May 11th, 2007 in Featured, Technology

15 Coolest Firefox Tricks Ever

Everybody’s favorite open-source browser, Firefox, is great right out of the box. And by adding some of the awesome extensions available out there, the browser just gets better and better.

But look under the hood, and there are a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. Get to be a Jedi master with the following cool Firefox tricks.

1) More screen space. Make your icons small. Go to View - Toolbars - Customize and check the “Use small icons” box.

2) Smart keywords. If there’s a search you use a lot (let’s say IMDB.com’s people search), this is an awesome tool that not many people use. Right-click on the search box, select “Add a Keyword for this search”, give the keyword a name and an easy-to-type and easy-to-remember shortcut name (let’s say “actor”) and save it. Now, when you want to do an actor search, go to Firefox’s address bar, type “actor” and the name of the actor and press return. Instant search! You can do this with any search box.

3) Keyboard shortcuts. This is where you become a real Jedi. It just takes a little while to learn these, but once you do, your browsing will be super fast. Here are some of the most common (and my personal favs):

  • Spacebar (page down)
  • Shift-Spacebar (page up)
  • Ctrl+F (find)
  • Alt-N (find next)
  • Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
  • Ctrl+T (new tab)
  • Ctrl+K (go to search box)
  • Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
  • Ctrl+= (increase text size)
  • Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
  • Ctrl-W (close tab)
  • F5 (reload)
  • Alt-Home (go to home page)

4) Auto-complete. This is another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful. Go to the address bar (Control-L) and type the name of the site without the “www” or the “.com”. Let’s say “google”. Then press Control-Enter, and it will automatically fill in the “www” and the “.com” and take you there - like magic! For .net addresses, press Shift-Enter, and for .org addresses, press Control-Shift-Enter.

5) Tab navigation. Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs that you have open, use the keyboard. Here are the shortcuts:

  • Ctrl+Tab (rotate forward among tabs)
  • Ctrl+Shft+Tab (rotate to the previous tab)
  • Ctrl+1-9 (choose a number to jump to a specific tab)

6) Mouse shortcuts. Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard. Master these cool ones:

  • Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
  • Shift-scroll down (previous page)
  • Shift-scroll up (next page)
  • Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
  • Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
  • Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

7) Delete items from address bar history. Firefox’s ability to automatically show previous URLs you’ve visited, as you type, in the address bar’s drop-down history menu is very cool. But sometimes you just don’t want those URLs to show up (I won’t ask why). Go to the address bar (Ctrl-L), start typing an address, and the drop-down menu will appear with the URLs of pages you’ve visited with those letters in them. Use the down-arrow to go down to an address you want to delete, and press the Delete key to make it disappear.

8) User chrome. If you really want to trick out your Firefox, you’ll want to create a UserChrome.css file and customize your browser. It’s a bit complicated to get into here, but check out this tutorial.

9) Create a user.js file. Another way to customize Firefox, creating a user.js file can really speed up your browsing. You’ll need to create a text file named user.js in your profile folder (see this to find out where the profile folder is) and see this example user.js file that you can modify. Created by techlifeweb.com, this example explains some of the things you can do in its comments.

10) about:config. The true power user’s tool, about.config isn’t something to mess with if you don’t know what a setting does. You can get to the main configuration screen by putting about:config in the browser’s address bar. See Mozillazine’s about:config tips and screenshots.

11) Add a keyword for a bookmark. Go to your bookmarks much faster by giving them keywords. Right-click the bookmark and then select Properties. Put a short keyword in the keyword field, save it, and now you can type that keyword in the address bar and it will go to that bookmark.

12) Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections). Here’s how:

  • Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
  • Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number like 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at once.
  • Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

13) Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us. Again, go to about:config, filter “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”. It’s set to 50000, but you can lower it, depending on how much memory you have. Try 15000 if you have between 512MB and 1GB ram.

14) Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized. This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory. And there is no noticeable difference in speed when you restore Firefox, so it’s definitely worth a go. Again, go to about:config, right-click anywhere and select New-> Boolean. Name it “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. You have to restart Firefox for these settings to take effect.

15) Move or remove the close tab button. Do you accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move them or remove them, again through about:config. Edit the preference for “browser.tabs.closeButtons”. Here are the meanings of each value:

  • 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
  • 1:(Default) Display close buttons on all tabs
  • 2:Don’t display any close buttons
  • 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

Got any favorite Firefox tips or tricks of your own? Let us know in the comments.

