1. Turn off Google Search Suggestions in Firefox Awesome Bar

Firefox has a nice awesome bar placed at the right top of the browser window. This is how the “Awesome bar” looks in Firefox:

By default, the awesome bar consists of a list of search engines e.g Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Answers, Creative Commons and Wikipedia. The awesome bar lets you perform a search in any of these search engines right from the browser and without requiring to open the search engine in a new tab. This is useful but may be embarrassing some times. If you want to turn off the search suggestions in Firefox Awesome bar, follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Click the Search icon placed at the left top of Firefox Awesome bar and select “Manage Search Engines”.

2. In the next window, deselect the checkbox “Show Search suggestions” and press Ok. You are done.

The Firefox awesome bar search suggestions feature is disabled forever.

2. Search From the Firefox Address Bar

You can use the address bar to search using your favorite search engine (lets’ assume Google). Just follow the simple steps mentioned below:

1. Type about:config in Firefox address bar and click “I will be careful, I promise”.

2. In the next Window that appears, type keyword.URL as the filter type.

3. Double click the “Value” field and enter http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=

Press Ok and you are done. Type anything in the Firefox address bar and hit enter to perform search at Google. You can use the same procedure and tweak Firefox address bar to search for a keyword on a different search engine instead.

3. Turn Off Website and Bookmark Suggestions in Firefox Address Bar

The Firefox address bar has two useful features. First, you can bookmark websites right from the address bar by clicking the small yellow “star” icon placed at the extreme right. Second, when you type something – the Firefox address bar shows a list of websites as suggestions. These websites are shown depending upon your browsing history and bookmarks.

It can be really annoying to see address bar suggestions and you may want to completely turn off suggestions from showing up in the Firefox address bar. Just follow the simple steps mentioned below:

1. Click “Tools -> Options” and navigate to the “Privacy” tab.

2. You will see a setting for the Firefox Location bar under “When using the Location bar suggest”. Choose “Nothing” as the option.

3. That’s it. You have just tweaked Firefox not to show location bar suggestions from your browsing history and bookmarks.

4. Interchange the Position of Firefox Address Bar and Firefox Awesome Bar

If you use the Firefox Awesome bar for frequent searches, you might want to align it in the center. You may  want to interchange the positions of the Firefox address bar and the Firefox Awesome bar. The process is very simple and takes just a couple of minutes:

1. Right click on an empty area just above the Firefox awesome bar and select “Customize”.

2. This will open the customization window. Ignore the customization window and move the mouse cursor towards the left edge of the Firefox Awesome bar.

3. As soon as you move the cursor to the left edge, you will notice that the mouse cursor changes into a “hand icon”. Now select the Firefox Awesome bar with the “hand icon” and drag the bar towards the Firefox address bar. This will interchange the positions of Firefox address bar and awesome bar. You will get the Firefox awesome bar aligned in the center as shown below:

5. Combine the Firefox Address Bar and the Firefox Progress Bar

Here is a very quick and easy way to combine the progress bar with Firefox address bar (just like Safari). Download and install the Fission extension for Firefox, restart the browser and it’s all done.

Later, you can change the colors and position of the progress bar from the extension options. (Tools > Addons > Fission > Options)

6. Increase The Font Size of Firefox Address Bar

Do you find it real hard to read the URL’s in Firefox address bar? Want to increase the font size of Firefox address bar text? Install the Make Address Bar Font Size Bigger extension for Firefox. After installation, restart Firefox and you will see that the address bar font has grown bigger and better. Here is an example:

Also check out some really useful Firefox about config tricks and hacks. What’s your favorite Firefox address bar trick? Please share your ideas and suggestions in the comments section.

1. Database settings

define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

This is the first thing that you need to configure in order for WordPress to work. In most cases, you only need to change the database name, username and password. For the DB_HOST, ‘localhost’ should work most of the times. If not, ask your server administrator for details.

2. Changing the database charset value

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

You won’t have to change this value 99% of the time. Change this only if you are very sure that your database is using a different charset.

3. Changing the database character set sort order

define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Once again, change this only if you know what you are doing. If not, leaving it blank is the best option.

4. Authentication keys

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

The authentication keys are used to insure better encryption of information stored in the user’s cookies. Go to https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ to generate a new set of keys and copy/paste them into your wp-config.php file.

If you are using WPMU, you will see three extra sets of authentication keys:

define('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

5. Table prefix

$table_prefix = 'wp_';

This $table_prefix settings allow you to change the default wp_ prefix before your WordPress installation.

