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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Most users do not place them in the folder Bookmarks. A little CSS tweak expands that Add Bookmarks window to display most of your folder structure without having to press any buttons. To apply this tweak you need to find the file userChrome.css and open it in a text editor.

Add the following code at the end of the file. You might want to change the height that is set to 40 to another value depending on your monitor resolution and folder structure.

@-moz-document url(”chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/addBookmark2.xul”) {
#addBookmarkDialog {
min-height: 40em !important; /* Adjust this value to change the default height */
}
#folder-tree {
visibility: visible !important;
}
#keywordRow {
display: -moz-grid-line !important;
}
button[dlgtype="extra2"] {
display: -moz-box !important;
}
#expander, #keywordRow + row {
display: none !important;
}
}

Before:

After:

via [userstyles]

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Both tweaks need to be applied to the file userChrome.css which is located in the Firefox profile folder. Just search for userChrome.css and you should find it right away. Double-click that file and add one or both of the following two tweaks to the end of the file.

To move the sidebar from the left to the right you do add this line:

#browser {-moz-box-direction: reverse;}

To increase the width of the sidebar you would add this one:

#sidebar {max-width: none !important; }

A restart of Firefox applies the new settings.

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I’m talking about the fact that the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox is always displayed. It is possible to uncheck the toolbar which means that it is not shown which is not what I wanted to do of course. I was looking for a way to increase the space on the screen that the visited website would occupy while still keeping the Bookmarks Toolbar ready to be accessed.

I found a way to hide the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox and activate it only if the mouse is hovered over the area where it would normally appear. This way it is possible to have more space available for displaying the website while still being able to access the Bookmarks Toolbar if needed.

If you want to apply this Firefox tweak you do need to access the file userChrome.css which is located in the ‘chrome’ directory of the Firefox profile folder. Add the following two lines at the end of this file and restart Firefox afterwards:

#PersonalToolbar {display: none;}
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #PersonalToolbar {display: -moz-box;}

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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.

I would suggest you take a look at the following settings as well and see if you are using Firefox with tweaked settings or the default ones. If the latter is the case I suppose you change the settings to the same values that I changed them to, again..

Type in about:config and filter the name network.http.pipelining. The default values are that network.http.pipelining is set to false and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests is set to 4.

If your settings are optimized network.http.pipelining should be set to true and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to a value of 30, 32 or 34.

After that filter for browser.turbo.enabled. If no result comes up you don’t have that setting yet. Right-click the blank space and select New > Boolean from the menu. Name it browser.turbo.enabled and set it to true.

If you happen to make a mistake, e.g. create a String with the name browser.turbo.enabled, you can correct it by navigating to your Firefox profile folder and edit the prefs.js file by hand. Just search for the line and delete it. Close Firefox before you edit the file.

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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.

The options window looks different from the known one. There is only a close button now which means that the settings take effect immediately. This means that changes take effect even before you hit the close button. This is excellent if you want to test some settings.

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Take a look at the screenshot to get an impression of how this looks like.

As you can see you can actually save one complete toolbar by joining the Menu Toolbar in Firefox with the Navigation Toolbar. Instead of using the Hide Menu Extension you could simply use this one to get the same effect but keep all options in reach. It takes some time to get used to the new look but it works fine after a few hours.

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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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The first and most important aspect is to consider removing themes and extensions which can really consume lots of memory. Before you start removing extensions you should do the following to see if it is possible to determine which extension or theme is responsible for the memory consumption.

• Starting Firefox in Safe-Mode
  • Safe-Mode disables all extensions and themes and loads Firefox with the default template. If this method uses continuously less memory a theme or extension is most likely responsible for the high memory consumption.
  • To run Firefox in safe-mode simply add the following parameter during startup “-safe-mode”.

• Problematic Extensions
  • Some extensions cause unwanted side effects. The Mozilla team is collecting information about those extensions which can be looked up here. You can try the suggested workarounds to fix the problem or uninstall the extension completely.

All the following tweaks can be achieved by typing in about:config in the Firefox address bar and entering (part of) the bolded parameter into the filter field.

• Browser.cache.memory.capacity
  • Controls the maximum amount of memory to use for caching decoded images and chrome (application user interface elements).
  • This determines if and how much system ram Firefox will use to cache itself. The element does not exist and has to be created. The default value is set to automatic which means that Firefox uses a certain amount of RAM by default. (values for Firefox 2.x)
    • 32 MB of RAM -> 2 MB
    • 64 MB of RAM -> 4 MB
    • 128 MB of RAM -> 6 MB
    • 256 MB of RAM -> 10 MB
    • 512 MB of RAM -> 14 MB
    • 1024 MB of RAM -> 18 MB
    • 2048 MB of RAM -> 24 MB
    • 4096+ MB of RAM > 32+MB
  • You can tell Firefox to use another value by creating the element in about:config and assigning a different value (in KB) to it. It is also possible to turn this feature of by assigning the value 0 to it. This can greatly decrease the performance of Firefox and is not advised at all.
  • To reduce memory consumption reduce the amount of RAM that is assigned to Firefox.

• Browser.sessionhistory.max_entries
  • Firefox 2.x saves the last 50 visited websites of a single session in memory which means that it could add up quickly if you visit lots of content filled websites.
  • Reduce the amount of websites that are stored this way to reduce the memory consumption. It does not make a huge difference for most surfing habits to reduce the figure to 5 or 10.

• Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
  • Automatically determine the maximum amount of pages to store in memory based on the total amount of RAM.
  • If you have 64 MB or Ram 1 page is stored in memory, 2 for 128 MB, 3 for 256 MB, 5 for 512 and 8 for everything higher than that figure.
  • If you never navigate using the Back and Forward buttons in Firefox you can set this value to 0 to disable the feature.
  • Otherwise reduce the amount of pages stored in memory to make this feature use less memory.

• Config.trim_on_minimize
  • This preference determines whether to allow Windows to reclaim memory from a minimized Mozilla application.
  • Set to True if you want to free up memory when minimizing Firefox.
  • The value does not exist by default, simply create it and set it to true for better memory management.

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This worked for some time but not anymore. To much sites, compressed text everywhere and I had the same problem again. I knew that firefox was highly customizable and I began searching for a way to alter the style for the bookmarks toolbar and quickly found it. Now, to change the style which includes reducing or increasing font size, changing the font type, changing colors on that font and much more you need to open userchrome.css which should be in your firefox profile folder.

Paste the following line of code at the end of this file:

.toolbarbutton-text {
font-size: 9px !important;
}

This changes the default font size to 9px which is what I’am currently using. To increase it just increase the value. Some other settings that you could try:

Change the font color of the bookmarks:

font-color: blue !important;

Change the font itself:

font-family: Verdana !important;

Change the background color – this example changes it to blue.

background-color: blue !important;

Creates a border around the bookmarks.

border: 1px solid !important;

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