Firefox 2.0 Tips

Okie dokie. I figured, since Firefox 2.0 was released a few days ago, we should start a topic to review and give feedback on the new browser.


(from curtiss on the HTMLCenter forums…)

My thoughts:

  • The browser is slightly faster, so that’s a good thing.
  • According to the reports I’ve seen online, they’ve done a lot of work fixing memory leaks, but I never really experienced too many noticeable problems with those anyway, so I don’t know about that personally.
  • Quite a few of the features I need are now built in, so that’s a good thing
  • The default set up of the browser leaves a lot to be desired, but it seems that you can somewhat easily customize it to make it work the way you want

For those of you that haven’t tried it, yet, or those of you that are still trying to figure out some annoyances that are built into the browser by default, here are some suggestions:

  • Direct your browser to about:config
  • Find ui.key.chromeAccess and set it to 5 (this will set your menus accessible by pressing Alt+Shift, instead of just Alt)
  • Find ui.key.contentAccess and set it to 4 (this will make your keyboard shortcuts work again, like using Alt+S to submit a forum post – basically, this sets hotkeys to be accessible by using Alt – the default is setup for you to use Alt+Shift to access your hotkeys).
  • Find browser.tabs.closeButtons and set it one of the following:
    • 0 will make the little red X show up only on the active tab
    • 1 will make the little red X show up on all of your tabs (which is the default setting)
    • 2 will make the little red X go away altogether (which means that you’ll have to middle-click a tab in order to close it)
    • 3 will make the little red X show up in the far right corner, just the way it did in previous versions of Firefox
  • If your extensions didn’t get updated properly, you will want to start out by searching for those same extensions at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/ Some older versions of extensions (like Flashblock) will not be automatically updated, and will show that they are not compatible with Firefox 2.0. However, a new version that is compatible can be found at the Firefox web site.
  • If you still can’t find compatible extensions, try going to http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave…irefox/nightly and downloading that. That will force old versions of extensions to install on Firefox 2.0, and, in a lot of cases will make those extensions work properly.
  • If you miss your Email icon, you should be able to do one of the following:
    • Right-click on the tool bar and go customize. you can then drag icons onto the new window. Then once its in Firefox you can drag it to where you want it to appear on the tool bar.
    • You can install this extension to get it back.

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2 Responses

  • Oops. I forgot one of the other new features found in Firefox 2.0.

    Firefox now has a built-in spell checker. The spell checker that is now built-in is very similar to the spell checker in Microsoft Word. If you misspell a word, or Firefox doesn’t recognize that word, it will underline it in red.

  • Nice tips, i found all information i was looking for, i will use some of them.