Dan Herbert's

Firefox 3 has been out for about 2 weeks now. I’ve been using it since alpha releases, but so many things have changed and so little has been said about a lot of the new features until recently, that I finally just got the browser tweaked the way I like it.

Firefox 3 comes with a lot of new features that really make it a big step over the last version and make it competitive with the other competition (I’m still waiting for Internet Explorer to become competitive). I believe it is the best you can get as far as browsers go. It’s faster and more efficient, which has been proven by several studies. It’s got an awesome bar (love it or hate it) and an improved bookmarks system, and you can set up protocol handlers so that if you use gmail, Yahoo! mail, or another online web service for things, you can set them up as the default application (I set up firefox to use gmail for mailto: links). I really like it.

Although I love firefox 3, there are a few things that I had to tweak to get it the way I like it. Obviously I had to install a few plugins to make development much easier, along with the usual plugins like adblock plus. Besides my favorite plugins, there were just a few things I did to make firefox fit even more snugly.

about:config settings

Firefox has a page you can browse to known as “about:config” which holds settings that are user-configurable. There are just 2 settings I had to change in my config. To get there, just type “about:config”. You should get a cute little disclaimer telling you to be careful. Promise to be careful and read on:

• Enable Piplining: Web sites these days have dozens of individual files that need to be downloaded from their server before a single page can be displayed. Most browsers get these files 1 or 2 at a time. With a modern broadband connection, you can configure firefox to get all of these files in parallel, speeding up your browsing experience. To configure firefox, in your about:config search for the key “pipelining”. There is a key that ends in “maxrequests,” set its value to 30. Then set all of the other keys you see on the page to true so that it is enabled. Now your browsing experience should be much faster if you’re on broadband.
• Don’t eat the space to the right: This is just one of those minor nuisances for me. The key “layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word” causes the space next to a word to be selected when you double click on a word. I guess for most people, this setting is fine by default, but as a programmer, sometimes I only want to copy a single word and only that word. Set this to false to only select the word itself.

userChrome.css Configuration

The new Awesome Bar is great, but it has a few little things that bug me. It’s OK though because they are easily fixed thanks to the fact that Firefox’s UI is created using the awesome XUL (XML User Interface Language). Since the layout is generated using XML, this means that CSS can be can be used to alter things in the interface. All you have to do is add a userChrome.css file to your firefox profile.

To locate your firefox profile, read this: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles#How_to_find_your_profile

Inside your profile folder, open the “Chrome” folder. Look for a file called “userChrome.css” If the file doesn’t exist, you’ll need to create it. If you’re having trouble finding it, make sure you have your operating system set to show hidden files, and make sure if you’re running Windows, you have it set to “Show extensions for known filetypes”

There are just 2 things that bugged me about the Firefox 3 address bar:

1. The lack of yellow in the address bar for HTTPS sites. I found the bug report on Mozilla’s bugzilla site that explains why they did this if you’re curious. Firefox 3 took out the yellow and decided to just make the favicon for the site have a blue background. I want visible notification that I’m on a secure site!
2. The removal of the “Go” button. This is useless for most people, however as a web developer this button is needed as I have to “Go” to the same exact pages about 40 times in one day and refreshing the page isn’t always enough when you’re developing in ASP.NET. Sometimes, you need to click the “Go” button in web development.

To overcome these problems you just need to add the following to your userChrome.css file (you will need to create the file if it doesn’t exist) Comments (stuff between /* and */) explain what each line does, so if you don’t like the setting you can easily take it out or change it if you know what you’re doing.

/* Show the GO button */
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #go-button {
visibility: visible !important;
-moz-opacity: 0.35 !important;
}
#urlbar > #urlbar-icons > #go-button:hover {
visibility: visible !important;
-moz-opacity: 1.0 !important;
}

/* highlight HTTPS URLs (works on Mac too, if a bit messier there) */
#urlbar[level]  > * {
background-color: #FFFFB7 !important;
}