The second action is the auto-complete feature that kicks in under certain circumstances only be default. Entering Mozilla will load the mozilla.com website automatically because that is the best match in the Google search engine for that name. A search for www.mozilla on the other hand will be auto-completed by Firefox. The browser will append the .com suffix to the query and load the same website.

Not everyone is living in the United States and some users might prefer a country domain extension instead of the default .com suffix. This option can be changed in the Firefox preferences. Entering about:config in the Firefox address bar will load the preferences.

Filtering for the term fixup will show the four parameters on the screenshot above. A user can change the default prefix and suffix to something else by double-clicking the entries or disable the auto-complete feature completely by setting the browser.fixup.alternate.enabled parameter to false.

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To give you a practical example: If you visit https://www.paypal.com/ you notice a large green bar in the favicon area that is displaying the name of the owner of the website. A visit of https://www.amazon.com/ on the other hand is displaying a smaller blue bar around the favicon. Both are secure websites but one is dominant while the other is barely visible.

This can be changed in Firefox 3 so that the url of the website is displayed in the favicon are as well. To do that type in about:config in the Firefox 3 location bar and filter for the term browser.identity.ssl_domain_display. You can change that term to the following values:

• 0 – the default value.
• 1 – the top level domain is also painted in blue. e.g. ghacks.net
• 2 – all of the domain is painted in blue, e.g. www.ghacks.net

I set mine to the value 2 so that the complete domain name is shown in the favicon area.

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Configuration Mania is a Firefox add-on that displays many of those “deeper” settings in a menu that resembles the Firefox options menu. Users can access five main tabs, like Browser or Security, which lead to several subtabs that provide access to the settings.

Let me give you an example that helped me actually. Clicking on the Browser tab opens a menu with several like User Agent, Location Bar and Download. A click on Download revealed the option to disable the alert that you receive when a download finishes. I would have a hard time finding that option in the about:config settings.

Users who would like to keep the alert can chance the interval in that it is shown and even increase or decrease the speed of the animation. You can find dozens of such helpful settings in Configuration Mania.

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I should probably start with some basic information on how you edit the Firefox configuration at all. This is actually pretty simple: Enter about:config in the address bar and hit enter. A large preferences list should appear. Every option has a preference name, a status, a type and a value.We are using the name to find the option in the large list. Status defines if it is still the default value or has been edited by the user, type defines which values are accepted in the value field. For boolean it would be true or false, integer a number and so on. To filter the list enter part of the name into the Filter text field, the results get updated on the fly. On to the tweaks..

Change location of bookmarks file

• key: browser.bookmarks.file
• default: not existing, create new String by right-clicking and entering the above key
• value: path to bookmark.html, for instance e:\bookmark.html

You might want to change this if you want to use a removable drive to store your bookmarks for instance.

Middlemouse Paste

• key: middlemouse.paste
• default: false
• change to: true

Setting this option to true makes it possible to paste text into any text field in Firefox.

Hide Go Button

• key:browser.urlbar.hideGoButton
• default:false
• change to:true

If you set this value to true the Go button will be removed giving you more space in that bar. No one uses the go button anyway, just hit enter, this has the same effect.

Click Selects all in url bar

• key:browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
• default:true
• change to:false

This is useful if you often copy only part of the url. The default behavior selects the complete url first if you click into the url bar and you have to click and select again to copy part of the url only.

Open Search Results in a new Tab

• key:browser.search.openintab
• default:false
• change to: true

Opens the search results always in a new tab instead of the currently active tab.

Spellcheck for textareas

• key:layout.spellcheckDefault
• default:1
• change to: 2

This activates the spell check for textareas and input fields as well.

Autofill in url bar

• key:browser.urlbar.autoFill
• default:false
• change to:true

Known urls are automatically completed while entering them.

Disable extension compatibility check

• key:extensions.checkCompatibility
• default: not existing, create new Boolean with the above name
• value: false

Setting this value to false means that Firefox will not check installed extensions for compatibility. Great during updates, could lead to problems with incompatible extensions though.

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