Firefox Tips

Firefox users have an extensive range of add-ons that enhance its performance, security and usefulness. Most of these are readily available from the Tools, Add-ons menu option, but others need to be manually installed.

Firefox has long been criticised for the time it takes to open up, and in defence provided a FirefoxPreloader that loaded code into memory at Windows startup to shorten the opening time. That has now been superseded by a manual amendment to its prefs.js file. The procedure is set out below and significantly shortens the time for Firefox to open.

 Open the browser.

Also, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0".

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Close the browser. Next time you start it, you will notice the difference.

2. I appreciate the ease of opening links in another tab and automatically shifting to that tab, and have gotten used to right clicking on the link then left clicking on the option to open in another tab. But I always wished there was an easier way. There is.

Simply put the cursor on the link and press the mouse wheel. The link immediately opens in a new tab. To close that tab, simply put the cursor on the tab and press the mouse wheel. Life was meant to be easy.

Enjoy your computing.                                Terry Bibo.

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