Configuring Mozilla Firefox for ease of development

Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are great browsers of this world. Although Chrome is most popular among my circle I feel quite comfortable with Mozilla Firefox. This article will guide through some more configuration and plugins for ease of access with Firefox.

After installing Fresh copy of Firefox proceed as:

Add-Ons

1. Firebug ( by Joe Hewitt) : It features Inspect HTML and modify style and layout in real-time, JavaScript debugger, analyze network usage and performance and many more. Link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/
2. Web Developer Toolbar (by Chrispederick): Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/
3. LastPass Password Manager: This is not only an Extension but a Application to sync your password across devices and autofill on Login Forms. Link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lastpass-password-manager
4. ADBlock Plus (by  Wladimir Palant): A useful tool to block unwanted ads on webpages. Link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
5. Wappalyzer (by Elbert Alias): When surfing the web and different web pages you often see them quite attractive and elegant but wonder what front-end and programming tools the webpage is using. In this scenario Wappalyzer will be a great tool that finds the frontend and backend detail of any website loaded in the browser. Simply put it can say: Which OS the server is installed on, the version of Apache/PHP, the CMS (Wordpress/Joomla etc.) along with the frontend tools viz. Google Aanalytics, jQuery UI, Adsense etc. Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wappalyzer/

Conguration/Settings

Beyond the availability of such add-ons Firefox have plenty of customization for ease of use. This includes its about:config page features to simply Drag and Drop Customization Features. When you download the fresh copy you see enough icons beside the address bar so clean that by

• Click the menu  on Top Right and button so that you could drag and drop icons you don't require
• In my contest the address bar can also do the search so I removed Search Bar by dragging it to pool of icons and Similary the less and least used inlcudes Home, Pocket, Hello etc. You may use shortcut icons to achieve those tasks rather than making the interface messy.
• You can synchronize your such settings and addons across devices by using Sync feature available in Firefox by Signing In with account created within Firefox

about:config

A feature Firefox includes to easily configure many flags and paramaters at one place is simply nagivating to the url about:config from address bar. For this enter the url in address bar and hit enter. The confirmation message will welcome you with the option of continuing to the list of paramaters. Below is the list of some Key, Value combination to give rise for settings unvailable in graphic interface.

1. Enable Spell Checking In All Text Fields :
   0 – disable the spell checker
   Default: 1 (spell checker for multi-lines text boxes only)
   2 – enable the spell checker for all text boxes
2. 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)

3. 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

4. Overwrite the built in limitation of showing count for upto 100 match only
   In Firefox when you press Control+F to search for some phrase and the result are more than 100 matching then the count will say "More than 100 Matches" rather than saying the actual count. To solve this.
   Config name: accessibility.typeaheadfind.matchesCountLimit
   Set this to the value as per your wish but in my contest I set this to -1 and there is no limitation

Tip for Chrome Users: You can navigate to chrome://flags/ via your addressbar to get some sort of similar adjustment.