Firefox 3 introduced a new coloring scheme and design for secure websites. You might remember that Firefox 2 displayed a yellow url bar when the user was accessing a https site. This changed drastically in Firefox 3 which is now displaying blue, yellow and green colors in the favicon area on the left side of [...]
Pimp the Add Bookmark Dialog in Firefox
The Add Bookmarks dialog windows is not really the best example of usability in Firefox. The default window just shows a ‘Create in Bookmarks’ folder and the user has to click the down arrow to expand this menu and display his folder structure. If you like your things organized you probably have created a rather large folder structure in which you place your bookmarks.
Two Firefox Sidebar Tweaks
While I’m not using the sidebar in Firefox at all I know some users who really love it. The sidebar however has some limitations and the following tweaks are supposed to get rid of two limitations. The first tweak is going to remove the width limitation of the sidebar while the other one moves the sidebar from the left to the right side making it easier to read the websites that you are on.
Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar Tweak
My Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox is filled with lots of bookmarks, many of them stored in folders to stuff even more bookmarks into the space of a single toolbar. While the Bookmarks Toolbar is useful for accessing websites fast it has one limitation that made me do some research to see if there would be a way to fix it.
Check if you Firefox speed tweaks are still active
I recently read an article about Firefox tweaks that would speed up page loading time by changing several settings in the about:config dialog. I knew those tweaks but decided to take a look if my settings were different from the ones mentioned in the article.
I found out – to my big surprise – that I was running Firefox with the default settings and not the tweaked settings. I had the feeling that Firefox was running slower than before after the latest update but I was not able to determine the cause, until now that is.
Make Firefox behave independently from its options
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.
Tiny Menu Firefox Extension
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.
