Top Firefox 2 config tweaks

by Gina Trapani

When you type in about:config in the address bar of the Firefox browser, you enter into the Firefox's configuration page. Here are some tweaks to make your browsing experience more pleasurable. The following are the tweaks that I have put in.

Fetch only what you click

Fx .6 and up: Firefox has this wacky little feature that downloads pages from links it thinks you may click on pages you view, like the top result on a page of Google results. This means you use up bandwidth and CPU cycles and store history for web pages you may not have ever viewed.

* Key: network.prefetch-next
* Modified Value: false

Turn off chrome tooltips



All versions: [snip] Like you, I already know what all the buttons on my browser chrome do, so the tool tips aren't necessary. To turn them off, set the browser.chrome.toolbar_tips key value to false.

* Key: browser.chrome.toolbar_tips
* Modified Value: false

Enable spellcheck
layout.spellcheckDefault = 2 turns on Firefox 2's spell-checking in input fields as well as textareas. (That means no more typos in Lifehacker post headlines!)

Hide the Go button at the end of address bar
* browser.urlbar.hideGoButton=true turns off the rarely-used Go button at the end of the address bar, for more room to see long URLs.

See other tweaks in Top Firefox 2 config tweaks