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!

Yay! Greasemonkey's back

I've been without the invaluable Greasemonkey for about three weeks and have finally had time to sit down and work through it methodically. All the solutions proposed to create new profiles etc. did not work for me. The only thing that did in the end was remove extensions one by one, restarting each time and adding Greasemonkey and restarting again to see if it got installed. I removed extensions in ascending order of importance, starting with Greasemonkey collections from Lifehacker since obviously they couldn't be used without Greasemonkey in the first place. I removed; restarted; added Greasemonkey; restarted about five times in total, each time making a note of what extension I removed. The fifth one removed was Distrust, an extension for secure browsing, and that did it. Greasemonkey was installed. I reinstalled the extensions I had removed and all still works well.

Dark is the new light

In common with most things professional these days on confusers, taking your interface colours down a notch proves restful for the eyes when staring at a screen for megahours as is common. I recently installed a new theme on Fx called PitchDark, which darkens all the surrounds to my actual web browsing nicely, but I still had the shocking white about:blank page whenever I started Firefox. The solution is as shown to the left made possible by editing the usercontent.css script in your Firefox profile (a task much simplified if you use the MR Tech Toolkit extension) to add the following stuff from this page: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2007/12/customize-firefox-blank-page/ to it, I just changed the default BRIGHT YELLOW!!! to a more sober #211111. The Firefox logo is encoded in BQSE64 in the css.

Quick Fx tip

To allow you to use Alt S to submit posts in a variety of forum software and to save elsewhere in Firefox you might need to change this: ui.key.contentAccess in Firefox's config. To do so type about:config in the location bar and click to continue. Then enter the above into the filter field and change the 5 to a 4.

Nice Fx extension: Auto Context

Found an extremely nifty extension for Firefox this evening, Auto Context. It watches for when you select some text and then pops up a menu offering you choices, like so:


This is very handy for when you want to just copy text off a page without getting all the HTML so that your word processor doesn't overwrite your existing styles, and the "Search with..." option at the bottom of the list gives you all the search engines you have in the search field. The options you can see are the ones I wanted to keep but there is a very comprehensive options window to put exactly what you want up.

PS. Using this extension I can remove Context Search and Right Click Link.

PPS. I ought to give you the AMO link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5714