10 Firefox config settings
I spotted an interesting article over at Ghacks while reading through all the updated RSS feeds in Netvibes which was named 10 lesser known Firefox about:config parameters and I immediately thought that this would probably make a great article for Firefox Mastery as well.
Guess what, I did actually find two settings that I have not heard about yet and that would help me tremendously in my daily work. The first notable setting is the double-click behavior on words. Firefox marks a space behind the word as well by default and the setting made it possible that the space would not be marked as well. Not sure why anyone would want to mark the space as well..
The second change that I made determined how Firefox handled copy and paste operations into forms of text that consisted of more than one line. By default only the first line gets pasted in Windows while Linux pastes everything and I was able to change that behavior as well.
I decided to copy and paste all ten Firefox config settings for your convenience.
- plugin.expose_full_path – The default display for about:plugins mentions the name but not the path of the plugin. Setting this to True changes this behavior.
- accessibility.tabfocus – pressing tab on a website switches through various elements on that website. This setting defines which elements will be considered. 1=Forms, 2=other Elements and 4=Links. Elements can be combined, the default setting is 7 for instance which means that tab recognizes all elements. If you wanted it to only work with forms you would change it to 1.
- browser.chrome.favicons – displays those little icons next to the site url and in tabs by default. Changing this to false displays a standard icon for all websites.
- browser.download.manager.closeWhenDone – is by default set to false which means that the download manager will remain open even after the download finished. Setting this to false closes the window automatically.
- browser.download.manager.retention – Defines how Firefox handles finished downloads. The default value 2 means that Firefox will never clear the downloaded files list automatically. Settings this to 0 clears finished downloads automatically from the list while 1 clears them after restarting Firefox.
- browser.preferences.instantApply – Changing this setting to true will apply changes immediately without having to press OK.
- layout.spellcheckDefault – defines when the spell checker becomes active. By default it is only active in forms with at least two rows. Changing this setting to 2 enables it for all forms and setting it to 0 disables the spell checker.
- editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines – Defines how Firefox handles if a user pastes text that consists of more than one line. The default setting in Windows (1) pastes only the first line of text while everything will be pasted with carriage returns in Linux. (0). Other possibilities are (2) which replaces carriage returns with spaces, (3) which pastes everything in one line and (4) which replaces carriage returns with “,”.
- layout.word_select.eat_space_to_next_word – if you double-click a word in Firefox it will be marked automatically. The default marks a space behind the word as well. If you set this to false only the word will be selected and not the space behind.
- browser.fixup.alternate.suffix – Firefox tries to automatically add a suffix to the domain name entered if none has. So, entering www.mozilla would add .com to it because .com is the default suffix that will be added. You might prefer to add a country code like .fr or .de if you live in those countries. Simply change the setting to your country domain.