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Leo Babauta

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343 Responses

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  • Kevin says on May 11th, 2007 at 10:34 am

    1) More screen space:

    If you want go gain some real screen space move your address bar to the same row as the menu, and move your bookmarks to the same row as the other buttons.

    Shown here:
    http://technogeek.org/images/ffox-screen.png

  • Rahat says on May 11th, 2007 at 11:33 am

    “Kevin says on:
    May 11th, 2007 at 10:34 am
    1) More screen space:

    If you want go gain some real screen space move your address bar to the same row as the menu, and move your bookmarks to the same row as the other buttons.”

    Kevin! How can I move bookmarks??

  • Noel Hurtley says on May 11th, 2007 at 1:21 pm

    If you want to improve performance, simply use the Fasterfox extension. But I would recommend disabling prefetching (which is turned on automatically in the Turbo mode).

  • Jayson says on May 11th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    Find next is also CTRL-G
    Quick search is /

  • Kevin says on May 11th, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    I think my response got killed (to many links).

    To move the Bookmarks:
    1- Select customize for your toolbars
    2- Drag the “Bookmarks Toolbar Items” from your Bookmarks toolbar to your Navigation toolbar.
    3- Turn off your Bookmarks toolbar.

    You use the same process for the Address bar, except you are moving it from the Navigation toolbar to the Menu toolbar.

    More images at URL above:
    ffox-screen-001.png
    ffox-screen-002.png
    ffox-screen-003.png

    –
    Kevin

  • Nick Burns says on May 11th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

    The autocomplete (CTRL-Enter) is not Firefox exclusive. I’ve been using it for years in IE prior to switching to FF.

  • Bill Cannon says on May 11th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    Open the about: window in a new tab. much easier.

    OK, now, when you create the new variable and you misspell it, how do you delete it or modify the name?

  • Daily Bargains says on May 11th, 2007 at 4:09 pm

    Nice list, the memory tricks work well

  • ListAfterList says on May 11th, 2007 at 4:37 pm

    Agreed - nice list, especially the keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

  • Kraeg says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:10 pm

    Any Tricks/Tips list, where I can put to use over half of them, is excellent in my opinion. Thank you.

  • Laura says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:27 pm

    It looks like #2 is not a feature on mac :( that’s not a menu option

  • voidgame says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:33 pm

    They forgot this:

    Ctrl+Shift+T

    If you accidentally closed a tab, you can get it back.

  • jessemoya says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    #12 is an unethical “trick.” There’s a good reason why the default setting for pipelining is “false.”

    What it does is send multiple requests for a page to a server, which benefits the individual user doing it, but at the expense of the server. The result is that privileged users with reliable ISPs (say, the average American user) slam a site with these multiple requests which shift resources away from others that are connecting from, say, a third-world country in Sub-Saharan Africa.

    If the practice caught on in a large scale it would start to affect others as well. Online stewardship benefits everyone.

  • egon says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:40 pm

    Pipelining can only be a max of 8. You set it higher, but it will only actually use 8 “pipes.”

    I’ve had a lot of luck with it, but there is a risk of it breaking connections and the like. Make sure you have the bandwidth to support this before setting it too high.

  • me says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

    they forgot about ctrl-shift-t to open the latest closed tabs…

  • Nicholas says on May 11th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

    @Bill Cannon
    right click at the new variable and go to Modify

  • MagnoliaSouth says on May 11th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

    Excellent list! Thank you very much for posting. :)

  • Cody Mays says on May 11th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    Pressing F6 will highlight all in the address bar and make it focused. :)

  • melchior00 says on May 11th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    Ctrl+page up: Previous tab (tab left of current), circular
    Ctrl+page down: Next tab

    A bit easier to remember than Ctrl-tab and Shift-ctrl-tab (”Next document/Previous document”), IMO.

  • Jef says on May 11th, 2007 at 6:57 pm

    Good list!
    Thank you

  • Andy says on May 11th, 2007 at 6:59 pm

    I switched from ie7 to firefox about 6 months ago, and its just soooo much better!

  • Spencer says on May 11th, 2007 at 7:22 pm

    If you want absolute supreme screen space, then just press F11. It works really good if you are just reading something and not just surfing.

