GeekFindr: Firefox, font size and close tabs
So the other day I upgraded to Firefox 2.0 - it’s actually because I found this intel specific build and wanted to try it out. I haven’t really compared it much with the regular firefox version, but it doesn’t seem to be significantly faster at first glance.
But that’s not what I wanted to talk about - there’s a few nice things about FF2 but there were immediately a couple annoyances that I needed to figure out how to change. The first was that when I held down the command key and scrolled my mousewheel the font size didn’t go up and down. This is really annoying, sometimes I just like to sit back, crank the font size and read, you know? The second problem was that the close tab button was on each tab - I don’t know about you, but I hate this, I have always hated this - it was one of the first reasons I had that made me stop using Safari. I just always accidentally closed tabs when I meant to switch to them.
It was google to the rescue. G quickly led me to the about:config doc page. It was long on that page where I found the two bits that concerned me the Mousewheel.* and the Browser.* sections.
So first off all you need to do is put about:config in your url bar and you’ll be taken to the preference page. Then filter by mousewheel, for example. The the key ones there (for the purpose of controlling font size control) is the mousewheel.withmetakey.action (if you want to use a different control key, you’ll see other with*key ones right there). Double click on the action you want to set and it’ll pop a dialogue box - the number you want to use is ‘3′. Once you click on ok, you’ll be able to hold whichever modifier key down (i.e. if you set mousewheel.withmetakey.action to 3, then on a browser window holding down the command key and scrolling your wheel will make the fonts bigger or smaller). I was psyched.
Then if you are on your about:config page and filter by browser.tabs, then look for browser.tabs.closeButtons. Double click that and set the value to 3, that will move the close tab button all the way to the right hand side of the tab bar. Phew!
The nice thing about all of this is also that on this page you’ll see a status column, if you click on that to sort by it, you’ll see all the values that you set either directly or via the preferences screens so you can undo any changes you made.
There’s a few other things in here that you might check out, the pipelining things can speed up your downloads of pages. Filter on pipelining and you’ll get 3 things, network.http.pipelining, network.http.proxy.pipelining and network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Set the pipelining and proxypipelining to true to check out this feature and increase maxrequests to 20 or 30. This should speed up your downloads, but it’s possible that it may cause some pages to not work - if you start coming across pages that break you might try and turn of this feature to see.
There some a lot more things in browser.* that I haven’t had a chance to play around with yet. browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers sounds interesting. I’ll get around to it soon.
UPDATE: Lifehacker seems to have a whole bunch more things to do with your firefox. Cool stuff.
