all popups from plugins.
• 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.
• 2: Block popups from plugins.
• 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.

There's also a pop-up tester page to try it out

Ad Blocking

Firefox supports user-based CSS customization using the userContent.css file. With this file you can configure Firefox to not display ads on Web pages. Details at http://www.floppymoose.com. Also see the section towards the bottom that describes how to also block Flash-based ads. [10-Aug-05]

Speedups

These adjustments to about:config may improve performance:

Pipelining

The following entries in config are related to how many pages Firefox requests at one time. Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once.

network.http.pipelining=true
network.http.proxy.pipelining=true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=30

Initial paint delay

Right click and click New > Integer an create a new value named nglayout.initialpaint.delay. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. Pages should load much faster now.

nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0

Acrobat plugin

By default, Firefox 0.9 will always open a PDF in the browser window, regardless of the "display in browser" setting in Acrobat Preferences. The solution is to edit the following paramenter in about:config:

plugin.scan.Acrobat

This parameter specifies the minimum version of Acrobat that Firefox is to scan for. If you set this value to 999 (for example), then it will never find any plugin of that version (the default is 5.0) and will open the file with the default application (AcroExch per the plugins list).

Windows cannot open Web site

There is a bug with the Firefox 0.9 and 0.91 installers in the way it registers incorrectly register themselves as the default handler for HTTP and other transactions. The result is that for some URLs, you get the message:

Windows cannot find [URL]. Make sure you typed the name correctly, then try again.

However, the Web page still loads correctly in Firefox as if no error occurred.

The easiest solution is to correct the registry with the following reg file.

New tabs open in the background

For my installation, whenever a new tab was opened, it never got focus. To solve that, you need to adjust the settings. Open Firefox to the page

about:config

Scroll down to browser.tabls.loadInBackground and double click on it. You can then change the value from true to false.