  • Frank G. says on May 11th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

    with the pipelining how does it effect your speed if I am on a wireless network?

    Awesome tricks!!!
    frank

  • max says on May 11th, 2007 at 8:04 pm

    There is a reason network.http.pipelining.maxrequests is defaultly set to 2. If everyone had this set to 30, just about every website you’d ever visit would be down because every greedy idiot thinks he deserves to make 30 SEPARATE CONNECTIONS to the same webserver to load a single page. Recommending people do this is not only unethical but it’s also ill advised. Keepalive connections were invented for a reason.

  • Elton says on May 11th, 2007 at 9:10 pm

    You missed YubNub (www.yubnub.org)! Using that plug-in speeds up my activity sooo much since I can search YouTube by typing in just “yt” rather than the URL, or google with “g”, or yahoo with “y”, etc.

  • fudje says on May 11th, 2007 at 9:23 pm

    Type-ahead find! Type “/” to search in a page, or just start typing to search on links only!

    also tab navigation can be done with Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn

  • Stew13 says on May 11th, 2007 at 10:28 pm

    Great list of FF tweaks… however, there are extensions out there that let you do even more than what’s listed here. This is why Firefox is constantly gaining market share over MS Explorer. Check out FastFox and TabMix Plus to really put FF on steroids.

  • Stew13 says on May 11th, 2007 at 10:29 pm

    Sorry, it’s FasterFox, not fastfox.

  • Shantanu Oak says on May 11th, 2007 at 10:49 pm

    a) To have more screen space I use View - Page Style - No Style
    b) To change the browser font size : Tools - Options - Content - Advanced - Minimum font size - 11
    c) Shortcuts: F3 to repeat search and Ctrl + Click (or right click a link and choose Open in new tab option)

  • Darren says on May 12th, 2007 at 2:35 am

    Great list. Started using some of them even beofre reaching the bottom of the article. Thanks a lot!

  • Vlad says on May 12th, 2007 at 2:37 am

    Hello,
    Please tell me how can I backlink this post?
    Thanks in advance….

  • Rene Kriest@ProBloggerWorld.de says on May 12th, 2007 at 3:37 am

    Nice article! I appreciate it. :)

    One thing I would like to add refers to “5) Tab navigation.”

    I prefer to use + Page up/down to rotate through the tabs.

    Regards,

    René@ProBloggerWorld.de

  • Mel says on May 12th, 2007 at 3:49 am

    With 1GB of memory in my Macbook and still Firefox worked a bit slow. So I applied these suggestions in the about:config and now it’s running much faster.

    Thx!

  • JK says on May 12th, 2007 at 3:53 am

    FF is my favourite browers, go make me to love it more and more. thanq

  • sifumokung says on May 12th, 2007 at 4:13 am

    Nice list. Thank you. About full screen (F-11): right clicking in the toolbar can reveal the option to hide the toolbars making the full screen option a “true full screen.” Opera does this automatically. I hope Firefox will follow suit in this detail.

  • iceman says on May 12th, 2007 at 5:37 am

    Don’t forget control+ + (ie hold the control key down and hit the plus key) for text increase-this can make the web much more readable. hit it again for bigger type and again…..too big control + -, hit (control minus) and take me back to the default control 0

    love this list, nice job, love the yubnub.org site

  • JoeBackward says on May 12th, 2007 at 6:33 am

    Max and Jessemoya have it right; running too many simultaneous server connections is actually antisocial.

    You do know how servers get overloaded when an article gets slashdotted, or shows up near the top on a social-networking site. If all the readers of such an article have lots of these antisocial pipelining requests, your server is much more likely to crash! The rich boys at places like CNN have the capacity to handle this, so the negative effect is actually on the blog community.

  • Martin says on May 12th, 2007 at 7:17 am

    Sure this is a real good idea
    network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 30

    IF you want to burn every site you visit, there’s a reason it’s limited to 4, try reading the RFC you idiot.

  • ruben says on May 12th, 2007 at 7:36 am

    cool tricks, thanks. but set the pipelining maxrequest to 4

  • jopa says on May 12th, 2007 at 8:26 am

    Hello!
    Nice list about great browser…

    I have 2 questions… maybe someone have the same problems:
    1. how I can “View” selection source” without
    SHIFT=F10 and then pressing “E”?
    does anybody know how I can create my own shortcut like
    “ALT+R” to activate “view selection source”

  • Rob says on May 12th, 2007 at 8:37 am

    Seeing that ‘30′ value for the pipelining makes me stabby. Firefox limits it internally to 8 max anyway.

