SpaceMan's Blog

My Firefox Customization

Yesterday, I customized and tweaked my Mozilla Firefox.

First, I removed the unused toolbars and moved the address bar to the main menu. You can do this by clicking View → Toolbars → Customize, drag away anything you don’t want, and drag the address and things you don’t want on the top. Then, you will see some empty toolbars. Just click View → Toolbars and un-check the toolbars you do not want. After the customization, it will look like this: http://twitpic.com/hrn3v

You will ask, “How can I press the Back button or the Refresh button?”. Use shortcut keys. Shortcut keys are keyboard sequences that performs actions that you originally need to click a button to perform it. Shortcut keys can increase your productivity. This Firefox layout is used to enforce you to use shortcut keys. If you don’t want shortcut keys, please change it back. You can see a list of Firefox shortcut keys at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts?style_mode=inproduct.

I edited my Firefox’s title, to do this, get the Firesomething add-on: http://www.cosmicat.com/extensions/firesomething/. Then click the Preferences in the Firesomething of the Add-Ons window. You can configure Firesomething to display various types of titles, the User-Agent string (which identifies you browser), and even the about screen picture.

The Firefox themes are not perfect, some themes didn’t display the numeric inputs properly, or some doesn’t display Organize Bookmarks menu properly. There is a good replacement of themes: Personas for Firefox, you can simply go to www.getpersonas.com to download that extension. After you installed that extension, a fox mask will show in the bottom-left. Click on it, and you can choose a design. By the way, you can also get AnyColor add-on to customize Firefox’s color scheme: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6991.

Also, get the FoxTab add-on, it allows you to visualize the tabs in 3D. You can summon the FoxTab switcher screen by holding Ctrl + SHIFT + Tab. Also, press Ctrl + Q to summon FoxTab in interactive mode, where you can configure the appearance and various aspects of FoxTab. Download FoxTab at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8879.

Here is the screenshot of my Firefox after customization: http://twitpic.com/hslb1.

See also http://lifehacker.com/142764/guide-to-tweaking-firefox for more information about tweaking Firefox.

Tags: Customization, Extension, Firefox, Mozilla, Tweak