Get Firefox Now

Are you ready to infiltrate society and spread Firefox one sticker at a time? Operation Firefox is currently recruiting agents to place huge 3.5’ Firefox stickers where the world will see them. In addition to worldwide notoriety, you might wind up with a new MacBook Pro or a Nintendo Wii.

Operation Firefox began last summer as a project initiated by the Mozilla Marketing interns. We had seen what the Mozilla community produced before, including the New York Times ad, the Firefox crop circle, and the Firefox Flicks contest, and decided to step up to the challenge and create another opportunity for Mozilla fans to show off their creativity.

This newest campaign puts 3.5 foot Firefox stickers in the hands of our community and looks for creative new ways to share Firefox with the world. Ultimately, our goal is to get 50 great photos of the Firefox logo in situations that promote some of the defining characteristics of the Web browser–performance, security, customization, and community.

The contest is two-tiered: first, we’re putting out a call for the 50 best “placements” for these stickers (due November 9th). Then, the most creative agents will receive a fathead sticker to complete their mission: take a photograph and submit before December 3rd. All 50 photos will be displayed on the Operation Firefox website, but the four best ones will receive a new MacBook Pro or Nintendo Wii.

Do you think you have what it takes to be an Operation Firefox agent? To learn more about the contest and how to participate, visit www.operationfirefox.com.

There has been a lot of news flying around and I have simply not had the time to write about it, the last couple of days have been very busy, expect a flurry of articles in the coming days. Now lets explore the wonder that is known as Firefox.

Over the last few months I have noticed people complaining about Firefox and the memory ‘leaks’ and how much memory Firefox hordes for itself. I guess for some people the 40-60Mb of ram that Firefox is sitting on is expensive, but for me, Firefox doesn’t get close to touching my gig of ram, but for those performance nuts that like to do SuperPI runs while browsing the internet, this guide is for you. I have spent days and days (edit: hours) scouring the internet for all the tweaks, hacks, hax, plug-ins, extensions, and tricks that let you eke out every bit of performance and efficiency from Firefox. First off, the hacks.

Minimize Hack

The first hack that I have here is the popular Firefox Minimize Hack that has recently flashed through the internet. The purpose of this hack tries to keep Firefox from eating up your physical RAM and instead puts the burden on your hard drive, or at least that is the general reason behind it. To implement this hack, perform the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the pop-up window, type in “config.trim_on_minimize” without quotes and hit enter.
4. In the next pop-up window, select True and hit enter.
5. Restart your browser


With that done, open up a bunch of tabs and monitor the memory usage. In my first run without this hack, Firefox was using 137.8 Mb of Ram. With all 30 tabs open again, Firefox was using 118.4 Mb, but when minimized this dropped to an astounding 4 Mb. However, this was too good to be true, I left Firefox minimized and came back 12 minutes later and the memory use had slowly creeped up to 42.4 Mb. While this was 10 times larger than the initial 4.2 Mb, I was still saving about 75 Mb. One note about this, the memory was still very slowly creeping up by about 1 Mb per minute, maybe more or less per minute, but either way it was still creeping. I would have liked to test to see if it would creep up to the original 118.4 Mb but that would have required more than an hour and I am impatient. Another note, when I had Firefox maximized it was using 66 Mb with Flickr.com as the main tab, but 119 Mb when I quickly browsed through all my tabs and then quickly retreated back down to 66 Mb. I don’t know what causes this, but either way, for the most time it was using 66 Mb. The verdict: useful and free with no downloads.

Back Button Hack

The next hack deals with Firefox’s Cache. Whenever you jump around the Internet, Firefox caches your previous pages to make your internet browsing blazing fast. However this causes Firefox to consume memory that you may not ever need to use. To implement this hack, perform the following the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers” and instead of the -1 setting, change it to 0 and hit Enter.

