In our articles, we often mention the about:config command which can be entered in the address bar. That command opens the built-in configuration editor of the Firefox browser and allows performing extreme fine-tuning of the browser. It contains lots of options which are not accessible from the browser's settings interface. Many Firefox users are not even aware that about:config is not the only about: command available in the browser. Firefox comes with a huge set of useful about commands which I would like to share with you today.
Category: Firefox
Add private tabs instead of private windows in Firefox
The classic Opera browser had a very useful feature - private tabs. Unlike all modern mainstream browsers, it allowed you to mix private and regular tabs in the single window. Firefox users can get the same feature and use private tabs instead of private windows. Follow the instructions below to learn how it can be done.
Mozilla adds Safe Mode button to Troubleshooting page in Firefox
Recently, we covered how to start Mozilla Firefox in Safe mode. In the safe mode of Mozilla Firefox, addons and plugins will not be loaded, so it is very useful for troubleshooting issues with plugins and add-ons which affect the browser performance, stability or prevent it from being started. Mozilla developers decided to add an additional way to launch Firefox in safe mode.
How to customize shortcut keys (hotkeys) in Mozilla Firefox
In our recent articles, we showed you lots of Firefox keyboard shortcuts, both, essential ones and the lesser-known ones. Now let's see how you can customize these shortcuts and re-assign menu hotkeys in Firefox. This can be useful if the default shortcut keys are not easy to remember for you.
Run different Firefox versions simultaneously
The popular Firefox browser is available in many different editions. Every edition has its own release channel and has different features, stability, target audience and OS and add-on compatibility. While it is possible to install different Firefox versions in one OS, they all try to use the default browser profile, as a result of which they can't run simultaneously. This lead to crashes, profile corruption and inconveniences.
In this article, we will see which versions of Firefox are available and how to run them simultaneously.
Disable icons in the Mozilla Firefox context menu
Modern versions of the Firefox browser have icons in the context menu for back and forward navigation commands, reload/stop command and for the "bookmark" item. Many users do not like the fact that the context menu has icons, not text labels. Besides the design, they break the user interface flow, as they are aligned horizonally while the rest of the menu items are ordered vertically. In this article, we will see how you can revert to the fully textual context menu of the Firefox browser and remove the icons.
Use the Forget button in Mozilla Firefox to clean your history quickly
Mozilla Firefox comes with a nice option to keep your privacy by cleaning your browsing history with just one click. This is possible thanks to the Forget button available in the browser. However, by default it is not shown in the sandwich menu, so many users never use it. If you never knew this button existed or never tried it, read the rest of the article.
There is a new Reader mode in Mozilla Firefox
Firefox Nightly for Windows now features a new Reader mode, which might be familiar to Firefox users of mobile devices. When enabled, it strips out unnecessary elements from the opened web page, reflows the text and turns it into a cleaner looking text document without ads, menus and scripts, so the user can focus on reading the text content. Firefox also renders the text on the page with a new font and formatting in Reader mode. At the moment of this writing, Reader mode is not available in the stable release of Firefox, but can be enabled in Firefox Nightly. Here's how.
Switch YouTube to Flash Player in Firefox
Some time ago, YouTube had switched to HTML5 videos for all modern browsers including Firefox. After doing some tweaks you can play all HTML5 videos in Firefox even without the Flash plugin installed. In some cases, e.g. when YouTube detects that something is wrong with your browser, it might switch automatically to using Flash for videos instead of HTML5, but there is no way to control this yourself. Let me show you a way to switch between HTML5 and Flash manually.
Disable javascript and images with a single click in Mozilla Firefox
Several releases ago, Mozilla abandoned the GUI option to disable JavaScript in Firefox. I used this feature a lot and was not happy to see it removed. That is because there are still many sites with annoying popups, or some which prevent you from copying the web page text or from right clicking. Also some badly coded web pages with JavaScript slow down Firefox to a crawl or consume a tremendous amount of memory. In all these cases, you were able to disable JavaScript from Firefox options, but now it's no longer easily possible. Instead, you are forced to open about:config to disable it. Today, I would like to share a fast and convenient way to disable JavaScript and images quickly.