Note: If your existing database is already using the default wp_ prefix, changing this value will not change the database value, and it will also cause your site to break. To change your existing table prefix, refer to this tutorial.

6. Language and Language Directory

define('WPLANG', 'de_DE');
define('LANGDIR', 'mylanguagedirectory');

If you are using a language translation file for your blog, this is where you define the language that you are using and the location of the translation (.mo) files.

Defining of LANGDIR is optional. If it is not specified, WordPress will first look up the wp-content/languages folder, follow by wp-includes/languages for the .mo file.

7. Defining the Home and site url

define('WP_SITEURL','http://your-site-url.com');
define('WP_HOME','http://your-site-url.com');

The SITEURL refers to the actual installation path of WordPress (the file path where the wordpress files are located) while the HOME refers to the URL that you want your visitor to access. There are several uses for this

1. For security measure. Install your wordpress in subfolder and have your visitors access them from the root directory
2. Migrating to new URl. When you are moving to a new URL, you can easily restore your database by pointing the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME to the new URL. No editing of the database is required.

8. Revision count

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', FALSE);
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

Change the number of post revisions for WordPress to record. Giving it a value of FALSE (without the quote) will turn post revisions off.

9. Modify AutoSave Interval

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 160 );

When editing a post, WordPress uses Ajax to auto-save revisions to the post as you edit. You may want to increase this setting for longer delays in between auto-saves, or decrease the setting to make sure you never lose changes. The default is 60 seconds.

10. Define new wp-content location

define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content' );
define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://example/blog/wp-content');
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content/plugins' );
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://example/blog/wp-content/plugins');

Since WP2.6, you are allowed to move the wp-content folder to other destination and still get it working. You just need to specify the filepath of the new location in the wp-config file.

11. Access external configuration files

require_once(‘FilePathToConfigurationFiles’);

For developer, if you need to access external configuration file from within WordPress, the place to define it will be within the wp-config.php. This is useful when integrating another software with WordPress. For example, to integrate bbpress with WordPress, add the following

require_once(‘filepathtoforums/bb-load.php');

to access to the bbpress functions in WordPress.

12. Managing your cookies

define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.yoursite.com');
define('COOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', get_option('home') . '/' ) );
define('SITECOOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', get_option('siteurl') . '/' ) );
define( 'ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH', SITECOOKIEPATH . 'wp-admin' );
define( 'PLUGINS_COOKIE_PATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_PLUGIN_URL)  );

The cookie definition is meant for sites with unusual domain setup. If you are using sub-domains to serve static content, you won’t want WordPress to track the cookies for the static sites. Simply define the COOKIE_DOMAIN option to limit the domain tracked by the cookie.

13. Debug

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

The WP_DEBUG option is especially useful when you are developing a WP site. It allows you to see what went wrong in the code. In actual production site, this option should be turned off (FALSE) as it can affect the performance of the site.

Additionally, if you are planning on modifying some of WordPress’ built-in JavaScript, you can enable the following option:

define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true);

This will allow you to edit the scriptname.dev.js files in the wp-includes/js and wp-admin/js directories.

14. Configure Error Log

@ini_set('log_errors','On');
@ini_set('display_errors','Off');
@ini_set('error_log','/home/example.com/logs/php_error.log');

This option allows you to turn on php error_logging and logs them to a specific file. This is especially useful for those who have no access to the php.ini file.

15. Increasing memory allocated to PHP

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be necessary in the event you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”.

16. Cache

define('WP_CACHE', true);

Activate the WP_CACHE for better site performance.

17. Custom User and Usermeta Tables

define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', $table_prefix.'my_users');
define('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE', $table_prefix.'my_usermeta');

Save the user data to other table instead of the default wp_users.

18. Save queries for analysis

define('SAVEQUERIES', true);

The SAVEQUERIES option allows you to see all the queries made to the database. You can then analyze those queries and see the function that called it, and how long that query took to execute.

NOTE: This will have a performance impact on your site, so make sure to turn this off when you aren’t debugging.

To view the queries, place the following code in the footer of your theme:

<?php
if (current_user_can(‘level_10′)){
global $wpdb;
echo “<pre>”;
print_r($wpdb->queries);
echo “</pre>”;
}
?>

The code above uses the level_10 capability so only the administrator will see the query results.