3. Restart your browser.


Before using this hack I went to Cnn.com and entered 10 different articles but never touched the back button, just using links. Upon the 10th article, Firefox was using 41Mb. I performed the hack and performed the same step by visiting the same sites with a cleared Cache, and memory usage was down to 33.7 Mb. This value never changed even after a few minutes left idle on the final page. Verdict: not a large saving with a slight decrease in browser rendering speed, worth it if you are ram limited.

Network Hack

This next group of hacks all relate to the network.http group in about:config. Basically these various options open up your network connection to Firefox, permitting it to access information online as quickly as your connection will permit you. Since the majority of my readers utilize broadband connections, this will benefit you, 56k you are tough out of luck, sorry. To implement these hacks, perform the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2a. Find the entry called “network.http.pipelining” and set it to “true”.

2b. Find the entry called “network.http.proxy.pipelining” and set it to “true”.
2c. Find the entry called “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and set it to 16-32, but beware, if set too high you may risk banning yourself from various servers by being mistaken for a DoS attack.
3. Restart your browser.

Even though I am sitting on Georgia Tech’s campus with a blazing fast 100Mbit connection, it seems like with these options enabled, webpages load faster, pictures in particular. When I went to Flickr.com and started clicking around, all the pictures loaded at one time unlike how it used to load a picture at a time. Either Flickr enabled a quick optimization between me closing and opening Firefox, or this trick works. Either way, it hasn’t hurt my connection at all. Verdict: Causes pictures to load very fast, but I do see an increase in network activity, more spikes than constant travel with each pageload.

Cache Hack

This next hack deals with the memory Firefox uses as cache. In the default setting, Firefox will adjust the cache size to fit however many pages you have open. While this is useful, if you tend to only have a few pages open at a time, you can manually reduce the setting to a specified amount at the cost of reducing performance when Firefox runs out of cache. To implement this hack, follow these steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Integer.
3. In the pop-up window, type in “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. In the following pop-up window, specify how many Kb of ram you want to dedicate to the cache, I selected 32768(32Mb). I suggest a number between 16Mb and 64Mb, anything lower and performance will suffer, anything higher is excessive. Here you should experiment, or don’t bother if it worries you.
4. Restart your browser


I don’t know how much this helps or hurts performance, so far with 32Mb enabled I have yet to see a major difference, memory use dropped from 42Mb to 39Mb with the same pages open, but I don’t think this hack is what did that. Verdict: not sure if it is useful at all.

Download Manager Hacks

This next group of hacks deal with the download manager in Firefox. For those of you that don’t use the Firefox download manager, skip this section. I don’t know about you, but I personally hate the download manager, it is annoying and generally a distraction when it pops up with its messages and warning, so, let�s do away with it. Follow these steps to tweak/destroy your manager.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter.
2. Take your pick of the following attributes to modify.
3a. browser.download.manager.showAlertInterval at default shows the alert message for 2000 milliseconds or 2 seconds. I personally set it to 500 milliseconds; all I need is a quick blurb telling me my download is done.
3b. browser.download.manager.openDelay at default opens up the download manager immediately, which can be a big pain if you are downloading 10Kb files to your desktop, you don’t need that annoying manager to pop up. I have this guy set on 30,000 milliseconds or 30 seconds. If a file is larger than 30 seconds of download time, I might want to watch its progress.
3c. browser.download.manager.closeWhenDone at default is set to false so that your manager doesn’t close itself. I set it to true just to get this thing out of the way the moment it is done, I like to watch progress, but I don’t need to waste space or the time to close it.

3d. browser.download.manager.flashCount at default flashes the download manager icon in your taskbar for 2 seconds, I prefer zero seconds to reduce annoyance, adjust to your preference.
4. Restart your browser.


These hacks are just my personal preference, you may like it just the way it is, or you may want to do more. Browse through the about:config and you’ll find tons of stuff to tweak. Verdict: personal preference, doesn’t increase performance, maybe productivity.

This last hack is less of a hack and more of a good habit you should pick up. I tend to clear my cache and download list at least once a week, sometimes more often. This will usually increase performance and it will also update all content, but on a slow connection this could hurt your performance, especially if you have pictures loaded in your cache that don’t change. Do this at your own digression.

