Installing and configuring Firefox
Introduction
This tutorial will guide you briefly through the installation of Firefox, then we'll give you basics about how to personalise it with skins (themes), then we'll list a few useful extensions. Finally, we'll see how to configure it to increase the loading speed of pages, block all popups, and a few other optimizations or tweaks.
Summary
- Introduction
- All links
- Installation
- Getting themes
- Getting extensions
- Configuration through the menus
- Configuration through the config files
- Credits and copyright notice
All links
- Firefox (download page) - remember to check this page once in a while to see if there is an update available
- Some places good to know :
Installation
Run the installer.
Choose the custom installation.
Choose the folder where you want to install Firefox (we chose
C:\Program Files\Firefox).
On the next screen, we chose not to install the
Developer Tools nor the
Quality Feedback Agent, but you can install whatever you want.
Then, we chose to place Firefox icons in the Start menu and in the
Quick Launch bar.
You're done, now launch Firefox.
It asks you if you want to import your settings (favorites, form data, etc) from MSIE, do as you want, we chose not to import anything.
It also asks if you want Firefox to be your default browser, we chose no and not to check everytime the browser is started.
Getting themes
Themes can be downloaded here. This is a little directory where you can browse themes.
To download and install a theme, click on
Install Now on the theme's page (see screenshot below).
For the screenshots here, we used a theme named
Modern Pinball.
Here is a little selection :
- Compact themes :
- Modern Pinball : I'm currently using this one
- Microfirefox : I use it on my older comp and on my laptop
- Littlefox : I use it on my older comp and on my laptop, looks pretty similar to Microfirefox
- MSIE-like :
- Luna Blue : maybe you'll manage to fool your lamest friends and make them think they use their dear dear internet explorer ;)
- Other :
Getting extensions
Extensions can be downloaded here. This is a little directory where you can browse extensions.
To download and install an extension, click on
Install Now on the extension's page (same as with themes).
Here is a little selection :
- Highly useful, we'll even configure Tabbrowser later in this tut :
- Tabbrowser Preferences : improves the tabbed browsing
- MR Tech Local Install : adds plenty of features, its primary goal was to improve extensions handling (you can install several extensions together, you don't need to wait 3 seconds before installing an extension)
- Yes popups : improves popup blocking
- Webmaster-oriented extensions, the 3 first ones are must-haves :
- Web Developer : adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools
- Add N Edit Cookies : enables you to edit your cookies, and even to create cookies - useful to test your site's security
- Tamper Data : view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and post parameters, trace and time http response/requests, security test web applications by modifying POST parameters
- LinkChecker : check the validity of links on a webpage
- MeasureIt : draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage
- View Rendered Source Chart : an improved view source - not so great in my opinion
- View formatted source : another improved view source - not so great either, I think
- Google Pagerank Status : to check the pagerank of a site
- Other :
- Gmail Notifier : a notifier for Gmail accounts, you may want to use Gmail Manager instead to handle multiple Gmail accounts
- WebmailCompose : makes mailto: links load your webmail's compose page and adds a Compose link to the context menu, also optionally overlays the Mail Button, Send Link and Send Image context menu items
- CustomizeGoogle : enhance Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam)
Configuration through the menus
To open the Options, in the menu choose
Tools → Options.
Then, follow our screenshots...
General
Tabbrowser preferences
Privacy
Web features
Note that we disabled Java only because, for some reason, we didn't manage to get it work properly. You can leave it checked.
Downloads
Not much to do here... if you want, check
Ask me where to save every file.
Advanced
Configuration through the config files
Your whole Firefox configuration is located in a folder named :
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
where :
- C: is the drive where you installed Windows
- username is your Windows username
We are going to work with your Firefox profile files, located in a folder named :
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\s1fbh24p.default
where
s1fbh24p are 8 random characters.
Note : You should close Firefox when you are editing these files, otherwise you may lose your changes.
prefs.js and user.js
In your profile folder, you can see a file named
prefs.js. This is where some of your settings are stored by Firefox, Firefox can write in this file.