19. Override of default file permissions

define('FS_CHMOD_DIR', (0755 & ~ umask()));
define('FS_CHMOD_FILE', (0644 & ~ umask()));

The above two options allow you to override the default file permissions. You won’t have to define this in most cases. However if your webhost uses restrictive permissions for all user files, then this is the way to go around it.

20. FTP/SSH Constants

define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpext');
define('FTP_BASE', '/path/to/wordpress/');
define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/');
define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/');
define('FTP_PUBKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub');
define('FTP_PRIKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa');
define('FTP_USER', 'username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org:21');

WordPress allows you to upgrade the core version and plugins from within the backend. However, some of you might not be able to enjoy the benefits due to the FTP connection issue. Simply update your wp-config file with the necessary FTP credential and your WP upgrade function should work fine.

21. Control Proxy Access

define('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', false);
define('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'api.wordpress.org');

The above options allow you to access external hosts from your domain. This is useful if you are in a restrictive environment (such as your comapny’s intranet) and you need to access an external host.

Protecting wp-config file

With so many information in the wp-config.php file, the last thing that you want is for hacker to see your wp-config file and gain access to your database.

Add the following code to your .htaccess file to prevent hackers from accessing your wp-config file.

# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

Did I miss out any tricks? Leave it in the comments

You may have installed countless add-on in Firefox to enhance your using experience, but if you want to get the most out of Firefox, you really have to hack your way into the about:config.

The about:config page contains most (if not, all) of Firefox configuration options. It is so far the most effective, and the most powerful way to tweak and enhance your Firefox performance. Here are 28 of the popular tweaks.

Accessing your about:config page

In your Firefox, type about:config in the address bar.

You will be shown a warning page. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to proceed.

On the main page, you will see a long list of configuration entries. Enter the name of the key you want to update in the “Filter” field. The list will narrow to only the entries that match your keyword as you type.

To modify the value, simply double click on the entry value field and update the entry. That’s all!

Isn’t that simple? Now, let’s get to the tweaking.

1) Adjust the Smart Location Bar’s Number of Suggestions

In Firefox 3, when you start typing in the location bar, a drop-down list of suggestion URLs will be shown. If you want it to show more than 12 suggestions (12 is the default), you can adjust the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults keys and get it to show the number you want.

Config name: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
Default: 12
Modified value: Set to your desired number of suggestion. If you want to disable it all together, set it to -1

2) Disable the session restore function

Firefox 3 automatically saves your session every 10 secs so that whenever it crashes, it can restore all your tabs. While this is a useful feature, some of you might find it irritating. To disable this function, toggle the value of browser.sessionstore.enabled to False

Config name: browser.sessionstore.enabled
Default: True
Modified value: False if you want to disable the session restore function

3) Adjust the Session Restore Saving Frequency

Same as above, if you decided to keep the session restore feature on, but want to reduce the session saving frequency, change the value of browser.sessionstore.interval so that Firefox will save the session at a longer interval.

Config name: browser.sessionstore.interval
Default: 10000 (in msecs, equivalent to 10secs)
Modified value: Set it to your desired value. 1000 means 1 sec and 60000 means 1 minute.

4) Enable Advanced Color Profile Support

Firefox has this advanced color profile features that display higher image quality. It is not enabled by default as it has a negative effect on the performance of the browser. If you are concern with the image quality rather than the performance, you can activated it via the gfx.color_management.enabled setting

Config name: gfx.color_management.enabled
Default: False
Modified value: True (if you want to activate the color profile support feature)

5) Disable Antivirus Scanning

This is mainly for Windows users. By default, Firefox 3 automatically scan the downloaded file with the default anti-virus application to make sure it is free of virus. If you download a big file, it could take a long time for the whole scanning process to complete. To increase the performance of the browser, you might want to consider disabling the anti-virus scanning via the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone key.

Config name: browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone
Default: True
Modified value: False (if you want to disable it)

6) Configuring The Scrolling Tabs

When you opened many tabs, Firefox will not keep on reducing the tab width. Instead, it shows a scrolling bar so that the min width (100px) is conserved and you can scroll to find your tabs. If you are those who don’t like the scrolling tab function and prefer Firefox to show all the tabs, regardless how small it is, you can set the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 to disable it. Similarly, if you want Firefox to display more tabs before showing the scrolling button, you can reduce the default value to a lower value, say 75 pixels.