Extensions

Extensions are what make Firefox great, you can customize to your hearts content by adding extensions. The following list are the extensions that I use.

Fission

This extension places a page status bar over the address bar which creates a cool effect and also lets you know how much of the page is left to download. Useful for slower connections and just plain cool.

Reveal

This is definitely the coolest extension I have seen. You know that cool thing that OSX does that lets you view all your currently open programs in little thumbnails? Well this does the same thing, but for your tabs! When I am writing an article, coding CS, or doing something else that requires lots of back and forth movement, this saves me a lot of time from having to ctrl-tab or click on tabs. To get to know reveal, take the quick 30 second tutorial that prompts you upon restart. I highly recommend this extension.

TabX

TabX is another great productivity increaser. I know whenever I have more than 2 tabs open and I am trying to select the last guy or close a tab, I mistakenly close the tab instead of click on the correct tab, causing me to close an incorrect tab. With TabX each tab gets an individual X which works when you have fewer than 10 or so tabs. Once you get to about 15 tabs, the X’s take up too much space, so use this at your own digression, I find it useful.

Gmail Space

Who likes free online storage? I do and I’m sure you do too. This extension turns those 2+GB that Google has given to each of their users into 2GB of online storage. I find this as a great way to transfer files between computers with no need for a jump drives. While I don’t know how secure this extension is, I find it nice when I don’t want to carry a jump drive around, but nothing beats having a FTP server.

IE Tab

This causes Firefox to render a page with an embedded Internet Explorer within your Firefox window. I use this specific extension whenever a page renders terribly in Firefox. I wish they made an extension for Safari that would let you guys render my page in Firefox, sorry! Very useful when a page loads terribly. Be warned though, IEtab has a known memory leak but they are working on fixing it.

Tab Mix Plus

This extension was called in by Stu and it offers even more features than TabX and Fission. It puts “x” buttons on every tab, shows a loading status bar on each tab, lets you manipulate you add various properties to your tags, and the title goes red if the page has loaded and you haven’t checked up on it since it loaded. There are a bunch of featurs in Tab Mix Plus and if TabX isn’t enough for you, grab Tab Mix Plus.

Fasterfox

Some people on Digg.com mentioned this extension, which I have used before. Fasterfox lets you tweak everything I mentioned in the networking about:config and a few other options. I originally didn’t include Fasterfox because it tweaks a few things that could possibly slow down Firefox, such as the initial paint delay. On a side note, some admins on various servers started banning the Fasterfox prefetch routine and some have gone to the extent of IP banning, so be careful with what you install.

Webdeveloper

I haven’t had much time to play with this extension, but this is one powerful extension if you run your own website. I know whenever I am working on my CSS whenever I want to change some stuff up, I tend to just edit the CSS sheet and you guys take a hit whenever I screw it up, but no more! Web Developer lets you edit the CSS on the fly and you get to see the changes you make in real-time, meaning no more screw ups. Check it out if you edit lots of CSS or want to simplify your life.

Hyperwords

Do you feel unproductive in the time it takes to mouse over to the Google search bar and search for a word that is displayed on the website you are currently viewing? Hyperwords is here to save you those additional precious seconds normally wasted by pulling up Google or using the search bar. Check it out if you want a quick way to search for words and definitions, handy if you are constantly searching for stuff.

Took some time and added two more extensions, I personally don’t use Hyperwords, but web developer is something I higly reccomend. Firefox 1.5.0.2 just released and I am finding it to be buggy in windows XP, but that could just be my overclocked processor being a pain. There is a new alpha version of Firefox out that supposedly renders faster and loads faster but I am not risking using an alpha program, I have corrupted XP twice in 5 days, don’t want to go for a third, use at your own risk. Firefox Alpha version can be found here. That wraps it up, I will update this article if anything else catches my eye, thanks for reading.

If you enjoyed this, please Digg me here.

