I really hate the behavior of Firefox in Windows when you open the options. The complete browser is not accessible anymore until you close the options again. This is extremely frustrating if you want to test a few settings. There is however a really nice way to change the behavior and make it that the options are independent from the Firefox browser.

To do this you only need change one setting in Firefox and restart the browser afterwards. Type about:config in the address bar and search for the string browser.preferences.instantApply and change the setting from false to true. This ensures that the options can be accessed and changed while it is still possible to surf the Internet.

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Firefox is already really comfortable when it comes to searching the web. One search box is displayed by default which is great if you want to do a fast search for something. Did you know that there is another way, even faster and better than this one ? Firefox supports so called keyword searches which means that you define a keyword for a certain search engine and can use that keyword to search it without visiting the website of that search engine.

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.

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I found this interesting article at the Lifehacker website. The articles lists 15 tweaks and tips for Firefox of which several have not been known by me. Did you for instance know that you could move a page down by pressing the spacebar, that you could move around tabs by pressing CTRL + TAB or that you could use so called smart keywords for searching IMDB in the Address Bar (try typing in imdb Johnny Depp) ?

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I’m always looking for ways to reduce the toolbars and menus to have more space for the websites. I have already written about extensions such as Hide Menubar or the Firefox UI Tweaker that change the appearance of Firefox. The Tiny Menu Extension is another great add-on to this list. What it does is that it compresses all entries from the menu toolbar (File, Edit, View, History and so on) into one entry that lists the compressed items beneath each other. Take a look at the screenshot to get an impression of how this looks like.

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Some users prefer to have as much space in Firefox for websites as possible. One way to get rid of some of the toolbars and menus temporarily would be to press F11 which removes the title, the bookmarks toolbar and the menubar. Another way would be to just remove the menubar which is not needed most of the time anyway. To do that you simply need the Firefox extension called Hide Menubar which removes the menubar once installed.

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