Alioth recently recommended a web page on speeding up Firefox. I am trying out the suggested settings (except that I’ve set maxrequests to eight instead of thirty) and there seems to be some improvement but not a dramatic one. It’s hard to tell for sure. Anyway, I’ll keep the new settings unless they seem to cause problems later on.
This seems as good a time as any to discuss the themes and extensions that I’ve installed for Firefox (actually, that’s the real point of this post; the bit above is simply an excuse). What I won’t discuss are my gripes with the software (of which I have several), except when they are relevant to my choice of extensions. One of my gripes can be found in a comment I wrote on Alioth’s post above.
My theme of choice is Whitehart, which I just happen to find the most aesthetically pleasing one available. This is simply a matter of personal taste.
Many useful extensions don’t so much add new functionality as make existing functionality more convenient. I use the extensions Text Size Toolbar and Read Easily, which respectively bring text size adjustment and style toggling from the menus into the toolbar, where I feel they properly belong. (I do not wish to debate the merits of toolbar buttons with keyboard shortcut nuts.)
The Extended Cookie Manager serves a dual purpose. It provides a more convenient way to change cookie settings for individual domains, but just as importantly, it provides a graphical representation of whether or not the page you are currently viewing uses cookies, and if so, what your settings enable it to do. There exist other extensions which do the former but not the latter, and are therefore not equivalent.
Another extension I use a lot is LinkVisitor. This enables you to mark visited links as unvisited, or unvisited links as visited. Extremely useful for forums and other websites where you use link colours to keep track of where you’re up to. (Also for making a page look neater before printing it.)
Sometimes it’s useful to view a page as though as I were using Internet Explorer, and for that, IE Tab is my friend. I find this particularly useful for downloading media with IE-style buffering. Another extension that simulates IE-like behaviour is Show Picture, but if I remember correctly it’s incompatible with the Extended Cookie Manager so I can’t use it.
NewTabURL is buggy, but still useful. What I’d really like is the “locking” feature available in Tab Mix Plus (which I thought of independently). Unfortunately, Tab Mix Plus is infamous for being incompatible with other extensions, including Extended Cookie Manager, so I can’t use it (besides, it’s overkill, containing many features I don’t want). I would be grateful if someone could create a cut-down version of TMP that implements the tab locking feature and is compatible with ECM, and preferably enables me to lock and unlock tabs by double-clicking on them (which TMP does not allow). For those of you who aren’t sure what tab locking is, basically the idea is that while a tab is locked it cannot be made to display a different page, and so all links and so forth are forced to open in a new tab. When a tab is unlocked it behaves normally, so links are opened in the existing tab. To my way of thinking, this is the way tabbed browsing ought to work.
One of my Firefox gripes is that there are large sections of Unicode that it won’t display, so I have the Character Identifier extension installed as a crude work-around. And finally, I use the BugMeNot Firefox extension.
