Firefox Tweak Guide

[Page 4] Firefox Settings

This section covers all the main Firefox settings which can be accessed under the Firefox options menus. Before you do any customization or tweaking of Firefox, you need to understand what all of these settings do, and make sure that they are configured correctly for your machine.

The main Firefox settings can be found by going to the Tools menu and selecting Options. Each section of the Options window is covered in detail below, with my recommendations where relevant:

Main

When Firefox starts: Whenever you launch Firefox, you can configure it to do one of the following: 'Show my home page' will load up the home page you set in the Home Page option (see below); 'Show a blank page' will simply start Firefox with a blank page; and the 'Show my windows and tabs from last time' option' will use Firefox's Session Restore feature to restore all your open browser windows/tabs to exactly the way they were when you last closed Firefox. Select the option you prefer, but obviously the more pages Firefox has to load and/or the more content-rich the pages are when starting up, the slower startup may be.

Home Page: If you've chosen the 'Show my home page' option under the When Firefox Starts setting (see above), you can set the home page which appears whenever you open up Firefox. You can either manually enter a web address in the Locations box; if you want to set the page you are currently viewing as the home page click the 'Use Current Page' button; or you can choose a page from your Bookmarks. You can set multiple homepages as well, each opening up in a separate tab when you launch Firefox or click the Home button - open the relevant pages as tabs, then click the 'Use Current Pages' button.

Downloads: When Firefox begins downloading a file using its built-in download manager, and the 'Show the Downloads window when downloading a file' box is ticked, you will see the Download Manager window appear. This is useful as it shows you the progress of the file download, and gives you the option of cancelling or pausing the download at any time - hence I recommend you tick this option. You can also tick the 'Close it when all downloads are finished' box so that when all downloads are completed the download manager box automatically disappears as well.

New to Firefox 3 The Download Manager has been significantly enhanced, see the 'Download Manager' area of the Features, Tips and Tricks section for full details.

Save Files To: Every time you choose to download a file from the Internet with Firefox, the download manager will save it to a particular location. You can either select to have Firefox 'Ask me where to save files' for each file, or as I recommend, select a fixed download folder under the 'Save all files to this folder' box. Note: I don't recommend saving files to Desktop, as this can increase Memory usage in Windows and increase startup times.

Add-ons: This section allows you to access the Add-ons Manager dialog box by clicking the 'Manage Add-ons button'. Add-ons provide a range of custom functionality to Firefox, and are an important feature.

New to Firefox 3 The Add-ons Manager has had a range of changes, see the 'Add-ons Manager' area of the Features, Tips and Tricks section for full details of its functionality, as well as the Add-Ons section of this guide for recommended Add-ons.

Tabs

New pages should be opened in: This setting essentially controls whether you use tabbed browsing or not. It comes into effect any time you launch a new web page, whether from within Firefox, or when clicking on a web link in an application, email or game. There are two simple options: selecting 'a new window' means that all new pages launched will open as a new window in a separate instance of Firefox; the 'a new tab' option means that if Firefox is already running, any new pages launched will open as a new tab within an existing instance of Firefox. I strongly recommend the 'a new tab' option to take advantage of tabbed browsing in Firefox, and prevent lots of instances of Firefox running, which minimizes resource usage. See also the browser.link.open_newwindow preference in the Advanced Tweaking section for more ways to alter this setting.

Warn me when closing multiple tabs: If ticked, this option raises a warning when you try to close a Firefox window containing multiple open tabs. If you're the forgetful type, or if you're used to seeing each page open in a separate window, you might want to tick this. Otherwise for most people I suggest unticking it for quicker closing of Firefox windows.

Warn me when opening multiple tabs might slow down Firefox: If ticked, Firefox will warn you if you are likely to cause slowdowns or problems in Firefox by launching too many tabs at once. For the most part this depends on how much memory your system has available. I suggest ticking it to begin with, as you shouldn't be warned unless you're truly getting to the point where there are too many tabs open and Firefox is using too much memory to remain responsive. At this point obviously the best option would be to close Firefox altogether and re-open it with fewer tabs.

Always show the tab bar: If ticked, this option forces the tab bar at the top of the Firefox viewable browser area to remain shown, even if only one page is currently open. If more than one tab is open, this option has no impact - the tab bar will be displayed anyway. I suggest you untick this option, as there is not much use for a tab bar if only one page is being displayed.

When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately: This option determines whether pages launched in a new tab are shown in the foreground or the background. When you open a new tab from a link on the current page, if this option is unticked any new tabs opened will be in the background, not affecting the tab you're currently viewing. If ticked, your view will automatically switch to the most recently opened tab, effectively forcing all other tabs to the background.

New to Firefox 3, when you have more tabs than can be displayed on one screen, you can now scroll smoothly between them by using the arrows which appear at either end of the tab bar.

Content

Block pop-up windows: This option should remain ticked, as it blocks 'popup' windows. Popups are separate browser windows or tabs which typically open up by themselves after you open a web page. They are most commonly used for advertising, and can vary in size and location on the screen, as well as frequency. However there are some sites which have legitimate popup windows (such as Internet Banking sites or Internet forums), and hence won't work correctly with this setting ticked. If you experience problems with such sites, click the 'Exceptions' button and enter the name of the site you want to allow popups for in the form www.sitename.com, then click the Allow button. Note that some spyware/adware resident on your PC can also launch browser popups, regardless of the site you visit, so make sure you scan your system for such malicious software (See the PC Security chapter of the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion for full details).

