Firefox 4 Tips and Tricks

Mozilla Firefox has proven to be the most successful challenger to Microsoft Internet Explorer and is fast closing in on the usage share of IE. The recently released Firefox 4 proved that this browser is indeed very popular with it crossing 10 million downloads in just 24 hours, beating the record recently set by IE9 by a huge margin. Today, we will show you how you can make this already popular browser even better by using some easy to do tips and tricks.

Save tabs on exit
There were quite a few changes made in this version of Firefox, and while some were good, a few were not. Users of earlier version of Firefox were shocked to find out that there is no longer any option to save tabs on exit, so that those tabs are restored the next time you start Firefox and continue from where you were last time. This was a very good feature and while it would have made sense to disable it when we had only slow dial-up internet, it just doesn't make sense removing it when almost everyone has decent internet connections. But it is not entirely true that this feature has been taken out. You can still enable it by diving into the advanced configuration settings of Firefox.

Type "about:config" (without the quotes), in the Firefox 4 address bar and hit ENTER.

Now you will see a warning, just click on "I'll be careful, I promise" button.

You will see a host of settings which can be changed to alter the way this browser behaves. Type browser.show in the Filter dialog box to narrow down to the setting you want to change.

You will now see that there is only one setting in the list below - browser.showQuitWarning, and it is set to false. Right-click on it and click on Toggle to set it to true. Firefox 4 will now ask you to save your tabs when you exit and will restore them automatically the next time you launch the browser.

Enable Menu Bar
Yet another popular and important feature that is not visible in the new iteration of Firefox, is the Menu bar (where you see File, Edit, View, etc).

To get back this option, all you need to do is simply right-click on the space to the right of the plus sign next to New Tab and select Menu Bar. The Menu Bar will instantly appear and it will remain there until you manually go and disable it from here.

Disable extensions incompatibility warning
Firefox 4 reports that many of your old extensions are not compatible with the new version. The best bet for you is to check for an update for the extension and install it if it is available. But developers may not be able to bring out an update so soon, so in the meantime, you can disable this compatibility check so that Firefox will no longer bother you with this warning. Open about:config as in the previous step. Right-click on any of the "Preference Name", select New and click on Boolean. Enter the preference name as "extensions.checkCompatibility.4.0" in the given space and click OK.

Let the Boolean value remain selected as false and click OK. Firefox 4 will no longer trouble you with compatibility check messages.

Use Sticky Tabs option
There are certain websites that you invariably visit every time you open Firefox. Rather than having them saved as part of the last browsing session, there is another handy option in Firefox 4 that you may want to use.


Open the URL you visit the most and after the page loads, you can simply right-click on the its tab and click on Pin as App Tab. This will create a permanent tab for the URL of your choice. If you want to remove this permanent tab in the future, simply right-click on it and select Unpin Tab.


Use Tab Groups
If you are one of those who keep countless tabs open in Firefox, then the Tab Grouping option is going to be really useful for you. Suppose you have several tabs open, all you need to do is to click on Tab Groups button on the top right of the browser or simply press Control + Shift + E.


Firefox's interface instantly changes to a collection of thumbnails.

You can see that Firefox 4 puts all the open tabs into one group. If you want to create another such group, all you need to do is draw it in the blank grey area in the Firefox window and click on the plus sign at the bottom left corner to maximize this group. You can now open the tabs you want to put in this group and follow the above procedure to form another Tab Group. If you want to include a tab from another group into this group, simply restore it down so that both the groups are visible and drag and drop the tab you intend to include in this Tab Group.

Use Add-on Bar
Firefox 4 has done away with the familiar status bar, which used to appear at the bottom of the window and moved most of its functionality elsewhere. You can still see the status of the website being opened, but only momentarily while it is being opened. By default, the status bar's position at the bottom of Firefox 4 now belongs to another feature called the Add-on.

Right-click on the blank area to the right of tabs and select Add-on Bar. That is not all, you now need to customize it and manually add the shortcuts you would like to use in Firefox. To do this, right-click on the blank area to the right of tabs and select Customize. You can drag and drop different shortcuts from here onto the Add-on Bar for quick and easy access.

In a similar way, you can also place widgets in here.