Config name: browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
Default: 100
Modified value: 0 if you want to disable the scrolling functions, other values to set the min width value

7) Show/Disable Close button on Tabs

Some people love to see the Close (the red X) button on every tabs, but some hate it. Whatever is it, you can configure it to your preferences via the browser.tabs.closeButtons setting.

Config name: browser.tabs.closeButtons
Default: 1
Modified values:

• 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 strip

8) Extend Scripts Execution Time

In Firefox 3, a script is only given 10 seconds to respond, after which it will issue a unresponsive script warning. If you are hooked on a slow network connection, you might want to increase the script execution time via dom.max_script_run_time to cut down on the frequency of the no script warning.

Config name: dom.max_script_run_time
Default:10 (in secs)
Modified value: 20, or any values greater than 10

9) Handling JavaScript Popups

When you come across a site that executes a javascript open new window function, and if the popup window is without all the usual window features, i.e. back/forward/reload buttons, status bar etc, Firefox will automatically treat it as a popup and will not open it as a new tab. However, if you find this to be a nuisance and wanted to open all new windows in a new tabs, you can specify it via the browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction setting.

Config name: browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction
Default: 2 – Open all JavaScript windows the same way as you have Firefox handle new windows unless the JavaScript call specifies how to display the window
Modified values:

• 0 – open all links as how you have Firefox handle new windows
• 1 – do not open any new windows
• 2- open all links as how you have Firefox handle new windows unless the Javascript specify how to display the window

10) Enable Spell Checking In All Text Fields

The default spell checking function only checks for multi-line text boxes. You can get it to spell-check for single line text box as well.

Config name: layout.spellcheckDefault
Default: 1 (spell checker for multi-lines text boxes only)
Modified values:

• 0 – disable the spell checker
• 2 – enable the spell checker for all text boxes

11) Open Search Box Results In New Tab

When you search using the search box at the top right hand corner of the browser, it will display the search results in the current tab. If you don’t want the search to interfere with your current tab, you can tweak the browser.search.openintab to make it open in a new tab.

Config Name: browser.search.openintab
Default: False
Modified value: True (open search box results in new tab)

12) Lower The Physical Memory Used When Minimized

This tweak is mainly for Windows users. When you minimize Firefox, it will send Firefox to your virtual memory and free up your physical memory for other programs to use. Firefox will reduce its physical memory usage, when minimized, to approximately 10MB (give or take some) and when you maximize Firefox it will take back the memory that it needs.

The preference name does not exist and needs to be created.

Right click on the background and select New->Boolean.

Enter the name when prompted: config.trim_on_minimize
Enter the values: True

13) Speed up your Firefox

Several tweaks required for this

Config name: network.http.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

Config name: network.http.proxy.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

Config name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Default: 4
Modified value: any value higher than 4, but not more than 8

Config name: network.http.max-connections
Default: 30
Modified value: 96

Config name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Default: 15
Modified value: 32

14) Increase/Decrease the Amount of Disk Cache

When a page is loaded, Firefox will cache it into the hard disk so that it doesn’t need to be download again for redisplaying. The bigger the storage size you cater for Firefox, the more pages it can cache.

Before you increase the disk cache size, make sure that browser.cache.disk.enabled browser.cache.disk.enable is set to True.

Config name: browser.cache.disk.capacity
Default: 50000 (in KB)
Modified value:

• 0 – disable disk caching
• any value lower than 50000 reduces the disk cache
• any value higher than 50000 increases the disk cache.

15) Select all text when click on the URL bar

In Windows and Mac, Firefox highlights all text when you click on the URL bar. In Linux, it does not select all the text. Instead, it places the cursor at the insertion point. Regardless which platform you are using, you can now tweak it to either select all or place cursor at insertion point.

Config name: browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
Modified value:

• False – place cursor at insertion point
• True – select all text on click

16) Autofill Address in URL Bar

Other than the smart location feature, you can also get your URL bar to autofill the address as you type the URL.

Config name: browser.urlbar.autofill
Default: False
Modified value: True (Have Firefox autofill the address as you type in the URL bar)

17) Same Zoom Level For Every Site

Firefox remembers your zoom preference for each site and set it to your preferences whenever you load the page. If you want the zoom level to be consistent from site to site, you can toggle the value of browser.zoom.siteSpecific from True to False.

Config name: browser.zoom.siteSpecific
Default: True
Modified value: False (enable same zoom preferences for every sites)

18) Setting your zoom limit

If you find that the max/min zoom level is still not sufficient for your viewing, you can change the zoom limit to suit your viewing habits.

