Like most people, ever since I got my hand on Mozilla's Firefox browser, I have kicked IE to the curb and never looked back (except for testing of course). The tabbed browsing, all the add ons, the extensibility, it's just unsurpassed in my opinion. One of the biggest reasons I like this browser however, is all of the configurability options you have.

MosDev.org has a list of editable Documented Preferences that can not only speed the performance of Firefox up but can also let you customize the browser for the way you want. To access these advanced preference settings, open up Firefox and browse to
about:config
You will see a list of all documented preferences with a description for each and what the default value is. Any change/alteration you make will now appear in bold. You can change nearly (if not all) values, just be careful to know what you are changing before you make the change. However, if you really mess it up you can right-click any preference and use the Reset command to change the setting back to it's default.

For example, you can make Firefox perform on the web much better by adjusting how many requests the browser makes of a Web site at once.

• Change network.http.max-connections from 24 to 48.
• Change network.http.max-connections-per-server from 8 to 24.
• Change network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy from 4 to 12.
• Change network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server from 2 to 6.
• Change network.http.pipelining from False to True by double-clicking on the value.
• Change network.http.pipelining.maxrequests from 4 to 32.
• Change network.http.request.max-start-delay from 10 to 0.

Here is a comprehensive list of the Documented Preferences

In addition to the browser settings, you can also customize the way Firefox looks and handles by modifying the style sheet it uses by making changes in a file named userChrome.css located at:
C:\Documents and Settings\[YOUR USERNAME]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

(Replace [YOUR USERNAME] with your actual username for your computer) The Profiles directory will contain a subdirectory that will be oddly named "{SOME RANDOM STRING]. default. Inside that directory there's a "Chrome" subdirectory which has a file named userChrome-example.css. Rename this text file userChrome.css. Now edit userChrome.css with your favorite text editor (like Notepad). This works just like any other CSS file from what I can tell. For example to make the foreground tab highlight with an orange color (cause we all know how cool orange is) and use dark gray type I can add the following code:
/* Change active tab color */
tab{
-moz-appearance: none !important;
}
tab[selected="true"] {
background-color: #DE6A0A !important;
color: #333333 !important;
}

In addition to all of that you have the extensions for Firefox. One of the coolest extensions (especially for blog posting or Forum posting) for inserting BBCode into your posts can be found at Jed Brown . This adds Formatting (BBCODE/HTML/XHTML/etc.) to the context menu for Blogs and forums.

And of course where would I be without may favorite extension, the Macromedia News extension which 'notifies you of the latest news and information from Macromedia', or the Search Macromedia plug-ins 'for searching Macromedia and Flash resources', all created by Mike Chambers.

So there you go...start hacking away and make your browser work for you, not the other way around

This entry was posted on Friday, July 29th, 2005 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Firefox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.