The Secrets of Firefox about:config

jcatcw writes "While Firefox is very customizable, many of its settings aren't in the Options. Each setting is named and stored as a string, integer, or Boolean in a file called prefs.js and accessed via about:config from the nav bar. Computerworld provides instructions on 20 tweaks for speeding up page loads, making tabs behave, reducing memory drain, and generally making the interface act the way you want it to. Customization also comes through the must-have FF extensions (but be sure to skip these)."

Comments

link to one page article

[maj1k]

here

Re:I just want

[Fry-kun]

try this setting:
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled

set it to "true"

Foons!

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Well, a lot of these "tweaks" will have negative effects.

Example: nglayout.initialpaint.delay as 0. This will slow rendering of the page as it causes reflows. Fools.

Re:Foons!

[daeg]

Opera has sensible pipelining defaults. Most "Firefox tip" articles have you set them to values that when combined with other network settings makes your browser appear like a misbehaving robot, proxy, or hacking attempt. Firefox with sensible values doesn't get blocked.

Re:Foons!

[MedicinalMan]

Damn right. Here's what mozilla says about nglayout.initialpaint.delay

Lower values will make a page initially display more quickly, but will make the page take longer to finish rendering. Higher values will have the opposite effect.

Re:Foons!

[AcidPenguin9873]

Example: nglayout.initialpaint.delay as 0. This will slow rendering of the page as it causes reflows. Fools. From the article, just below the section on nglayout.initialpaint.delay:

Reduce the number of reflows
When Firefox is actively loading a page, it periodically reformats or "reflows" the page as it loads, based on what data has been received. Create a content.notify.interval integer preference to control the minimum number of microseconds (millionths of a second) that elapse between reflows. If it's not explicitly set, it defaults to 120000 (.12 of a second).

Too many reflows may make the browser feel sluggish, so you can increase the interval between reflows by raising this to 500000 (500,000, or 1/2 second) or even to 1000000 (1 million, or 1 second). If you set this value, be sure to also create a Boolean value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to true. Seems like setting nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0 and bumping up the reflow interval can get you the page quicker and avoid too many reflows.

official mozilla reference

[wizardforce]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

Re:Camino?

[maxume]

I think this is what you want:

http://www.firefoxtutor.com/39/loc-bar-search/

And really, they should have called Iceweasel IreOx, at least until mozilla.org asked them to stop.

Re:While it's nice..

[Anonymous Coward]

I particularly love the "pipelining" part. Send requests before getting valid acknowledgments from previous requests. ...

It's rude, annoying and breaks the rules/protocol.

From RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) section 8.1.1:

HTTP requests and responses can be pipelined on a connection. Pipelining allows a client to make multiple requests without waiting for each response, allowing a single TCP connection to be used much more efficiently, with much lower elapsed time.

Thunderbird also...

[thejuggler]

You can configure many settings in Thunderbird using a similar interface. However, in Thunderbird you can get to the config section from the Options menu Advanced tab. I have reduced the size of the attachment icons this way. set mailnews.attachments.display.largeView to False.

Re:While it's nice..

[maxume]

It isn't faster for everybody, it doesn't work with all servers...

Re:While it's nice..

[SailorFrag]

This is a tactic spammers use with mail servers. It's rude, annoying and breaks the rules/protocol.

RFC 2920 is the SMTP extension for pipelining. Pipelining is a perfectly valid strategy to reduce the time it takes to send mail by reducing the number of round-trips.

What's rude is violating the RFC that says that certain round-trips are required and the spammers tend to violate those rules (such as asking if a message body can be sent before actually sending it, and waiting for the server's introduction message before the client introduces itself). Pipelining itself is actually quite good.

I won't comment on HTTP pipelining because someone else did already.

Re:The Art of Performance Tuning -- a Fable

[MulluskO]

"The general.config.obscure_value preference specifies how the configuration file is obscured. Firefox expects that each byte in the file will be rotated by the specified value. The default value is 13. If this value is left unchanged, then the configuration file must be encoded as ROT13. Autoconfig will fail if the cfg file is not encoded as specified by this preference. A value of 0 indicates that the file is unencoded-- i.e. it is unobscured plain text. It is recommended that you set this value to 0. (This will allow you to skip the encoding step in part 3.)"

Hee.

Re:I just want

[the_cowgod]

Set "keyword.enabled" to false.

Re:Still can't turn off favicons in the bookmark m

[Dracos]

In Firefox 2.0.3, I opened up the DOM inspector, chose the main window, and started drilling down in to the element tree: I found the icons which you loathe.

Open up userChrome.css (in your profile: [profile dir]/chrome/).

In it, the following CSS rule should work to hide the icons:

.bookmark-item > .menu-iconic-left > image { display: none; }

(This selector appears in chrome://browser/skin/browser.css, if you know where that is).

Re:While it's nice..

[jesser]

If it's valid behavior according to the protocol, and it's faster, and it's not bad nettiquette, then why, pray tell, isn't it on by default?

Because some servers violate the protocol by responding incorrectly to pipelined requests. At least, that was the reason 2 years ago.

Re:Camino?

[644bd346996]

Did you even bother to try it out? Camino's about:config page is almost identical to FF's page. Any options that are named the same in Camino as in FF will do the same thing. (Camino is just a different front end on Gecko, and about:config options are almost all Gecko options, not browser specific.)

Opera Version

[Deliveranc3]

opera:config

Re:Documentation

[bunratty]

My question is simple: Is there good, concise documentation of the about:config page and its options?

Yes.

If yes, where is it and is there an an easy why to find it?

MozillaZine Knowledge Base Article on about:config entries

It is the first page Google finds when you search for "about:config". I'll let you decide whether that's easy to find.

If no, why not? If this is all about choice, should people be able to learn about their choices?

If there wasn't, you'd be able to put it in the Knowledge Base yourself.