You can never know enough about Firefox. I’ve been using it for many years now, and I am still uncovering its vast depths. There are many features that you may not know about, and I definitely won’t have enough room here to cover them all. Therefore, I’ll start off with the ones I think are the most important. You may know some of these all ready, so bear with me!

Hints and tricks to make your online experience the best it can be!

1. about:config This has to be one of the most interesting things you can do with Firefox. You can customize the browser completely with this, and I’ll just show you a select few of useful features. So to start, I will demonstrate how to speed up your browsing.

In the address bar, type about:config and promise to be careful…

Use the filter tool to find network.http.pipelining double click on it so it becomes True

Filter again for network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set it to a value like 8 (or greater if your really desperate..)

Another filter! plugin.expose_full_path and again, double click.

Filter this time for network.http.proxy.pipelining and make it true, by double clicking again.

Again, filter for network.dns.disableIPv6 again, double click on this to make it true.

These are the basics, and there is a lot more in there to play with if you know what you are doing, though this will speed up your browser indefinitely.

2. Addons There are some really good add-ons that I recommend you use, which you can see below:

• Adblock Plus
• For the developers: FireBug
• DownThemAll
• Xmarks
• Stumble upon – Great for killing time

3. Mouse Shortcuts

Zoom in and out of the site that you are viewing with ctrl + mouse wheel.

To open a link in a new tab, middle click on it. To close a tab, middle click on it.

To open a blank tab,  double click on the tab bar where there are no tabs.

4. Keyboard Shortcuts

Ctrl + t opens a new tab (many know this all ready).

Ctrl + tab moves one tab to the right.

Ctrl + r does the same as f5 (reloads the page)

Esc stops the page from loading.

If you type something in the address bar, and press ctrl + enter, it automatically changes it into www.[your text].com

Ctrl 1 – 9 changes to the corresponding tab.

Ctrl + d bookmarks the current page.

Ctrl + Shift + Del deletes private data (ie. history, passwords, cookies etc)

There are many more, but thats not for just now.

5. Dragging and Dropping You can drag items all over the place in firefox, for example, to quickly bookmark a page, you can simply drag its favicon into your bookmarks menu or toolbar. You can also drag links into your bookmarks. If you drag a link on a site into the address bar, you will be taken to that page. If you drag a link into the search bar, you will automatically search it. You can select text, and then drag it into the search bar.

6.Customizing toolbars

You can change the way your toolbars look by going into View > Toolbars > Customize then playing with the different things. Currently mine isn’t too different, as you can see below.

If you want to get it back to how it was originally, just go into that menu, and press Restore Default Set

7. Various

You can set keywords for bookmarks, these can be set when you bookmark it initially, or afterwards by right clicking on the bookmark >>properties >> and then typing in your keyword in the “Keyword” field.

If you install the StumbleUpon addon, you can stumble in another tab by middle clicking on the “Stumble!” button.

Thankyou for reading and if you have anything to add to this list, feel free to by commenting below as well as any other feedback.