A couple of days ago, it finally occurred to me to look for a way to turn off the sluggish (on Linux, at least) drag-and-drop previews in Firefox. So, while I’m at it, I thought I’d list a few of the more interesting about:config keys which aren’t exposed by the Firefox 7 GUI.
Performance Tweaks
| browser.panorama.animate_zoom | Whether to animate when entering/leaving Tab Groups view |
| browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs | When set to 0, defers restoring tabs from a saved session until you actually click on them. |
| browser.tabs.animate | Whether to animate tab opening/closing |
| nglayout.enable_drag_images | Disable drag-and-drop thumbnails |
UI Customizations
| browser.backspace_action | Set to 2 to stop the Backspace key from navigating back in history when focus lies outside editable fields. (or 1 to make it mean PageUp) |
| browser.search.context.loadInBackground | Set to true in Firefox 13+ to restore the old “open in background” behaviour to the “Search Google for [selected text]” context menu. |
| browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll |
Set both of these to false for Chrome-like selection behavior |
| browser.urlbar.trimURLs | Bring back http:// in your address bar |
| middlemouse.contentLoadURL | Disable for predictable middle-click tab-closing on Linux |
| keyword.URL | Set the search engine Firefox uses by default when you type keywords in the address bar |
| keyword.enabled | Just disable keywords in the address bar altogether |
| ui.key.contentAccess | Controls which modifier key is used for web access keys.I often use web keys and never use browser keys, so I swapped values with ui.key.chromeAccess so web access keys use Alt and browser access keys use Alt+Shift.) |
| view_source.wrap_long_lines | Enable word-wrap in “View Source” |
“It’s My Computer”
| browser.blink_allowed | Set to false to kill blink tags while browsing Geocities-era pages. |
| browser.history.allowReplaceState | For if you’ve got a website which is abusing history.replaceState. |
| browser.link.open_newwindow | Set to 1 to prevent links and JavaScript from opening new windows/tabs. |
| browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction | Set to 0 to force JavaScript to always open new tabs rather than windows. |
| browser.link.open_newwindow.override.external | Lets you specify a different behaviour than open_newwindow for links opened from outside the browser. Set to 3 to open them in tabs. |
| browser.send_pings | Disable <a ping> |
| browser.send_pings.require_same_host | Just limit <a ping>‘s utility for tracking you across multiple sites |
| browser.sessionstore.privacy_level | Set to 2 to keep Session Restore from persisting cookies. |
| dom.disable_open_click_delay | Adjust this to fix some sneaky sites which open a pop-up AND navigate the existing tab when you click |
| dom.disable_window_open_feature.* | A bunch of properties for limiting what JavaScript can control when opening new windows/tabs |
| dom.popup_allowed_events | This controls what the popup blocker counts as “user-triggered” |
| image.animation_mode | Lets you control whether GIF and APNG will animate. Would be better if someone wrote a FlashBlock-like extension for it though. |
| layout.frames.force_resizability | Always show the splitter handles for <frameset>-based pages. |
| media.autoplay.enabled | Ignore autoplay="true" on HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags. (Doesn’t stop sites from calling play()) |
Let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed.
about:config Tweaks for Firefox 7 (and up) by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Is there a similar tweak to browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll for the search bar?
I don’t use the search bar myself but I took a quick look and didn’t find anything.
You may need an extension for it. (If I’m proven wrong, please let me know so I can update this page)