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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
In Soviet Russia, Firefox keeps tabs on YOU!
here
try this setting:
browser.xul.error_pages.enabled
set it to "true"
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
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.)
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.
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.
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).
404 is an HTTP status code. If firefox cannot find the server you want to connect to, where do you want that 404 to come from?
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).