How can you change your cookie settings in Firefox? To change your cookie settings:

1. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button (Tools menu in Windows XP) and then click Options.
2. Select the Privacy panel.

If you click the check mark box under the “Tracking” section, you can tell websites that you do not want to be tracked. I have covered that in a previous article: How to Stop Website Tracking in Firefox

Under “History” you have the option to remember past websites you’ve visited, not to remember websites you’ve visited or a custom history setting.  When Firefox remembers your browsing history, it keeps track of form and search history, websites you’ve visited, downloads and cookies.

Last but not least, if you scroll down a little lower you will see the option to “Accept cookies from sites”. This allows you to control if specific websites can track you or not.  You can also accept cookies until:

• Keep until: they expire: Each cookie will be removed when it reaches its expiration date, which is set by the site that sent the cookie.
• Keep until: I close Firefox: The cookies that are stored on your computer will be removed when Firefox is closed.
• Keep until: ask me every time: Displays an alert every time a website tries to send a cookie, and asks you whether or not you want to store it.

When you are done with your cookie changing, always be sure to hit the “OK” button at the bottom of the options window to save your changes.  What type of cookie tracking changes do you like to make?

Now, most of the time, when I see Firefox asking if I want to save my tabs for the next time Firefox starts, I quickly click through whatever I have to do to turn this extra warning off. However, I was thinking the other day, I wonder how I could toggle this interesting Firefox feature on or off again?

In the Firefox menu toolbar, click Tools and the select Options. Next, under the Startup section you want to check the drop down menu next to where it says, “When Firefox starts:”.

Click the drop down menu, and then select, “Show my Windows and Tabs from Last Time”.  Once you do that, click the OK button at the bottom of the screen and you should be set.  To turn it off, you can just go from the previously mentioned setting to one of the other two.  The other two options are to show your home page or show a blank page.

Want Firefox to ask you if you want this option each time?  If so, go back into the menu toolbar, go to Options and then the Tabs section. You can go in here and check the box for “Warn me when closing multiple tabs”.

There you have it.  Now, for this to work – you will need to make sure your saving your browser history between sessions too.  Hope that helps you either turn back on this feature, or maybe even turn it off as well.

New Tab Homepage is a very simple and lightweight add-on for Firefox.  When you open a new tab in Firefox, it will open your default homepage – rather than an empty tab. While I am using Firefox, I frequently go back to my homepage to check my mail or the latest updates in my RSS reader – so this extension seems like a very obvious evolution of the opening a new tab process.

You can also get very creative with this, such as setting up your homepage as your favorite calendar website or maybe even your favorite online to-do list host.

Without this fantastic add-on, there is one more way you can get this task done.  All you need to do is hold the Ctrl key down while left-clicking on the house icon in your navigation toolbar.  That too will open your homepage in a new tab.

You can pick up New Tab Homepage for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

By default, Firefox has a pretty good pop-up blocker.  It gets the job done.  Sometimes, it does too good of a job and blocks a pop-up on a webpage where you want to see a pop-up though.  Today, I will be showing you how to allow pop-ups for a certain domain from within Firefox.

To access the pop-up blocker settings, from the menu toolbar go to Tools and then Options. Next, you want to select the Content panel.

Beside where it says, “Block pop-up windows” click on the button labeled Exceptions.  This will give you a list of sites that you want to allow to display pop-ups.

From here you can:

• Allow: Click this to add a website to the exceptions list.
• Remove Site: Click this to remove a website from the exceptions list.
• Remove All Sites: Click this to remove all of the websites in the exceptions list.

This can also be a good way to unapprove a website you have mistakenly allowed to display pop-ups too.

So, there you have it.  Now you know how to give a website permission to display pop-up windows, or take that permission away.  Now, in a perfect world businesses and websites would do away with the annoying pop-ups all together.  Until then though, this work around should do the trick.  Hope this helps those of you looking for a solution to let Firefox display pop-ups.

Every so often, you might need to find your Firefox profile folder to do some tweaking or maintenance of your own.  In the past, this has lead to diving through your operating system’s folders and after twenty clicks, finding the information you need.  Since Firefox 3.6 there is a much easier way to open your profile folder, with no additional extensions installed.

To open your Firefox profile folder, go to Help in the menu bar:

Next, click on Troubleshooting Information.  This will take you to the about:support information page.  If you can remember, you can also visit this page by typing about:support into the Firefox address bar too.

Under Application Basics, click on the button that reads, "Open Containing Folder" next to Profile Directory, and there you go. Your Firefox profile directory should be opened up.  Going to the profile location by following the folder path to it via your computer still works, but this is a much easier way to get the job done.

Hope this comes in handy next time you want to backup, tweak or change something in your Firefox profile folder.

There are a lot of Firefox features that don’t get much press, or are quickly forgotten about.  For example, did you know that you could switch to using Gmail or Yahoo! Mail as your default mail client (to handle those mailto links)?

To chance your settings, go to Tools, Options and then click on the Applications tab.  From there, type “mail” into the text box to go to the default mail handler settings.  From the drop down box, you should get several choices, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail being two of them.  Choose the webmail application of your choice, hit the button labeled, “OK” and you are all set.

Now you are ready to use the webmail provider of your choice as your default e-mail application, as far as Firefox knows.

I’ll share with you though how I have my browser setup to clear some un-important data each time I close the browser.

Mitch’s Clear History When Firefox Closes Settings

Go to Tools, and then click on Options.

Next, go to the Privacy tab and select “Use custom settings for history” from the drop down menu.

Put a check mark in the box for, “Clear history when Firefox closes” and then click on the button labeled, Settings.

Make sure you add a check mark for only the following boxes:

• Browsing History
• Download History
• Forms & Search History
• Cache

Then hit the button labeled, “OK” to continue.  On the Options window, also click the button labeled, “OK” and you are all set.

This way I have Firefox setup to clear everything except for my saved passwords and login sessions that are enabled by cookies.  Your setup might be different, and if it is – feel free to share in the comments. 

This extension of Firefox will give you a lot of the “about:config” preferences, in an easy to navigate menu box.  It displays the options, included in the current version, using checkboxes, dropdown lists and textboxes.

If you want to check out all the advanced settings that gui:config makes available to you, Lifehacker has done a nice gallery of each tab you see in the screenshot above.

I would consider this extension well worth trying out, at least.  The add-on, gui:config is a must have for anybody who likes to tweak and customize their browsing experience.  You can find out more about the development at:  http://guiconfig.freedig.org/.

Password Synchronization is an optional feature for the newest version of Foxmarks that allows you to simply and securely synchronize your saved passwords. 

Since this feature is turned off by default, how do you activate it? 

1. Open the Foxmarks Settings dialog (located in Tools > Foxmarks > Settings…).
2. Click on the “Sync” tab.
3. Select the checkbox labeled “Passwords”. You will be guided through a quick and easy password synchronization setup flow.

Big congrats goes out to Foxmarks for making a damn good add-on even better.

Just type in about:config into your address bar to get started.  Next, into the filter text box, type in layout.spell.  That should bring up the preference name layout.spellcheckDefault. Right-click it, and then select “Modify”.  Change the 1 (default value) to 2 and you should be all set. 

Firefox’s built in spell check will now check all text fields, no matter where or how they are used on the web site in question.