Okay, i don’t blame you for assuming that this is going to be another one of those posts where someone piles up a ton of redundant lame tricks that don’t even work, but trust me you’re in for a treat because not only do these tricks work, they’re also safe and.. i’m sure that you haven’t seem most of them.  This post will teach you how to Optimize firefox, make it more user friendly aswell as accquaint you to almost all firefox shortcuts!

Anyway lets begin shall we?
1. Adding Smart Keywords (search a site without opening it..):

I’m sure everyone here uses search engines alot.. right? But.. what if you have a slow connect.. or you’re just damn lazy and don’t want to open the site everytime you want to search it.. (for example IMDB, it takes alot of loading time.. or ebay.. ), this trick is going to solve that little problem. First of all i’m going to run you through the basic concept; you associate a keyword with a search box, for example “ebay” and when you want to search ebay.. you type in “ebay search words” where search words are the text you want to search for.. it’ll automatically search ebay without you having to open ebay.com first.. and then enter the search words, nice no.. now for the technicalities:

Open the search engine you want to add a keyword to, rightclick on the search bar and click “Add a keyword for this Search”, insert a name (anything.. its only so you can open it later through bookmarks for editing etc) and then insert a keyword.. this is the word you want to use to open that search engine.. i.e. “ebay” was the keyword in our example.. click okay and you’re done!

2. Add Keywords to Bookmarks:

This trick is similar to the first one.. but its also very un-common.. basically you associate a keyword to a specific bookmark and when you type that keyword into your address bar it opens that bookmark automatically, simple really. Right click a bookmark, click properties.. and type in the keyword in the “Keyword” field, click okay and you’re done :D.

3. Limit RAM usage for Firefox:

Does Firefox hang up on you, do you have low ram? no worries.. we’re going to teach firefox to produce the same results without using a huge chunk of your memory.. its pretty easy:

Type “about:config” in your address bar (click “I’ll be careful, i promise!” don’t worry.. its safe.. :P). Type “browser.cache.disk.capacity” in the filter search bar.. and click “browser.cache.disk.capacity”.. and change its value (default = 50000).. depending upon your ram.. around 15000 if you’re between 1gb and 512mb and lower if you’re on 128-512.. (somewhere between 10000 and 12000). Click okay and close the tab, restart firefox and notice the lower ram consumption!

4. Reduce RAM usage even further:

Okay, the basic idea behind this trick is to reduce RAM usage when firefox is minimized.. basically the memory being used by firefox when its minimized is shifted from the RAM to the harddisk i.e. making your pc faster and.. it doesn’t effect firefox’s browsing speed so theres no downside. Again, open about:config, right-click anywhere and select New > Boolean. Name the new value “config.trim_on_minimize” and set it to TRUE. Click okay and restart firefox and you’re done.

5. Move/Remove the Close Tab Button (the red and white X):

Ever closed a tab by accident? (when you’re posting especially).. :p annoying isn’t it? well this trick fixs that problem. Open about:config. Type “browser.tabs.closeButtons” in the filter bar.. and edit its value. Here are the meanings of each value:

• 0: Display a close button on the active tab only
• 1: Display close buttons on all tabs
• 2:Don’t display any close buttons
• 3:Display a single close button at the end of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x behavior)

6. Useful Keyboard Shortcuts:

• Spacebar (page down)
• Shift-Spacebar (page up)
• Ctrl+F (find)
• Alt-N (find next)
• Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
• Ctrl+T (new tab)
• Ctrl+K (go to search box)
• Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
• Ctrl+= (increase text size)
• Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
• Ctrl-W (close tab)
• F5 (reload)
• Alt-Home (go to home page)

That wraps it up.. happy reading!