After spending no less than 12 hours per day in front of my PCs, I generally believe that I know most of the tricks my most common applications have to offer. Undoubtedly, Firefox is used most often. Whether I am looking for Dumb Little Man stories or looking for leads to call for my real sales job, I am ALWAYS on Firefox searching the internet.
But you know, you guys may not be as nerdy as me and you probably have lives that exist off line. Therefore, we're going to share a nice bit of information from a fellow lifehack/productivity site.
In fact, the name of the site is Lifehack.org and it's a decent resource for daily tips that could improve life. Anyway, here are their tips to speed up Firefox browsing.
- More screen space; make your icons small.
- Smart keywords. If there’s a search you use a lot (let’s say IMDB.com’s people search), this is an awesome tool that not many people use.
- Keyboard shortcuts. This is where you become a real Jedi. It just takes a little while to learn these, but once you do, your browsing will be super fast.
- Auto-complete. This is another keyboard shortcut, but it’s not commonly known and very useful.
- Tab navigation. Instead of using the mouse to select different tabs that you have open, use the keyboard.
- Mouse shortcuts. Sometimes you’re already using your mouse and it’s easier to use a mouse shortcut than to go back to the keyboard.
- Delete items from address bar history
- User chrome. If you really want to trick out your Firefox, you’ll want to create a UserChrome.css file and customize your browser.
- Create a user.js file. Another way to customize Firefox, creating a user.js file can really speed up your browsing.
- about:config. The true power user’s tool, about.config isn’t something to mess with if you don’t know what a setting does.
- Add a keyword for a bookmark. Go to your bookmarks much faster by giving them keywords.
- Speed up Firefox. If you have a broadband connection (and most of us do), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. This allows Firefox to load multiple things on a page at once, instead of one at a time (by default, it’s optimized for dialup connections).
- Limit RAM usage. If Firefox takes up too much memory on your computer, you can limit the amount of RAM it is allowed to us.
- Reduce RAM usage further for when Firefox is minimized. This setting will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, taking up much less memory.
- Move or remove the close tab button. Do you accidentally click on the close button of Firefox’s tabs? You can move them or remove them, again through about:config.
To learn how to actually do these things, read the original article at Lifehack.org.