Config name: zoom.maxPercent
Default: 300 (percent)
Modified value: any value higher than 300

Config name: zoom.minPercent
Default: 30 (percent)
value: any value

19) Configure Your Backspace Button

In Firefox, you can set your backspace to better use by getting it to either go back to the previous page or act as page up function.

Config name: browser.backspace_action
Default: 2 (does nothing)
Modified value:

• 0 – go back previous page
• 1- page up

20) Increase Offline Cache

If you do not have access to Internet most of the time, you might want to increase the offline cache so that you can continue to work offline. By default, Firefox 3 caches 500MB of data from supported offline Web apps. You can change that value to whatever amount of your choice.

Config name: browser.cache.offline.capacity
Default: 512000 (in KB)
Modified value: any value higher than 512000 will increase the cache value

21) Auto Export Firefox 3 bookmarks to bookmarks.html

Unlike the previous version, Firefox 3 backup the bookmarks file in places.sqlite rather than the usual bookmarks.html. Since bookmarks.html allows us to export and sync our bookmarks with other browser, it will be very useful if Firefox 3 can backup the bookmark to the bookmarks.html as well.

Config name: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML
Default: False
Modified value: True (auto export bookmarks file to bookmarks.html)

22) Disable Extension Compatibility Checks

This is useful if you want to use an extension that is not supported by your version of Firefox badly. It is not recommended, but you can still do it at your own risk.

Right click and select New->Boolean. Enter extensions.checkCompatibility in the field. Enter False in the next field.

Right click again and select New->Boolean. Enter extensions.checkUpdateSecurity into the field and enter False into the next field.

23) Disable Delay Time When Installing Add-on

Everytime you wanted to install a Firefox add-on, you will have to wait for several secs before the actual installation starts. If you are tired of waiting, you can turn the function security.dialog_enable_delay off so that the installation will start immediately upon clicking.

Config name: security.dialog_enable_delay
Default: 2000 (in msec)
Modified value:

• 0 – start installation immediately
• any other value (in msec)

24) View Source in Your Favorite Editor

This is very useful for developers who are always using the ‘view source‘ function. This tweak allows you to view the source code in an external editor.

There are two configuration need to be made:
Config name: view_source.editor.external
Default: False
Modified value: True ( enable view source using external text editor)

Config name: view_source.editor.path
Default: blank
Modified value: insert the file path to your editor here.

25) Increasing ‘Save Link As‘  timeout value

When you right click and select the ‘Save Link As…‘, the browser will request the content disposition header from the URL so as to determine the filename. If the URL did not deliver the header within 1 sec, Firefox will issue a timeout value. This could happen very frequently in a slow network connection environment. To prevent this issue from happening frequently, you can increase the timeout value so as to reduce the possibility of a timeout.

Config name: Browser.download.saveLinkAsFilenameTimeout
Default: 1000 (1 sec)
Modified value: any value higher than 1000 (value is in msec)

26) Animate Fullscreen Toolbar Collapse mode

In Firefox’s fullscreen mode, toolbars and the tab strip are hidden at the top of the screen and only shown on mouseover. To draw attention to this, there is an animation of the toolbar sliding upwards and off-screen when fullscreen mode is toggled on. For performance issue, the animation of the collapse of the toolbar only appear for the first time. For some reason that you may love/hate the animation, you can adjust Browser.fullscreen.animateUp to switch it on/off for every collapse.

Config name: Browser.fullscreen.animateUp
Default: 1 (animate the toolbar collapse only the first time)
Modified value:

• 0 -disable the animation
• 2- enable the animation for every collapse

27) Autohide Toolbar in Fullscreen mode

In fullscreen mode, the toolbar is set to autohide and appear upon mouseover. If you have a need to view the toolbar at all time, you can toggle the value of browser.fullscreen.autohide to False to always show the toolbar.

Config name: browser.fullscreen.autohide
Default: True (always autohide)
Modified value: False (always show the toolbar)

28) Increase Add-On search result

If you go to Tools->Add-ons->Get Add-ons and perform a search there, Firefox will only fetch and display 5 matching results. If you want Firefox to show more than 5 results (say 10), you can adjust extensions.getAddons.maxResults to get it to display more results.

Config name: extensions.getAddons.maxResults
Default: 5
Modified value: any value more than 5

This list of about:config is definitely not the complete list. If you have any tricks not listed here, please add it in the comment.