  • flash says on May 12th, 2007 at 9:33 am

    @Bill Cannon

    Did the same thing, quick good found the answer (as always!)

    “To undo the effects of a mistakenly entered or undesirable custom-created preference, right-click on it and select Reset, then close all instances of Firefox and restart it. This doesn’t remove the actual preference from About:Config however, so to remove it from the listing go to your Prefs.js file (See the Customizing Firefox section), do a search for the preference name, highlight that entire line it’s on and delete it altogether, then close and save the file. Go back into About:Config and it should no longer be there.” - Tweakguides

  • flash says on May 12th, 2007 at 9:35 am

    Sorry, to get to the Prefs.js file in windows, goto Run (Windows Key + R) then %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. It will be in a randomly named folder within that :)

  • Ray Myers says on May 12th, 2007 at 9:55 am

    Well….yah! Sure I do. It’s a StumbleUpon floating toolbar I whipped up with my British Phd. friend who’s the best coder in the universe.

    Works only with Firefox and does some other nice things…too. Check it out.

    Ray Myers

  • Stu says on May 12th, 2007 at 10:13 am

    Use the littlefox theme (or other themes by Alfred Kayser), and the width of the ‘live bookmarks’ drop-down menu expands to the width of the longest headline in each folder. So the headline is not chopped off after 4 or 5 words. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps there is an option this in about:config or chrome too?

  • Anish Jacob says on May 12th, 2007 at 12:09 pm

    Wow.. this has been an education!

  • CrimeFaction says on May 12th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

    The best part of Firefox is Stumbleupon and the cool Tab effect

  • itsnotthenetwork says on May 12th, 2007 at 5:32 pm

    Another excellent article from Lifehack, keep up the good work.

  • Painter says on May 13th, 2007 at 4:15 am

    13) Limit RAM usage

    but this is about HDD space, not RAM?..

  • RaymaN says on May 13th, 2007 at 5:01 am

    Thanks for education! :)

  • Mr Car Parts says on May 13th, 2007 at 8:05 am

    I evan use a few of them in my firefox. will give the others a try. Thanks

  • Thomas Adrian says on May 14th, 2007 at 2:37 am

    I use ALT-D to get to the addressbar.

    Also using the SwiftTab extension I navigate tabs using ALT-W and ALT-Q

    - Thomas
    http://www.notessidan.se

  • khosrobaigy says on May 14th, 2007 at 10:07 am

    hello
    here i find many usefull tricks. so thanks a lot.

  • Memo says on May 15th, 2007 at 1:01 am

    I like this trick: if you accidentally close a tab but want it back, hit Ctrl+F12. Keep clicking it and it’ll reopen up to six tabs (well, that’s how many I tried it with; could be more).

  • Sascha says on May 16th, 2007 at 6:06 am

    ich habe das problem das mein firefox bei meiner nutzung sehr ressourcen gierig wird (3-4 fenster zu je ~20 tabs) dies macht sich in ca 400MB ram verbrauch sowie ständige CPU spikes bemerkbar - hat hier jemand vorschläge (ausser die zahl der offenen tabs zu reduzieren ?)
    desweiteren kennt wer eine möglichkeit maus/tastatur schortcuts zu ändern/deaktivieren ? - ich empfinde es als recht lästig das firefox auf maustaste 4+5 reagiert(history vor/zurück), desweiteren hab ich das problem das sich bei eingaben in formularen plötzlich immer wieder mal die suchleiste öffnet und den tastaturfokus klaut -.-

  • someone says on May 16th, 2007 at 10:10 am

    13) Limit RAM usage.
    browser.cache.memory.capacity ?

  • spacedock01 says on May 16th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    Excellent educational post. ALSO THANKS TO Shantanu Oak says on - specially the View>Page Style>No Style. I now have NO wasted space on my widescreen.

  • Shashwat says on May 17th, 2007 at 3:00 am

    This is super cool!
    Very handy… I never knew I could manipulate firefox using about:config!
    -
    Shashwat

  • Shypys says on May 17th, 2007 at 4:55 am

    1. Nice one, I’m backlinking this. Although i knew almost all of this,