Simple Firefox Tips And Tweaks

It is perhaps ironic that after having been quiet for a few years, the browser war has reignited with a passion over the last couple of years as Google, the Mozilla foundation, Apple and market leader Microsoft all have released new versions of their browsers that promised significant improvements for windows users.  The newest entrants were of course Apple that ported its Safari browser to Windows in the middle of last year and Google that announced its maiden browser effort in September this year.

While all the new browsers out there offer some great features, none of them come close to Firefox 3.0 when it comes to speed, customization and 3rd party add-on support. In such a light, we here at Tech2 to simply pick some of the most common tips and tweaks that would help you achieve some subtle customization of the browser, which would improve its performance and your surfing experience

Firefox 3 significantly revamped its address bar, making it far more interactive and introduced searchable URLs based on a person’s browsing/search history.  While this is a great feature and was welcomed by many users, it has not gone down well with everyone. We received quite a few emails querying if it was possible to revert it to the Firefox 2.0 behavior.

While this question did leave us perplexed as the new bar is truly awesome, we did look around and found a couple of ways of reverting it back to the “old-skool” style. The first one is ‘OldBar’; an addon which works on the fly and modifies the search bar’s appearance to make it look exactly like the version Firefox 2 had. It can be downloaded here.

The second method is a little more complex. For this one need to access the browser’s advanced options. To do this goto the address bar and type “About:Config”. This will bring up a warning window. Accept the warning and move past that. You are now in the advanced section. As you can see on top, there is a filter option similar to Firefox search. In that box type this “browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped”. Once the option comes up, set its value to true by right clicking on it and using the toggle option to change it to true.  Restart the browser for it to take effect.

For those of you who do like the bar, there is another useful tweak that can be performed to improve the performance of the address bar, in regards to the number of results it shows up. As you know this can be problem as the bar can throw up totally random results and list out too many results leading it to lag. To improve its performance, follow the same steps as above, search for “browser.urlbar.maxRichResults” and change the number to a more manageable 6 or 8 as per your choice.