The Ultimate List Of Firefox Tips and Tricks

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This is the next post in a series of the ultimate tips and tricks for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome

Firefox users are very loyal to their browser and I’ve regularly ended up in several heated debates with Firefox fans. Personally I don’t use Firefox very often, but in our browser poll it was clear that Firefox was the most popular browser for readers of this site.

So for all your Firefox users, here’s my ultimate list of Firefox Tips and Tricks;

1.Keyboard Shortcuts

There’s so many shortcuts available in Firefox, I’d be here all day going through them, so here’s a selection of the best ones.

• 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)
• Ctrl + Shift + T (reopen a closed tab)
• Ctrl + R (refresh page)
• Alt + <- (back)
• Alt + -> (forward)

2. Open Link In A New Tab

A lot of the time you want to open a link in a new tab, generally you would have to right click and then select open in a new tab, but did you know you can just click the middle of the link to open in a new tab?

3. More Screen Space

Make those icons smaller for more screen space. Go to View – Toolbars – Customize and check the “Use Small Icons Box”

You can also go fullscreen by hitting F11

4. Mouse Shortcuts

Many people only know about keyboard shortcuts, well what about some mouse ones as well?

• 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)

5. Delete Items From Address Bar History

It can be handy, or annoying but Firefox automatically shows previous URL’s as you type them into the address bar, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get rid of them. Well if you go to the address bar and start typing the URL, you can navigate with the down arrow key and select it, then just hit delete.

6.about:config

Now every power Firefox user knows about the about:config options. You need to be careful with what you change here otherwise you could screw up your Firefox browser. Here’s a couple of tips for it.

This tip should speed up Firefox a bit

• 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.

7. Limit The Amount Of Ram Firefox Uses

You may have a limited about of RAM on your machine or you have a ton of tabs open so as a result you could find Firefox using up a lot of RAM. You can limit this by going to about:config again (type into address bar)

In the filter field type “browser.cache” and select “browser.cache.disk.capacity”, by default it should be 50000, but you can lower it, try 15000 if you have between 512mb and 1Gb of RAM.

8. Reduce Firefox Ram Usage When You Minimize It

This little trick will move Firefox to the harddrive when you minimize it, freeing up buckets of RAM.

Again head 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.

9. Add Keywords To Your Bookmarks

By adding keywords to your bookmarks, you will be able to find them so much quicker, especially if you have a lot of them. Simply get into the habit of adding a keyword or two into the keyword field when saving bookmarks and it will stand to you in time. You can also add keywords to current bookmarks by right clicking on them and entering keywords in the appropriate field.

And that’s it, a great little list of tips and tricks for using Firefox, I’d love to hear of any more tricks you guys have because there’s no way I could possible cover every one of them, let me know in the comments and we’ll add them to the list