Speed up Firefox Website Rendering

Firefox is waiting 250ms for data before it starts rendering a website which works well for most connections. If you however have a fast connection you can speed up Firefox website rendering by decreasing the amount to 0. Users on slow connections might play around with the setting as well and increase it a little bit which would mean that they would have to wait a bit longer before the website is displayed.

To change the waiting time type about:config in your Firefox address bar and filter for the string nglayout.initialpaint.delay. This is not a default string which means that you usually have to create it. Right-click the white space somewhere and select New > Integer. Enter nglayout.initialpaint.delay and give it the value 0 if you are on a fast connection. The default value for this is 250.

The benefit is that Firefox will immediately start rendering the website even if it did not receive all the data yet. It could increase the total page loading time on slow connections if they would change the value to 0 as well.

Folders for your Temporary Bookmarks

When I first heard about the Read it Later extension I thought that this would be another extension that was not really needed. I use a system of temporary folders in my bookmarks toolbar and move website urls in there whenever I find an interesting article that I cannot read at the moment.

Instead of using just one Temp folder I have several temporary folders depending on the type of article. I sort them in the categories Webmaster, Tips, Tools and Temp for general content. All four are always visible in my bookmarks toolbar and it takes just the click of the mouse button to access those websites again or delete them once I finished taking a closer look at them.

There is no need for an extension that uses valuable RAM to do the same.

Different Cursors depending on link type

Links can open in a new page or new tab and it is never clear where they are actually opening until you click on them. I don’t like to open links in a new window because new Firefox windows consume more RAM than Firefox tabs. If I know that a link will open in a new window I tend to copy the link location instead, open a new blank tab and paste that link into the tabs address bar.

But, there is one way to make Firefox display if the link is opening in a new window or tab. It’s just three lines of CSS code that have to be added to the userContent.css file in the Firefox profile. The best way to find this file is to use the search function of your operating system.

Close Firefox, add the following lines of code to the end of the file and restart the browser afterwards to see if the changes have been successful. Links that open in a new window should be displayed with a crosshair cursor instead of the normal cursor.

Secure Firefox Cache with a Ramdisk

This is a quick useful tip that I found at the Ghacks Technology News website. Instead of using a hard drive to store the Firefox cache users could use a Ramdisk instead to speed things up and increase security at the same time. The two benefits of a Ramdisk are that its data will not be recoverable by normal means after rebooting or shutting down the computer and that it allows faster read and write processes because those are stored in RAM and not on the hard drive.

You need a software to create the Ramdisk, one amongst many is Ramdisk.sys which can be extracted to any location on your hard drive. You have to initialize the Ramdisk by clicking on Install Ramdisk. Select a size of RAM that you want to use for it afterwards (I suggest 25-50%) and pick a drive letter for it. The Ramdisk will be available after clicking on OK.

Fire up Firefox and use about:config in the address bar to open the Firefox configuration. Filter for the value browser.cache.disk.parent_directory, if it is not found create it by right-clicking and selecting New > String. The value has to be the path to the Ramdisk in the form drive letter:\\folder.

My Ramdisk has been installed as drive letter Z: and I have a temp folder in there called temp. My path looks like z:\\temp\\ therefor.

Two Firefox browser cache tweaks

Firefox is running fine for most users with the default settings. Advanced users however can tweak an immense amount of settings in Firefox to make it more effective and suitable for their special needs. This is one of the main reasons for creating this blog. I wanted to create a place where I could write about the tweaks and tips that work for me to let other Firefox users know about them and try them out for themselves.

Today I’m writing about two Firefox browser cache tweaks, one dealing with the memory cache and one with the hard drive cache. My partition on C with Windows XP has a size of only 10 Gigabytes which is not much. I did install Firefox on that drive as well and was looking for ways to store temporary files on a different drive.

The Firefox hard drive cache stores a lot of temporary files and i decided to move it to another hard drive. This was not the only reason though. I’m using an encrypted hard drive for all my temporary files and wanted to move the cache to that drive for privacy reasons as well.

Tweak the Firefox Auto Completion

Whenever you start writing text into the address bar Firefox tries to auto complete the text by comparing it with previously entered text. The default way of handling and comparing is not optimal and there are several ways to configure the settings to become more effective.

I did find three options that can be changed that make a difference. The first requires that links have to being with the phrase that you are typing, the second searches in normal text as well and the third option is the time that Firefox waits for new keystrokes before showing results.

You have to change them in the Firefox configuration file. Type about:config in the address bar and filter for the following phrases:

accessibility.typeaheadfind.startlinksonly Set this to true if your links have to start with the phrase that you are typing.

accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly Set this to false if you want to search in entered text as well

accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout Change that value which is the time in ms Firefox waits for new keystrokes before showing suggestions.

Move Firefox sidebar from left to right

I had a quick chat with a friend of mine lately and we ended up arguing whether the left or the right side would be the better position for the Firefox sidebar. While I did not really mind because I tend to disable the sidebar his opinion was that it would fit better on the right side because it would not interfere with the flow of the eye and website.

There is no “put sidebar on right side” button in Firefox but we can add some code to the beloved userChrome.css file to move it from the left side to the right.

Search for userChrome.css on your system and open it. Now scroll to the bottom of the file and add the following code to it. Restart Firefox after saving the changes and you will notice that the sidebar is now located on the right side whenever you display it.

How to use Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 on the same system

The beta of Firefox 3 is relatively stable and users are beginning to download and install it on their systems. The problem that they face then is that Firefox 3 accesses the profile of Firefox 2 which means that many add-ons will be deactivated in the process and are re-activated once Firefox 2 is started again.

There are two solutions to work with Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 on the same system. The first is to download and install the portable version of Firefox 3 which does not interfere with the settings of Firefox 2. This method is not complicated at all.

Some users however prefer to install the normal versions of Firefox 3 and Firefox 2. This is understandable as well. A post on the Codefront blog explains how this can be achieved without facing the difficulties of sharing a profile. The solution is to create a new profile for Firefox 3 and tell Firefox 3 to explicitly use that profile when running.

Remove main menu items in Firefox

You can use a quick CSS hack to remove unwanted – or unneeded -top menu items in Firefox to save space in the horizontal menu bar. I have been using only three of the seven available top level menus. The three that I’m using are the View, the Bookmarks and the Tools menu. I’ve never used the File, Edit, History or Help top level menu items.

You need to add some code to the file userChrome.css which is located in your Firefox profile folder. I suggest you search for the file because the path depends on your operating system.

Open userChrome.css in a text editor and add the following lines of code to it:

Change the Size of the Firefox Searchbar

The Firefox searchbar has a default size that can’t be changed in the options of Firefox. Many users however do not know that the searchbar can be altered using simple css code in the file userChrome.css. This file can be found in your Firefox profile folder. You can open it with any normal text editor.

Append the following code to the end of the file to change the default size of the Firefox searchbar. You might want to play around a bit with the number which means width in pixels. If you would add that code and restart Firefox afterwards the default size would increase to 400 pixels.