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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)."
Do not tune stuff that is hidden unless you know what you are doing.
I thought we agreed that ComputerWorld article was mostly crap...
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I just want to make it stop going to Google when it's looking up a URL. If it can't find it in DNS, I want it to return a 404, not ask some fsking company where they think I should go.
I tried changing every entry that mentions google.com, and sometimes it still queries. WTF!
In Soviet Russia, Firefox keeps tabs on YOU!
I still use Camino, a Mozilla-based browser for OS X. Is there a similar guide to configuring Camino options or do most of these work as is?
here
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.
Is why useful tweaks are hidden behind and obscure and risky-to-use interface like about:config. If the tweaks are worth doing, shouldn't they have first-class support in the main configuration GUI?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Some of these tweaks cut down on memory usage. Given that there are still plenty of computers with 512MB of ram (e.g. notebook computers), you don't want applications pinning 100% CPU or memory as it slows down the rest of the system. This is more important with notebook computers, since a second lost through CPU usage or hard drive thrashing is a second lost from battery charge.
The notebook I'm using right now has this amount of memory, and was easily available in stores 1 year ago. Last time I checked, a web browser should never require the absolute latest system for day-to-day operations (which include having another application in the background, such as a word processor or even MSVC 2005.)
...works really well if you first watch the video you want to download, putting it in your cache. Then going to video downloader, and regardless of the file size, takes just a few seconds and you are done. Apparently it can grab it from your cache and make it a file on you system (very little for it to really do - very low bandwidth to convert).
In fact, it seems to me that when it doesn't work, "service not available" only happens when I don't watch it first, not in my cache.
Set general.config.obscure_value to 42 for a special treat :D
The real path to male liberation
A long time ago, when computers remembered using little donuts made of rust, I worked on on a mainframe computer system (CP/V) that supported batch, timesharing, realtime, the works. It had performance monitoring tools, and a large basketload of parameters for sys admins to twiddle.
One of our favorite parameters was SL:BB, documented as batch bias, an input to the process scheduler. When someone called or wrote to us saying they were having problems with performance tuning, we usually suggested they redo their tests varying the setting of SL:BB and let us know what happened. Try different values, 0, 1, 5, 20, 50, 100, things like that. Try it and get back to us.
And lo, they would go off and redo performance runs, and report back.
And we would collect their results and go and muse over them, usually over beer.
SL:BB told us a lot about the user, because SL:BB was a knob that wasn't connected to anything. Oh, the value was range-checked by the parameter setting tool, and dutifully stored in memory, and displayed on performance displays, but it didn't change system performance in any way at all.
That's not what the documentation said, but who believes documentation? We had plans for SL:BB, we just hadn't gotten around to writing the code yet.
So if the user reported that setting SL:BB to 25, but not 24 or 26 gave them incredibly better (or worse) results, we definitely factored that into our analysis.
Those that reported back that the setting of SL:BB didn't make a damn bit of difference, and there were some, we honored as brothers, took into our confidences, and shared beer with at the soonest opportunity. Their bug reports and feature requests received far more attention, for they had passed an important test.
And how many of these Firefox parameters are like SL:BB?
set org.slashdot.dont_make_changes_on_the_live_server_ yes_im_talking_to_you_cmdrtaco=1
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
KDawson is the new Zonk? Given the quality of the articles he is approving these days, he would soon surpass Zonk in crap-o-meter.
Gah. Why is it that these people insist on calling anything not found on the main options page "hacking"? As for the above questions - usually the reason things like that are 'hidden' is to stop people fiddling with them. A good example is the old 'coolbits' entry in the registry for nVidia cards - the overclocking functionality was there, but you had to do something non-standard to enable it. That way, the company's ass is covered if you melt your card; you can't pretend you enabled the options accidentally. Since Firefox is free and nobody is paying tech-support, I'm not sure why these things aren't available - but the fact of the matter is, anyone messing around with fundamental parameters should _not_ be the kind of person who lets random articles on the internet tell them what to change.
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.
#bookmarks-menu .bookmark-item .menu-iconic-left {
display: none !important;
}
Slashdot Classic
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:(This selector appears in chrome://browser/skin/browser.css, if you know where that is).
opera:config
I've found some secret hidden tweaks you can make to Slashdot articles, just by editing this thing called a URL. For instance, you can set the comment threshold HIGHER than 5 by editing the number after "threshold=", ensuring only the absolute best comments (apparently none in this story meet that standard yet). Why do they hide useful options like this from us?
about:config is the worst method of changing preferences that I have ever seen.
about:config is evidence of feature creep, and hence evidence of Firefox turning into the Mozilla browser.
Past versions of Firefox have added additional features such as image resizing. And guess, what, users are not given the ability to disable this; they must enter into the cryptic about:config.
about:config is an HCI catastrophe.
Consider all of the sites you go to in a single day.
How many do you actually need cookies for? Right. A handful.
The default behaviour, given how the technology is abused these days, should be to delete all cookies and purge the cache when the browser closes - except for the sites specified by the user.
It still irks me that IE (yes, we have to use it at work) still doesn't have an option for 'delete all cookies on exit' - but it is perfectly capable of clearing the rest of the cache.
I agree that the option to accept from originating site is good, but these days I don't care. Either way the cookies are purged every day.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
- about:config has always existed in Firefox and Seamonkey
- It's opera:config in Opera.
I've never seen Mozilla hype this.Here is why Opera doesn't work for me.In particular, the first point is the most important to me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Yes.
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 there wasn't, you'd be able to put it in the Knowledge Base yourself.What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.