Note further that some popups are actually launched when you click on a particular field or area of a web page, and are specially designed to circumvent popup blocking. You can only block such popups if you disable Javascript for example, or change the privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins preference in the Advanced Tweaking section, or install a script-blocking extension like NoScript, covered in the Add-Ons section.

Load images automatically: I recommend you tick this option, as it allows images to be loaded with web pages. Since most web pages contain images, unticking this option would see all the sites you visit devoid of any imagery. If however you want to choose to disable or allow images specifically on a website-by-website basis, you can click the Exceptions button and manually select websites which you can then permanently Block or Allow images from separately. Just remember that many graphical advertisements are actually Flash files or scripts, and not simple images, and hence this setting doesn't affect them. See the Add-Ons and Advanced Tweaking sections of this guide for details of various methods you can use to block different types of ads.

Enable Javascript: Many sites use Javascript to produce certain effects, display certain information or allow a range of functionality. For example, YouTube requires that Javascript be enabled to view videos. For that reason I recommend you leave this option ticked, as many websites will not display or function correctly without it. Click the Advanced button to see the types of Javascript tricks which you can disable. Here you can disable the more annoying effects. For example, I personally have all the functions listed unticked - this means all websites display correctly however they can't try any fancy tricks like resizing windows on me or hiding my toolbars. If you want to be more selective about which sites you allow to run Javascript on, again see the NoScript extension in the Add-Ons section.

Enable Java: Java is a programming language which allows a range of functionality on websites. If this option is ticked, sites which require Java will usually prompt you to install the Java plugin if you don't already have it installed for Firefox. By default Firefox does not come with Java installed - this is because some people do not prefer their browsers to be Java-enabled. If you do want to install Java, then go here to download the latest version. Aside from downloading Java you have two other options: you can view the site with Internet Explorer which may already have MS Java Virtual Machine support built into it or previously installed by you; or you can simply ignore the requirement for Java and view the site "as is". You don't have to enable or install Java if you don't want to, as it is not vital, but it may reduce or impair functionality on certain sites.

Fonts & Colors: As part of customizing Firefox, you can select the fonts, colors and styles used for various elements of web pages displayed in Firefox. For example, if you want all Sans-serif text on web pages to be Arial, click the Advanced button then select that font under the 'Sans-serif' box. You can even set a minimum font size. You can also change the colors used for various text and links on web pages by clicking the Colors button.

The important thing to understand is that most web pages already specify their default fonts and the styles of various elements like hyperlinks, background and text colors, etc. Therefore changing the settings here will typically have no visible impact. If you want your selections here to override the default web page options you have to untick the relevant 'Allow pages to choose their own...' boxes in the Advanced and/or Colors sections. For example, in the Advanced section, alter the fonts and sizes as required, then untick the 'Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above' box, then click OK to close this screen, and OK again to close the options. Refresh the current web page you are viewing and it will have changed to reflect the font and color choices you have made. Clearly most web pages are designed around their own font and color settings and you shouldn't override them if you want to view them correctly. However with a bit of testing you may happen upon a better combination of fonts and colors which work with all websites to better suit your tastes and/or needs.

Languages: Some (not all) web pages offer different language versions which display by default when you view them. Add/Select which language you want pages to display with by default if they offer such an option. Remember that if you want a different language version of Firefox, for correct spell checking for example, you need to download and install the appropriate version to begin with - See The Basics section of this guide. You can also download different dictionary and language packs - see the Add-Ons section for details.

Applications

Content Type: The first time you click on certain types of files you will be asked how you want Firefox to handle such links in the future - i.e. whether you want Firefox to save them to disk, or open them, and if so, with which particular application. You may also be prompted to select whether you want your choice to become the default behavior for that particular file type. Your choices are stored in this section of the Options, and you can manually come here and adjust them at any time. All the main file types and protocols that your browser has accessed are listed under the 'Content Type' column, and when you select the relevant content type, the behavior in the Action column becomes a drop-down menu you can use to alter as you see fit.

In particular I recommend that you change the behavior for archival file formats such as .zip or .rar, and online document formats such as .pdf and .doc to 'Save File' here, as otherwise these file types will try to automatically open up within Firefox, which can be quite time consuming and may slow the browser down. Adobe PDF documents for example can take quite a while to load up if Firefox attempts to open them within the browser instead of saving them to disk. Also, make sure to set your default Save directory - found under the Main tab of the options - to somewhere other than the Desktop for memory usage reasons.

New to Firefox 3, the Applications section is entirely new and separate in the options now, and a range of web protocols like mailto have been added, so for example you can click on email links in web pages and set them to be opened up with something other than your default Windows email client (e.g. opened by Gmail or Yahoo Mail). The handling of RSS feeds can also be set here now, under the 'Web Feed' protocol.

The next page continues the Firefox Settings descriptions.