There is also the kind of user who likes to use the keyboard to close tabs instead of clicking on that button. The keyboard shortcut [CTRL W] will close the active tab as long as Firefox is the active window. That’s convenient and making the close button more or less superfluous.

Another problem that arises when displaying close buttons on all tabs is that the tab size changes dynamically. This becomes apparent when you open many tabs. If you start closing tabs you will sooner or later notice that the close button shifted because of changed tab sizes.

But what are the options that the Firefox developers have implemented in the web browser? The parameter [browser.tabs.closeButtons] in [about:config] handles the close button in Firefox.

• 1: This is the default value, it displays a close button on every tab in Firefox.
• 0: This displays a close button only on the active tab.
• 2: This displays no close button at all.
• 3: Displays a single close button at the end of the tab bar.

Keyboard junkies will probably set the value to 2 to get rid of all close buttons. Users who regularly open many tabs will probably set it to 3 to be able to access the close button in the same place.

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Let me give you an example to clear things up. You may right-click any form field in Firefox and select the menu entry Add a Keyword for this search. Selecting this opens a new Add Bookmark menu which asks for a name and a keyword. I went to ebay.com and did a right-click on their site search. I entered the keyword “e” and the name eBay.

Typing in “e computer” would have the effect that a search on eBay would be performed with the search string computer. I only have to type this phrase into the address bar to perform the search. The same method works for other websites including, Google, Yahoo, IMDB, Deviantart, Myspace and Slashdot.

There is another possibility to use keywords. Every bookmark has a keyword object that is normally empty. By assigning a keyword to a bookmark you can use that keyword to open the url. If you use gH for Ghacks for instance it would open my site if you would type in gH into the address bar. Pretty nice for sites that you do visit a lot.

Last but not least you can add wildcards to urls as well. If you edit a bookmark you see that it asks for a location and a keyword. The locations is normally the url of the website and the keyword the shortcut key. A wildcard would be added to the location to further customize a search or visit a special part of a website.

The wildcard symbol is “%s” which means that a valid location would be for instance http://%s.google.com/. If g would be assigned as the keyword you would be able to access Google websites such as adsense (adsense.google.com) or video (video.google.com).

inspiration found @ Tutorial Ninjas

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