Faster! Accelerate Firefox 3.6 page scrolling

Firefox 3.6 has yet another secret feature that could significantly improve your web browsing on Windows: scroll acceleration.

By default, when you scroll the mouse wheel, the web page is scrolled the same number of lines no matter how many times you have already scrolled it. But, if you have scrolled the page a certain number of times in a short period, probably you are looking for something far below or above, and accelerating may be helpful.

Firefox 3.6 tips and tweak

Here are five quick tips to enhance your Firefox 3.6 experience.

1. Open links in the tab bar far right

In Firefox 3.6, links opened from a web page (middle-clicking on them or from the context menu) open to the right of the current page to keep related content closer by default. To restore the previous behavior, access the advanced preferences by visiting about:config, then look for preference browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to false.

2. Enable tab previews

If you prefer to see tabs thumbnails when switching tabs with Ctrl + Tab, set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true via about:config.

3. Enable tab previews menu button

Convert the list all tabs button (far right in the tab bar), set browser.allTabs.previews to true via about:config.

4. Tab previews hotkey

To quickly access the all tabs preview panel (once enabled) and search press Shift + Ctrl + Tab.

5. Hide the menu bar

On Windows, you can now hide the menu bar to gain a few thousand pixels for the actual content. Right-click on the menu bar and uncheck Menu Bar. To show it temporarily, press the Alt key.

Like Personas? Get Personas Plus for more

Personas is now available for everybody who updated to Firefox 3.6, just released yesterday. However, before been a feature, it was an extension, developed by Mozilla Labs. It’s the first of hopefully a long list of innovations to come to Firefox (and most likely, other web browsers as well). Other Mozilla Labs’ projects including Prism, Weave, and Jetpack are next in line (Ubiquity will come later).

Now that personas are available for Firefox 3.6, the original extension has been rebranded as Personas Plus, as it provides even more functionality. Here are a few reasons you may want to try Personas Plus:

Vacuum Firefox databases for better performance, now with no restart

A few months ago, I posted how to improve Firefox performance by defragmenting its database files executing SQLite VACUUM command. The only con was that it required a Firefox restart to execute the command.

Thanks to Mozilla’s Jeremy Orem, we have now learned it can be done from within Firefox in two short steps:

Vacuum your Firefox databases for better performance

Since Firefox 3.0, bookmarks, history and most storage is kept in SQLite databases. Also, the default history time span was raised from 9 to 90 days as it became more discoverable and useful thanks to the awesome bar, so depending on your browsing habits it could represent some pretty large databases.

Aas any other database, SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear all around. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these factors eventually result in a performance hit. So, a good way to improve startup and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases.

Workaround for Firefox 3.5 slow startups on Windows

If you find yourself with very long startup times after upgrading to Firefox 3.5 (from say 10 seconds to the order of minutes), you may be experimenting a bug due to a change in how Firefox 3.5 gets the randomness it needs for security purposes on Windows.

The procedure involves scanning some temporary folders looking for bits normally added by OS and other applications operations. Firefox 3.5 looks for more files and deeper (more subfolders) for increased randomness, but it has led to unexpected results for users with too many temporary folders or files resulting in slow startups.

Get full screen native video in Firefox 3.5, then skin it

By now you probably know that one of Firefox 3.5 main features is the ability to show video encoded in Theora format natively, that is without the need of a plugin or any other software.

As good as this is, it has no option for showing the video in full screen. But as usual, it didn’t take much time before a extension came to the rescue to provide the necessary feature (in fact it has been available before Firefox 3.5 final).

Disable tab tearing and six other Firefox 3.5 tab tweaks

With every Firefox release comes change, and Firefox 3.5 is no exception. While the changes are always well intentioned and aimed to make our web life easier, it’s not always like that for everyone, hence, there’s always something new to tweak.

Accessing about:config through the location bar, checking some setting, updating a file, or installing an extension, there’s usually a way to make things work your way.

Quickly find unread tabs in Firefox

Right-click on a link -> Open Link in New Tab, or simply middle-clicking, are pretty common tasks in a world of tabbed browsers, that allow us to differ some web content for a few minutes or even seconds. Unless you happen to forget where the tab actually opened or what was the page about and the unread tab goes unnoticed.

With a simple tweak to Firefox’s interface customization files, this becomes a thing of the past. In the image below, can you figure out which tabs I haven’t read yet?

Yeap, the ones with the italicized titles. To apply the same tweak, first locate your userChrome.css file, located in the chrome folder in your profile folder. If you don’t see it, just copy the provided userChrome-example.css file to the same location and rename it. Then add this line:

#content tab:not([selected]) {font-style: italic !important; }

Then restart Firefox and it will get much harder to miss a tab. Note that for some reason, moving tabs around set the font back to normal even if you haven’t clicked on it yet.

Update Firefox’s search bar with new Google favicon, again

So Google has updated its logo once again. If having different icons in the search bar and the location bar while on a Google results page makes you feel like there’s yet another item in your to-do list, here’s some relief.

You can update the Firefox’s default Google search plugin to show the new Google search icon:

1. Download this updated version of the Google search plugin. (Only change is the updated data: url for the favicon)
2. Copy it to your searchplugins folder in your Firefox install folder  (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ on Windows), and overwrite the existing google.xml file.
3. Save the file and restart Firefox.

Now you have the current favicon and can rest.