Firefox tinkerings

Various Firefox customisations are necessary in these days of oversimplification.

Search

In order to keep the old Firefox search settings instead of the new ones that conceal what search engine you are using until you hit return, you need to go into about:config and look for:

browser.search.showOneOffButtons

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working for me right now so I will probably have to ditch my profile and recreate my settings manually - actually, it turns out that Fx is now forcing users to use the crappy way of doing it they chose in v29 (I think it was), I'm looking into Pale Moon, which is a fork of the Fx source that still uses the "good way" of doing search. Which mean I also need to use

xpinstall.signatures.required

set to false so I can use the unofficial echofon extension.

In the end, I am using an extension called Classic Theme Restorer to bring back the search functionality I want.

So you know:

 
left: Fx Search bad, right: Fx search good

Don't forget to also set:

browser.search.openintab

To make sure the search bar doesn't overwrite the current tab.

Full-screen message

Another one. Set:



full-screen-api.warning.timeout

To 17 to reduce the timeout for the usual "XXX is now full-screen. Exit full screen (Esc)" message. You can't reduce it to less than that otherwise the message stays on-screen until dismissed. Its normal setting is 1000. (Update 160110: This doesn't seem to work on restart of the machine, so I've set it back to default for the time being)

Alt-s shortcut

Another one, slightly more abstruse. I am on several vBulletin forums and am used to using the Alt-s shortcut to post. Firefox recently changed so that Alt-s was used to open the menus and would no longer work for posting. As usual, tweaking about:config sorts it. 

Change

ui.key.chromeAccess to 5
ui.key.contentAccess to 4 

and Alt-s works again!