Lee Ferree

Mozilla released their new Firefox 3.5 browser today. Here’s some tips, tricks and tweaks that may come in handy after you upgrade.

1) If you use a lot of Firefox addons like I do, you may find some of them aren’t working with Firefox 3.5 yet. To get around this, simply do the following:

Type “about:config” into Firefox’s address bar and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Right-click anywhere. Choose New-> Boolean. Make the name of your new config value “extensions.checkCompatibility” and set it to “false“.
Make another new boolean value called “extensions.checkUpdateSecurity” and set the value to “false“.
Restart Firefox.

For users of the popular Firefox addon, Tab Mix Plus, the Dev-Build can be downloaded here.

2) Firefox 3.5 adds a new “Tab Tearing” feature that lets you drag tabs off the bar and into a new window. If you drag tabs around often, you may find this feature annoying, as it’s easy to accidentally drag tabs off the bar, creating a new Firefox window.

Here’s how to disable it:

First, install the Disable detach and tear off tab addon.

Once you’ve installed the experimental Firefox extension, you’ll need to open up Add-ons from the Tools menu, and then choose “Disable detach tab” from the extension options page.

3) Here’s an old tweak that increases the speed at which Firefox loads pages. If you haven’t already tried it, do yourself a favor and follow the steps listed below:

a) Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.

b) Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.

c) Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New–> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“

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This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by right-clicking and creating a New–> Integer or String

“network.dns.disableIPv6“: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0“