In honor of the Firefox 2.0 release yesterday, today we’ll dive deep into the bowels of the fox’s config with a handful of my favorite Firefox 2 (and older) tweaks.

How to modify Firefox’s configuration (about:config)

All this “advanced config” talk got you worried? Fear not, my friend. Here’s the deal: Firefox’s configuration is a long list of keys and values. To view this list, type about:config into the Firefox address bar. Then, enter the name of the key you want to update in the “Filter” field. The list will narrow to only the entries that match your keyword as you type, as shown.

(The key, of course, is knowing the key. More on that below.) To modify the value of a key, double-click on the value field and update the entry. To see your changes, restart your browser. Easy as pie.

Got it? Good. Let’s get to tweaking.

Session restore

Fx 2.0 only: As a blogger and web mail user, it breaks my heart to recount how many times I’ve composed a long post or email message, then accidentally closed the tab or browser and lost all my work. No more! With Firefox 2, set the browser.startup.page key to 3 to restore your browsing session - with form entries intact! - every time you start your browser or undo close tab after a wayward click. Note: By default, Firefox 2 automatically restores your session if your browser crashes - but this does it every time you restart your browser normally. Thanks for the tip, Arun!

• Key: browser.startup.page
• Modified Value: 3
• Default: 1 (open your specified homepages)

Update: Ryan points out that doing it this way is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. To do it the normal person way, from the Tools menu choose Options, and in the Main area, select “Show my windows and tabs from last time” from the “When Firefox starts” dropdown. D’oh! Thanks Ryan!

Tab width before scrolling kicks in

Fx 2.0 only: The biggest interface changes in Firefox 2 involve tabbed browsing. Power surfers who open more than a dozen tabs will notice that Firefox 2 minimizes tabs to a certain width, then sets the excess to scroll off the tab bar with left and right arrows. As someone who often has more than a dozen tabs open, not being able to see them all made me crazy. One solution is to reduce the minimum tab width so that more tabs fit in the bar before the scroll kicks in. The default is 100 pixels; I found that 75 worked better for me - page titles were still readable, but more tabs could fit. Compare 100 width, which fits 7 tabs across at this size (click to enlarge):

To 75, which fits 10 across at this size (click to enlarge):

To disable tab scrolling entirely, set the value to 0.

• Key: browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
• Modified Value: 75 (fit in more tabs before overflow enables scroll)
• Alternate Modified Value: 0 (disable scroll entirely)
• Default: 100

Tab close buttons

Fx 2.0 only: Another tab interface change in Firefox 2 is the addition of a close button on each individual tab. I happen to love this, but some hate it, saying it causes them to accidentally close a tab when just trying to switch to it. If you’re a hater, revert to the Firefox 1.5 behavior by changing the browser.tabs.closeButtons value to 3. This will not display close tabs on individual tabs, and turn on a single close tab button at the right end of the tab bar.

• Key: browser.tabs.closeButtons
• Modified Value: 3 (revert to Firefox 1.5 behavior)
• Alternate Modified Value: 2 (don’t display any close tab buttons)
• Default: 1 (display close buttons on all tabs)

Fetch only what you click

Fx .6 and up: Firefox has this wacky little feature that downloads pages from links it thinks you may click on pages you view, like the top result on a page of Google results. This means you use up bandwidth and CPU cycles and store history for web pages you may not have ever viewed. Creepy, eh? To stop that madness, set the network.prefetch-next key to false.

• Key: network.prefetch-next
• Modified Value: false

Limit RAM usage

All versions: Goodness knows I’ve done a good amount of belly-aching about Firefox’s voracious appetite for RAM. (It’s consistently the most memory-intensive process on both my PC and Mac.) Happily a simple config tweak got Mem Use right back down to a more comfortable number. Along with the previous prefetch mod, set your browser.cache.disk.capacity browser.cache.memory.capacity to a value that fits your total RAM.

• Key: browser.cache.memory.capacity
• Modified Value: Depends on your system’s total memory. According to Computerworld:
  

  For RAM sizes between 512BM and 1GB, start with 15000. For RAM sizes between 128MB and 512M, try 5000.