Create a file named
user.js in the same directory as
prefs.js. The
user.js file is read by Firefox, but Firefox can't modify it. So when you set an option in this file, it's always activated when you launch Firefox.
Note that the lines beginning with // are comments.
Make pages load faster : pipelining & Co
Pipelining is an experimental feature that makes pages load faster. To make it short, when it's not activated, you download a web page element by element (ie, the HTML code, then the first picture, then the second picture, etc). When pipelining is enabled, you download several elements at the same time, so the page loads faster (if your connection is good enough, of course). But some servers will react badly if you open too many connections, so don't choose a too high number for the
maxrequests parameter.
To enable pipelining, ad the following lines in
user.js :
// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
Firefox doesn't begin to render a web page during the first 250 milliseconds of loading. You can lower this limit, however I don't advise you to zero it since this would increase the total rendering time. Add the following line to
user.js to set it to 150 :
// Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 150);
Disable some JavaScript window features
Here are some useful options that are not available in the menus yet, to protect you against malicious javascripts :
// More DOM/JavaScript options
// Make sure all pop-up windows are resizable:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable", true);
// Make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable", true);
// Always display the menu in pop-up windows:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar", true);
// Always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.location", true);
// Prevent sites from disabling scrollbars:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars", true);
Block absolutely all popups
Firefox 1.0.x has a vulnerability that enables some contents like Flash to open popups even when popups are disabled. To completely block popups, add the following lines to
user.js (note that there is a bug with this feature that will prevent you from opening the blocked popups) :
// Block pop-ups from Flash :
user_pref("privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins", 3);
// Block pop-ups from events
user_pref("dom.popup_allowed_events", "dblclick");
Force frames to be resizable
Add the following code to
user.js to make all frame resizable. Note that this may give a weird look to some pages, since this option will make all frame borders visible. For an example, look at the bottom frame in your Gmail mailbox ;)
// Force frames to be resizable
user_pref("layout.frames.force_resizability", true);
Other
Well, there are a lot of other settings available in
user.js. We quickly explained the ones who seemed the most important to us, here is our own full
user.js file. If you need more help on an option, try our forum or use some search engine.
// http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_pipelining
// Change to normal Google search:
user_pref("keyword.URL", "http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=");
// Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 150);
// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 8);
// Path to Cache folder:
// user_pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory","D:\\TEMP\\FirefoxCache");
// Specify the amount of cache:
// -1 = determine dynamically (default), 0 = none, n = memory capacity in kilobytes
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 65536);
// user_pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 0);
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
// Force frames to be resizable
user_pref("layout.frames.force_resizability", true);
// More DOM/JavaScript options
// Make sure all pop-up windows are resizable:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable", true);
// Make sure all pop-up windows are minimizable:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.minimizable", true);
// Always display the menu in pop-up windows:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.menubar", true);
// Always display the Navigation Toolbar in pop-up windows:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.location", true);
// Prevent sites from disabling scrollbars:
user_pref("dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars", true);
// Reveal more tab/window options:
user_pref("browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs", true);
// Disable Bookmark Icons
user_pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", false);
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons", false);
// User agent
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "http://www.patheticcockroach.com/ - Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.7");
// Block pop-ups from Flash :
user_pref("privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins", 3);
// Block pop-ups from events
// user_pref("dom.popup_allowed_events", "change click dblclick mouseup reset submit"); defaut
user_pref("dom.popup_allowed_events", "dblclick");
// Sends the referer info (default is 2)
user_pref("network.http.sendRefererHeader", 2);
Some redesigning with userChrome.css
In
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\s1fbh24p.default\chrome, create a file named
userChrome.css.
In this file, put the following content :
/* Remove the close button on the tab bar */
.tabs-closebutton-box {display: none !important;}
/* removes throbber */
#throbber-box {display: none !important;}
This will remove the button to close the tabs (to close the current tab, use CTRL+W) and the little thingy (the throbber) that moves in the upper-right corner when you load a page.
Credits and copyright notice
To write this tutorial, we used our current Firefox 1.0.7 configuration. The following sites were useful :
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