Firefox Tweaks And Extensions Guide

Back To FireFox Tip's

Over the last few months I have noticed people complaining about Firefox and the memory ‘leaks’ and how much memory Firefox hordes for itself. I guess for some people the 40-60Mb of ram that Firefox is sitting on is expensive, but for me, Firefox doesn’t get close to touching my gig of ram, but for those performance nuts that like to do SuperPI runs while browsing the internet, this guide is for you. I have spent the last week scouring the internet for all the tweaks, hacks, hax, plug-ins, extensions, and tricks that let you eke out every bit of performance and efficiency from Firefox. First off, the hacks.

Minimize Hack

The first hack that I have here is the popular Firefox Minimize Hack that has recently flashed through the internet. The purpose of this hack tries to keep Firefox from eating up your physical RAM and instead puts the burden on your hard drive, or at least that is the general reason behind it. To implement this hack, perform the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter. 2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Boolean. 3. In the pop-up window, type in “config.trim_on_minimize” without quotes and hit enter. 4. In the next pop-up window, select True and hit enter. 5. Restart your browser

With that done, open up a bunch of tabs and monitor the memory usage. In my first run without this hack, Firefox was using 137.8 Mb of Ram. With all 30 tabs open again, Firefox was using 118.4 Mb, but when minimized this dropped to an astounding 4 Mb. However, this was too good to be true, I left Firefox minimized and came back 12 minutes later and the memory use had slowly creeped up to 42.4 Mb. While this was 10 times larger than the initial 4.2 Mb, I was still saving about 75 Mb. One note about this, the memory was still very slowly creeping up by about 1 Mb per minute, maybe more or less per minute, but either way it was still creeping. I would have liked to test to see if it would creep up to the original 118.4 Mb but that would have required more than an hour and I am impatient. Another note, when I had Firefox maximized it was using 66 Mb with Flickr.com as the main tab, but 119 Mb when I quickly browsed through all my tabs and then quickly retreated back down to 66 Mb. I don’t know what causes this, but either way, for the most time it was using 66 Mb. The verdict: useful and free with no downloads.

Back Button Hack

The next hack deals with Firefox’s Cache. Whenever you jump around the Internet, Firefox caches your previous pages to make your internet browsing blazing fast. However this causes Firefox to consume memory that you may not ever need to use. To implement this hack, perform the following the following steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter. 2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers” and instead of the -1 setting, change it to 0 and hit Enter. 3. Restart your browser.

Before using this hack I went to Cnn.com and entered 10 different articles but never touched the back button, just using links. Upon the 10th article, Firefox was using 41Mb. I performed the hack and performed the same step by visiting the same sites with a cleared Cache, and memory usage was down to 33.7 Mb. This value never changed even after a few minutes left idle on the final page. Verdict: not a large saving with a slight decrease in browser rendering speed, worth it if you are ram limited.

Cache Hack

This next hack deals with the memory Firefox uses as cache. In the default setting, Firefox will adjust the cache size to fit however many pages you have open. While this is useful, if you tend to only have a few pages open at a time, you can manually reduce the setting to a specified amount at the cost of reducing performance when Firefox runs out of cache. To implement this hack, follow these steps.

1. With Firefox up and running, type about:config and hit enter. 2. Right click on the new page and select New -> Integer. 3. In the pop-up window, type in “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. In the following pop-up window, specify how many Kb of ram you want to dedicate to the cache, I selected 32768(32Mb). I suggest a number between 16Mb and 64Mb, anything lower and performance will suffer, anything higher is excessive. Here you should experiment, or don’t bother if it worries you. 4. Restart your browser

I don’t know how much this helps or hurts performance, so far with 32Mb enabled I have yet to see a major difference, memory use dropped from 42Mb to 39Mb with the same pages open, but I don’t think this hack is what did that. Verdict: not sure if it is useful at all.

This last hack is less of a hack and more of a good habit you should pick up. I tend to clear my cache and download list at least once a week, sometimes more often. This will usually increase performance and it will also update all content, but on a slow connection this could hurt your performance, especially if you have pictures loaded in your cache that don’t change. Do this at your own digression.

Popup Hack

Lately it seems that more and more popups are managing to get through firefox. I did some checking, and it seems that the Macromedia Flash plugin allows webmasters to launch popups in a way that bypasses Firefox’s built-in blocking mechanism.

