Enable Save
Tabs on Exit for Firefox 4

Before I upgraded my laptop’s hard drive to SSD, I couldn’t
keep a lot of tabs open on Firefox because it takes up huge amount of memory
and slows down my laptop to a crawl. So what I normally do is note down the
interesting sites on a text file and will visit them again when I have the
time. Now with SSD drive, everything became so fast and I no longer need to
close the tabs. Every time I exit Firefox 3, I simply click on the Save and Quit button
when I am prompted “Do
you want Firefox to save your tabs for the next time it starts?”
The next time I launch Firefox 3, all tabs are automatically opened.

Firefox 4 final has just been released
and in fact I downloaded and installed it a day earlier because the setup
installer is already on Mozilla’s server. Updating from Firefox 3 to Firefox 4
is very easy. All you need to do is run the Firefox 4 installation file
(Firefox Setup 4.0.exe) and it will automatically upgrade as there is no need
to uninstall Firefox 3 first. After upgrading, I immediately noticed that
Firefox 4 no longer prompts to save the tabs on exit and it only warns me “You
are about to close X tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?” There
is only a checkbox to warn me when I attempt to close multiple tabs.

Fortunately the saving of tabs on quitting Firefox 4 hasn’t been removed and it
has been disabled by default. There is no need to use add-on or extension for
this feature. Not sure why the Firefox developers decided on this but here is
how to enable saving of tabs when closing Firefox.

1. Type about:config
at the address bar and hit enter.

2. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button

3. At the filter bar, type browser.showQuitWarning
and hit enter.

4. You can either double click on it to change the value from false to true,
or right click on it and select Toggle.

This change takes effect immediately without restarting Firefox. Now try closing
Firefox 4 with multiple tabs opened and you’ll be prompted to save the tabs.

Quick Tip:
Open Firefox Searches in New Tab

The default action for searching with the Firefox toolbar is to open the
search in the current tab. This drives me crazy, but thankfully it’s easy to
fix.

New Search Tab with Hotkey

Just search using Alt+Enter instead of hitting the normal Enter key. This
will work even if the default is still the current tab.

New Search Tab by Default

Type about:config into the address bar, and then put the following
into the filter box:

browser.search.openintab

Double-click the value to change it to true.

Electrolysis

Starting with FF48, the browser began sporting a feature similar to that of
Chrome. Now each tab gets its own process. For Firefox, this is called
Electrolysis and it's impressive.

By default Electrolysis is disabled. To enable it, you have to do the
following:

Open Firefox

Enter about:config
in the address bar

Set browser.tabs.remote.autostart
to true

Set extensions.e10sBlockedByAddons
to false

Set extensions.e10sBlocksEnabling
to false

Restart Firefox

Once you've done that, you should notice a significant increase in
performance (in both startup and page rendering), as well as stability and
security. According to the developers, the page rendering gains for
Electrolysis-enabled releases of Firefox could exceed over 700%. I have not
officially benchmarked the gains, but real-world testing does clearly show that
when Electrolysis is enabled, page rendering is not only seriously faster, it's
also much smoother.

10
handy Firefox about:config
hacks

Date: May 7th, 2009

Author: Jack Wallen

Unless
you’re a Firefox power user, you may not be familiar with the about:config page. The Firefox about:config page is not so much a
page as it is a somewhat hidden configuration section. It’s hidden because it’s
fairly powerful and not nearly as simple to use as the standard Preferences
window. In the about:config
page, you have to know what you are doing or you can mess things up a bit. In
fact, when you attempt to go to that page for the first time, you have to
accept an agreement (which is really just a warning) before you can continue.

How
this page works is simple. You reach the page by entering about:config in the address bar. There are entries
(one per line) that handle various types of configurations. Each entry has a
searchable keyword. The entries can be of Boolean, integer, or string value.
Entries contain Name, Status, Type, and Value. Typically, you will be modifying
only the Value, by double-clicking on it and making the change. With all of
that in mind, let’s take a look at 10 of the best ways you can “hack” the about:config page.

Tip

If
Firefox is fubar’d because you accidentally
misconfigured about:config,
you can fix it in one of two ways:

Make a backup of your prefs.js file before you start
editing. Then, if something goes wrong, you can restore it by copying it
over the corrupt file.

If you can’t restore via a backup prefs.js file, you
can exit Firefox and issue the command firefox
-safe-mode to bring up the Firefox Safe Mode screen. Then, just select
Reset All User Preferences To Firefox Defaults.
Note: This will restore all user preferences to their default values.

1: Speed up Firefox

This
hack requires a few steps. Search for pipelining in the filter and you
should see:

network.http.pipelining: Change this to true.

network.http.proxy.pipelining: Change this to true.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: Change this to
8.

Now
search for max-connections and you should see:

network.http.max-connections: Change this to 96.

network.http.max-connections-per-server: Change this to 32.

2: Disable antivirus scanning

This
is only for the Windows version. If you’re downloading large files, this
scanning can seriously slow things down. And since you will most likely scan
the downloaded file anyway, you’ll probably want to disable this. Of course, if
you are uber paranoid (not a bad trait for
computing), you might want to leave this entry alone.

To
disable antivirus scanning, search for scanWhenDone
and you should see:

browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone: Change this to false.

3: Open Javascript popups as
tabs

If
a popup window lacks the features of a browser window, Firefox will handle it
like a popup. If you would prefer to open all windows, including popups, as new
tabs, you need to tell Firefox in about:config.
Search for newwindow and you will see three
entries. Of those three entries, you will want to modify:

browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction: Change this
to 0.

4: Spell checking in all fields

By
default, Firefox checks spelling only in multiple-line text boxes. You can set
it to check spelling in all text boxes. Search for spellcheckdefault
and you should see:

layout.spellcheckDefault: Change this to 2.

5: Open search bar results in new tab

When
you use the search bar, the results display in the current tab. This can be a
nuisance because you will navigate out of the page you are currently in. To
make sure Firefox always opens search results in a new tab, search for openintab and you should see:

browser.search.openintab: Change this to true.

6: Auto export bookmarks

In
Firefox 3, bookmarks are automatically saved and exported for you. The only
problem is that by default, they’re saved as places.sqlite
instead of the more convenient bookmarks.html. To change this setting so that
they can be easily re-imported, search for autoExportHTML
and you should see:

browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML: Change this to
true.

7: Disable extension install delay

One
of the few gripes I have with Firefox is the silly countdown you must endure
every time you want to install an extension. Fortunately, this can be disabled.
Search for enable_delay and you should see:

security.dialog_enable_delay: Change this to 0.

8: View source code in an external editor

When
you need to view the source of a page, it opens up in browser popup. Most
developers would probably like to have that opened in their favorite editor
instead of having to cut and paset. To do this, there
are two entries to modify. Search for view_source.editor
and you will see:

view_source.editor.external: Change this to true.

view_source.editor.path: Change this to the explicit
path to your editor of choice.

9: Get more add-on search results

When
you do a search in the Add-on window, you’ll see just five results. You might
find it more efficient to increase this number. Search for getAddons
and you should see:

extension.getAddons.maxResults: Change this to 10
(or higher, if you want to see even more).

10: Redefine the Backspace button

Did
you know you can configure Firefox to use the backspace button to either go back
a page or go up a page? This keeps power users from having to go back and forth
from the keyboard to the mouse. Search for backspace and you will see:

browser.backspace_action: Change this to 0 for
previous page and 1 for page up.