I’ve been trying to clean things up today, and a part of that is trying to get rid of a few things about Firefox that annoy me. Maybe “annoy” is too strong of a word. Inconvenience might be a better one. Anyway, I figured I would play and see what I can find out.
First, extensions. I’ve installed fireFTP. I like it, in that it’s got an interface right there in my browser, but it is not quite right. I can’t put my finger on it. Part of it is that keyboard navigation doesn’t seem to quite work, and part of it is that there seems to be a delay that I can’t seem to time just right. Since there is no real notification when something completes (a sound perhaps), I find myself sitting and looking at the screen. I’ll use it some more, but I’m leaning towards dumping it.
I also installed FoxyTunes. This is a very sweet extension, though I’m not sure that I listen to music enough to use it. Still, the design and interface is awesome, and I’ll likely use it to enhance the interface to the Bloglines Toolkit when I get the chance. I really like FoxyTunes because it gives me quick access to volume and mute – something that was annoying me about the Windows volume control. I think it likely that I’ll keep it.
Finally, I decided to do some tweaking on the UI.
I use Google a dozen times a day. Probably much more than that. It’s always a pain for me to run a Google query while I’m in the middle of something on another page. I usually use CTRL-N to open a new tab, then click on the address bar and enter “google”, then the search string. Blech. I rarely use the “feeling lucky” search, so I have had to go to the site itself, not just type the search string in the address bar.
So I tried using the search bar in Firefox, but that wasn’t doing it for me either. Then I stumbled upon this tip that seemed as if it would work. Nope. Didn’t seem to do a thing. I had almost given up when I found another link (now dead), which tells you how to do it: Type about:config in the address bar, find browser.search.defaulturl and set it to the value you want. Bingo. Now I just CTRL-L to get to the address bar, type the query, and it takes me to Google. Sweet!
Update: After this last step stopped working, I had to go hunting again. This site held the answer. Instead of changing browser.search.defaulturl, change keyword.URL. This may be a change in Firefox 1.5 (though my earlier version worked okay without it) or it might be something else. Regardless, this should fix you up.
Comments
8 responses to “Tweaking Firefox”
I know this is VERY old but just wanted to say thanks for your tip about the keword.URL thing…I installed a toolbar that had Yahoo bundled with it but didnt say it did and then Yahoo decides to be their-usual-prick-selves and set themselves as the keyword.URL value and that annoyed the crap out of me to no end.
However they have improved the browser search function since your post and now you can just press Ctrl+K to jump to the browser search and use Google from there.
Thank you!
I was searching for the way to alter the I feel lucky default URL path, and this page told me it’s keyword.URL (not browser.search.defaulturl).
S Todd – I installed a fresh copy of Firefox on another computer, only to find that the above tip didn’t work – browser.search.defaulturl didn’t seem to take, even after a restart. So I reset that one, and tried changing keyword.url, and sure enough, after I restarted it seems to be working exactly as expected. Completely bizarre!
Not sure what you mean, Chris. You seem to be a bit confused about the order of things.
I still needed to access about:config in order to appropriately set the search query – that part has nothing to do with opening in a new tab or not.
After the value is set, then it could be certainly okay – but I don’t use the search bar either, because it’s another bar. There’s really no need for it.
If you use the Tabbrowser Preferences, you can set searches from Firefox’s search bar to always open a new tab. Then there’s no need to edit anything in the about:config.
Interesting – I read that the keyword option should work in one place, but then I found the browser option in another. I tried both, but only the latter worked for me. Perhaps it’s a version issue. I’m using 1.0 – what do you use?
Thanks. I needed to go to about:config and change
keyword.URL
rather than
browser.search.defaulturl
If anyone knows a clear description of the sequence?
Also, I had to restart before it took
(and it crashed on the first restart)
Hmmmm. I’ll have to give fireFTP a try. I’ve been looking for an FTP client, and something resident in the browser would be nice.
I guess that’s one of the nice bit about FF — that folks can extend it easily in different directions and plug and unplug stuff pretty easily.