Turn off chrome tooltips

All versions: I have an irritating Firefox problem on my Mac. When I try to drag a bookmark into one of my bookmark toolbar folders, the tool tip gets in the way and prevents the drop from working. Argh! Like you, I already know what all the buttons on my browser chrome do, so the tool tips aren’t necessary. To turn them off, set the browser.chrome.toolbar_tips key value to false. Bonus is, it solved my Mac’s bookmark drag and drop problem.

• Key: browser.chrome.toolbar_tips
• Modified Value: false

Lastly, though 2.0’s default value is a lot more reasonable than 1.5’s, you can use about:config to put off that annoying Unresponsive Script dialog on Javascript-heavy web pages.

Update: From the comments, a few more good about:config tweaks:

• layout.spellcheckDefault = 2 turns on Firefox 2’s spell-checking in input fields as well as textareas. (That means no more typos in Lifehacker post headlines!)
• browser.urlbar.hideGoButton=true turns off the rarely-used Go button at the end of the address bar, for more room to see long URLs. Thanks, sister-ray!

See the MozillaZine about:config wiki page for the exhaustive list of Firefox preferences keys, their possible values and effects.

A lot of people complain about the Firefox “memory leak(s)”. All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.

What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

For those who remain concerned, here’s how the feature works. Firefox has a preference browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers which by default is set to -1. When set to this value, Firefox calculates the amount of memory in the system, according to this breakdown:

(reference: nsSHistory.cpp)

No more than 8 pages are ever cached in this fashion, by default. If you set this preference to another value, e.g. 25, 25 pages will be cached. You can set it to 0 to disable the feature, but your page load performance will suffer.

Edit: In the comments, Boris and David pointed out that I misread the code, and that this is a global preference so that there are no more than 8 cached pages for the entire session, not per tab. My initial posting had claimed that it was per-tab. Oops!

Firefox Beta 3 has been released some days ago, I have installed it and made a little comparison with Firefox 2.0 to see some of the changes.

Here I am comparing them with screen shots, side by side when that is possible, because there are some features in 3 that are not present in 2.

Zooming

When you zoom with firefox 2 you can only zoom the text and not the images, but now with Firefox 3 the images are also zoomed, so you can zoom a page with text and images, or only images pages.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

Bookmarking

One of the biggest changes on Firefox 3 is the way it manage bookmarks, and its interface also changed.

Firefox 2

Firefox 3

Check out that now, it s possible to use tags, what I have tried was to import my delicious directly to Firefox, to my concern tags were not imported, maybe a mistake considering how many people are using delicious out there.

By the way, and talking about delicious there is not yet a plugin for it, by the time I am writing this post, there is one for stumbleupon just released yesterday.

Other changes to bookmarking includes the stars, now as soon as you start typing the address you want to visit and when the visited (suggested) URIs appear you can easily check which one is already on your bookmarks, because of the star near to the URI.

Firefox 3

And once you are visiting a page, if you do not want to use the shortcut Ctrl+D, you can just click on the star near to the URI, and a dialog box will be displayed so you can easily add that page to your bookmarks.

Firefox 3

Places

This is something new in Firefox 3, that does not even exist in Firefox 2, it is a menu located upper left and as you can see, it helps you navigate in your “favorite” pages, the most visited, the most used tags, the recently visited, etc.

Firefox 3

Password Manager

The dialog box offering to remember your passwords now appears located in other position it certainly looks better, but I do miss the “not now” option, don’t you?

Update: Thanks for all of you that made me find it (sorry)

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Add-ons

The add-ons dialog box (Tools-Add-ons) now has another option, which is Plugins, where you can manage the plugins installed on your Firefox, really a good addition.

Firefox 3

Firefox 2

Page Info

The page info dialog box (Tools->Page Info, or Ctrl+I) now has a real good option which is RSS discover, so you can easily find the rss links on the page to subscribe to it.

Firefox 3

Firefox 2