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.

official mozilla reference

[wizardforce]

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

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: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.