Firefox Add-on to Access Hidden Tweaks and Settings
Using the Mozilla Foundation developed browser is indeed a piece of cake, and choosing amongst the myriad of add-ons to customize Firefox is also a rather straightforward process. For those of you that are eaten away by curiosity and want to look under the hood, there is now an add-on that lets you do just that – gain access to the advanced settings that are hidden away from sight.
The add-on I am talking about is called gui:config and works with Firefox 1.5 through 3.0, although you would be “security challenged” to use anything other than Firefox 3.0 since all previous versions of the broser are no longer supported by the Mozilla Foundation. Moving on, what gui:config does is it lets you access the preferences found in “about:config:”.
Once installed, the gui:config add-on will insert an "Advanced Settings" tab – click "Tools" and look under "Options". You will gain access to the following customization options:
- Six different customization areas: Accessibility, Browser, Style, Download, Bookmarks, and Developing.
- In the “Accessibility” category you will find options such as “Load clipboard as URL” and “Paste text from clipboard” when clicking the middle mouse button, and "Miscellaneous" options that let you customize how the “Backspace” button acts among others.
- In the “Browser” category you get to set if you will see an icon whenever the browser blocks a popup and you get to set how much disk space and memory will be used as cache.
- In the “Style” category you get to access features such as “Show Favicons”, “Show tooltips”, “Allow frames” and “Enable blinking text”.
- In the “Download” category you get to play with "Download manager" and "Alerts".
- In the “Bookmarks” category you have the option to enable “Load bookmarks in the background” and set the number of bookmark backups (or disable backups).
- The “Developing” category is meant for programmers, so casual users would best leave things alone in here.
If you would like to get gui:config, a download location is available here.
The add-on I am talking about is called gui:config and works with Firefox 1.5 through 3.0, although you would be “security challenged” to use anything other than Firefox 3.0 since all previous versions of the broser are no longer supported by the Mozilla Foundation. Moving on, what gui:config does is it lets you access the preferences found in “about:config:”.
Once installed, the gui:config add-on will insert an "Advanced Settings" tab – click "Tools" and look under "Options". You will gain access to the following customization options:
- Six different customization areas: Accessibility, Browser, Style, Download, Bookmarks, and Developing.
- In the “Accessibility” category you will find options such as “Load clipboard as URL” and “Paste text from clipboard” when clicking the middle mouse button, and "Miscellaneous" options that let you customize how the “Backspace” button acts among others.
- In the “Browser” category you get to set if you will see an icon whenever the browser blocks a popup and you get to set how much disk space and memory will be used as cache.
- In the “Style” category you get to access features such as “Show Favicons”, “Show tooltips”, “Allow frames” and “Enable blinking text”.
- In the “Download” category you get to play with "Download manager" and "Alerts".
- In the “Bookmarks” category you have the option to enable “Load bookmarks in the background” and set the number of bookmark backups (or disable backups).
- The “Developing” category is meant for programmers, so casual users would best leave things alone in here.
If you would like to get gui:config, a download location is available here.
