Firefox tips and triks 3.

Other Tips

View web pages in your preferred language (if available)

Some web sites offer content in multiple languages. You can choose several languages in Firefox and they will be treated in order of priority. In order to change the priority, just go to Tools > Options... > Advanced, select the General tab, and under Languages, click the Choose... button.

Run Firefox from removable media

This advanced tip makes it possible to run Firefox from removable media, such as a USB memory stick. This will allow you to run Firefox with your personal settings from any computer, even those that don't have Firefox installed. It has only been tested on Windows XP/2000. The basic instructions are as follows:

1. Copy the Firefox application folder and your profile folder to the removable medium. In this example we will use R:\Firefox for the application folder and R:\FFProfile as the profile folder, assuming the drive letter for the removable media is R:.
2. Create a simple batch file called R:\Firefox.bat with the following line:

   start \Firefox\firefox.exe -profile \FFProfile
   

3. Optionally, disable the disk cache to reduce the amounts of file writes to the removable storage by using about:config to set browser.cache.disk.enable to false.

The reason why a batch file is needed instead of a simple shortcut is that a shortcut uses absolute paths, and since the actual drive letter for the removable media may change depending on which computer it is plugged into, the relative path used in the batch file is guaranteed to work anywhere.

Select and copy individual table cells

While holding down the Ctrl key, you can select table cells. Just click on any non-link portion of the cell. You can select multiple cells, either by clicking individually on the cells you want to select or by just dragging with the mouse. Once selected, you can use Copy and Paste just like you would on a text selection.

Speed up page rendering

By default, Firefox doesn't try to render a web page for 250 milliseconds while it's waiting for data. If you use about:config to add the Integer preference nglayout.initialpaint.delay, and set the value to 0, Firefox immediately starts to display the page, even without complete data. The drawback, especially on slower machines, is that the total time to display the page will be longer.

Enable Pipelining

Pipelining is an experimental feature, designed to improve page-load performance, that is unfortunately not well supported by some web servers and proxies. To try it out, by using about:config to set the following preferences:

network.http.pipelining

Set this to true, to enable pipelining.

network.http.proxy.pipelining

Set this to true, to enable pipelining to the proxy server.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Set this to 8, to have a maximum of 8 pipelining requests at once. Possible values are from 1 to 8.

For more information about pipelining, read the HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ.

Specify where to store the cache

To specify in which folder the cache is stored, use about:config to add the String preference browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, and set the value to C:\Path To Cache.

Replace Path To Cache with the actual path to your cache folder.

Specify the memory cache usage

Normally, Firefox determines the memory cache usage dynamically based on the amount of available memory. To specify a specific amount of memory cache, use about:config to add the Intefer preference browser.cache.memory.capacity, and set the value:

-1

(default) Determine the amount of memory cache dynamically.

0

None.

n

Memory capacity in kilobytes. For example: 4096.

To disable the memory cache completely, use about:config to set the preference browser.cache.memory.enable to false.

View page source using an external program

If you want to view the HTML source of a web page using an external text editor instead of the built-in source viewer in Firefox, use about:config to set view_source.editor.external to true, and then set view_source.editor.path to e.g. C:\Windows\Notepad.exe or whatever is your preferred text editor.