With Firefox 4 coming soon, we will be finding a lot of new hacks, interface customizations and more we can do to make Firefox more personalized to our own needs. So, with that said, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the most popular hacks for Firefox 3.5 and up to give you all one last chance to try them out before Firefox 4 changes the game again.
How to Disable the New Tab Button
For some people out there, the new tab button on the tab toolbar was a waste of space. By editing your userChrome.css file, you can easily remove it.
Speed Up Flash Videos (like YouTube)
Want to speed up your flash video watching? By default, Firefox takes a sort of “snapshot” of whatever you are doing every ten seconds. Why? It is so that the browser can restore itself, just in case of a crash. With a little about:config tweak you can speed up the videos you are watching on YouTube and other video sharing websites.
Quicker Route to Private Browsing
Yes, we did finally get a way to enable private browsing in Firefox. The problem is, it is a pain to enable! Well, to save you a few clicks, I figured out a way you can start private browsing mode in Firefox from within the awesome address bar.
In an effort to simplify the Firefox interface, did you know you can make a few changes in the about:config page to move the close tab buttons around? I’ll show you how to move it to the far right of the browser, in just six easy steps.
Enable the Visual Tab Switcher
With Firefox 3.6’s release, we can all do a quick about:config tweak that will enable the prettier tab switching. By default, when you hit the keyboard keys Ctrl + Tab you just rotate through your tabs. By making some quick adjustments though, you can pull up the new tab switcher that you see in the picture above.
Make New Tab Pages Open in the Far Right of the Tab Bar
New to Firefox 3.6, when you are on a page, and you want to open a link in a new tab – rather than opening the link in the far right of the tab bar, Firefox will now open the link right next to the tab you are in. Now, while this might be convenient for some, it is a feature I don’t really need. Now, let us put things back the way they were.
Change the Firefox Spell Check Font Format
Want to make your misspelled words stand out a ‘bit more when composing a message in Firefox? It is easy to do with this quick about:config tweak. You can select no highlighting, a dotted line, long dots, a single straight line, a double underline or the default squiggly line.
I hope you enjoyed this collection of classic Firefox 3.5+ interface hacks and tweaks you can do to make the browser a little more customized to your own browsing needs. Have another favorite customization tip I might have missed? Leave it in the comments!
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