Fortunately, there’s a way you can get around it. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Type “about:config” into the Firefox location bar.

2. Right-click on the page and select “New–> Integer”

3. Name the new value “privacy.popups.disablefromplugins”

4. Set the value to 2.

In case you’re interested, the other possible values are:

· 0: Allow all popups from plugins.

· 1: Allow popups, but limit them to dom.popup_maximum.

· 2: Block popups from plugins.

· 3: Block popups from plugins, even on whitelisted sites.

Extensions

Extensions are what make Firefox great, you can customize to your hearts content by adding extensions. The following list are the extensions that I use.

Tweak Network Settings

Firefox has a couple of hidden network settings. With this extension, you can tweak these settings, and you might be able to speed up the loading of web pages. You can also increase the maximum number of simultaneous downloads from a site (the default is only four).

CustomizeGoogle

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhance Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). All features are optional and easily configured from the options menu. View a short introduction movie

Google Preview

Appends website thumbnails to google and yahoo results. Brilliant. Once you have it once you need it. It would be great to have also statistics (alexa, google pagerank, even SEO stats etc) on the right of each link.

Update Notifier

Re-adds the update button from pre-1.5 builds of Firefox, but with added functionality. Instead of simply alerting you to browser updates, Update Notifier informs you when extension and theme updates are available. This extension is a must-have if you like staying up-to-date with all your add-ons.

Spellbound (Firefox 1.5 compatible)

SpellBound is a port of the spellchecker code and user interface from the Mozilla Suite's Composer that enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea / input elements (html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound) and rich text form elements. This allows you to spell check forms (e.g. message board posts, blog entries, wysiwyg, etc.) before submitting them when using your Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Suite browser. 

Dictionary Tooltip 

shows the meaning of the selected phrase in a tooltip on the same page. Main idea is "not" to open a new tab or window for looking definitions when you are seriously reading an article. It's a great multi-lingual learning tool.

Performancing

This is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox.

Adblock 

One of the best plug-ins ever written. Adblack allows you to block elements of a web page, images, flash, i-frames, etc… This will help make pages load faster and with zero ads!

Adblock Filterset.G Updater 

This is a companion extension to Adblock and should be used in conjunction with it. This extension automatically downloads the latest version of Filterset.G every 4-7 days. Filterset.G is an excellent set of filters maintained by G for Adblock that blocks most ads on the internet. In addition, this extension allows you to define your own set of filters that you can add along with Filterset.G during an update.

Video Downloader

You use You Tube, Google Video or any such services and wish that you could easily save those Video files to your hard disk? If so then this extension will be of great use. It also downloads embedded objects like mp3s, flash and such from webpages.

This extension places a page status bar over the address bar which creates a cool effect and also lets you know how much of the page is left to download. Useful for slower connections and just plain cool.

Reveal

This is definitely the coolest extension I have seen. You know that cool thing that OSX does that lets you view all your currently open programs in little thumbnails? Well this does the same thing, but for your tabs! When I am writing an article, coding CS, or doing something else that requires lots of back and forth movement, this saves me a lot of time from having to ctrl-tab or click on tabs. To get to know reveal, take the quick 30 second tutorial that prompts you upon restart. I highly recommend this extension.

IE Tab

This causes Firefox to render a page with an embedded Internet Explorer within your Firefox window. I use this specific extension whenever a page renders terribly in Firefox. I wish they made an extension for Safari that would let you guys render my page in Firefox, sorry! Very useful when a page loads terribly. Be warned though, IEtab has a known memory leak but they are working on fixing it.

ImageShack right-click

Is an extension for Firefox that allows users to upload images on other websites directly to ImageShack without having to first save them locally.
Download Statusbar

This is an extension that allows you to keep track of ongoing and completed downloads in a hide-away statusbar.

   

Sage

Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It's got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don't.


Stumbleupon.com

An intelligent tool for browsing and sharing the best websites, StumbleUpon uses +/- ratings to analyze sites and show you only sites you'll like. Stumble across sites on the web by the stumble button, through the main site, or by the recommendation of other "Stumblers."

Fasterfox

Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with the unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links
on the page you are browsing.

CLEO

 is a Firefox extension that works with FEBE to package any number of extensions/themes into a single, installable .xpi file.

---