Firefox/Icecat Tips and Tricks
Mozilla Firefox used to be a great web browser. It's gone downhill from version 4. Here are some tricks to make the horrible new changes made by the stupid poor-website-design spirit developers more bearable.
Contents |
[edit] Actually show the protocol in the address bar
Go to about:config and add a new boolean named browser.urlbar.trimURLs and set it to true.
This setting is not present in Icecat, and adding it has no effect. This is because Icecat is a version of Firefox with more bugs.
[edit] Extentions you probably want to install
- Live http headers
- Webservers deliver more than just the web page asked for when a web browser (or other application) delivers a web-page. Live http headers is a great plug-in which makes the headers visible in Firefox in a variety of ways. This is specially handy if you are setting up a hidden Tor service and want to know just how much information the web-server actually gives a visitor about it's configuration (and other bits of information you may want to hide if the goal of running a hidden service is to keep the services location hidden)
- SwitchProxy
- Gives you a nice button where you can change proxy from the status-bar
[edit] Firefox extentions who do basically the same job as Privoxy
- Adblock Plus - http://adblockplus.org/ to block ads
- Adblock Filterset.G Updater - http://www.piercive.com/ to keep Adblock Plus up-to-date
- NoScript - http://noscript.net/ to disable JavaScript unless you authorise
These plugins will basically do the same thing as Privoxy, but you do get DNS leaks when using Firefox to browse via Tor without Privoxy.
[edit] Configuration Tweaks
You can change a few of the settings available to you as a Firefox user in the menu Edit -> Preferences.
However, there are more settings available to you as a Firefox user than what means the eye in the graphical interface.
Enter about:config in the navigation (adress) bar. You will find that there is a huge amount of settings beyond those available in the graphical interface.
[edit] Configuration tweaks for Tor users
These are good settings if you use Firefox to browse the Tor network using Privoxy (They are good settings for non-Tor users too)
network.http.keep-alive.timeout:600
(300ms default is OK usually, but 600 is better.)
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy:16
(The default network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy is 4)
network.http.pipelining:true
(Default- false. Some old HTTP/1.0 servers can't handle it.)
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests:8
(No default)
network.http.proxy.keep-alive:true
(Default- true, but double check)
network.http.proxy.pipelining:true
(Default- false)
[edit] Firefox Tips
You can press Shift+Ctrl+Del to clear stored private data in Firefox:
