Brian Cook Presents

I’m a bona fide Firefox fan (I also like a little alliteration). Ever since installing Firefox way back in 2005, I’ve loved the tabbed browsing, sane handling of CSS and overall vibe of the community. In all of those departments, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer compares unfavorably. One of the greatest things about Firefox is how open it is to tweaks, allowing users to customize almost everything about it. Here are the first three tweaks I made after downloading Firefox 3:

1. Shrinking the Back Button

I’m pretty handy with the mouse, so I don’t need such a big target for a Back button. I found a good, simple guide for shrinking the back button on Lifehacker. It gives me a little more real estate, which I desperately need since I only have two monitors at work (damn you Canz!)

2. Searching the Content of a Page by Just Typing

Frequently, the need arises to find some text on a page, be it code, mentions of my name, or the word “tickets.” Going to Tools –> Options –> Advanced –> General, then checking the box next to “Search for text when I start typing” lets me skip the step where I have to go to Edit –> Find on Page. On the downside, I had to shut it off to be able to enter text in some fields, including this one.

3. Google Results Page Instead of Feeling Lucky in the Address Bar

If you type a keyword into the address bar and hit Enter, Firefox will take you to the first Google result by default. I do Google searches frequently, and the search results pages (SERPs) are of interest to me, since I want to know where I’m ranking. To change this, I simply typed “about:config” into the address bar, promised Firefox not to be naughty, and searched for the keyword. URL switch. I right-clicked, selected “Modify” and changed the URL from:

http://www.google.com/search? ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

to

http://www.google.com/search? ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&q=\

And that’s it! What tweaks have you made? Leave a comment.

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