How to turn off Firefox 3’s “awesome bar”

Posted on July 13th, 2008 in Applications by admin

In Firefox 3, the Location Bar received a number of improvements. Among those improvements was the move to a XUL richlistbox widget for the auto-complete dropdown. This allowed styled URL/title information, favicons, and highlighted match information. This preference determines how many entries should appear (at most) in the dropdown.  Many find Firefox 3’s “awesome bar” quite annoying.  Luckily  this is easy to disable.

First, in the address bar type:   “about:config”  (without the quotes).

In the about:config search bar type:  Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

The default value is set to 12.  If you set this interger to 0, nothing will display in the “awesome bar” any longer.

Beautify Firefox Form Widgets in Linux

Posted on March 10th, 2008 in Applications, Tweaks by admin

For some reasons, web controls are rather ugly in Firefox when it runs under Linux. It is particularly the case with radio buttons. Here are comparison screenshots of what it looks like and what it will look after you follow and implement the following instructions:

Ugly:

uglyradiobuttonsiffirefox.png

Fixed:

prettyradiobuttonsiffirefox.png

Fortunately, I found a solution to fix this problem. Note the follow tutorial will be for Ubuntu and Suse. But similar instructions will apply to other distro’s and I will explain further at the bottom.

Speed Up Firefox 2.x

Posted on March 4th, 2008 in Applications, Tweaks by admin

Now alot of us have found the secrets on how to manipulate settings in “about:config” to drop the memory usage as long as possible and to increase the speed at which Firefox loads sites. Below is how to do this. Please take note, please tell your friends. Because i’m pretty sure us fans of all things not Internet Explorer are really tired of millions thinking Firefox has a bug when it doesn’t, and users feel hopeless in their want to use Firefox, but not deal with the memory issues.

Note, many of the memory issues are fixed in Firefox 3.0 and these tweaks do not need to be applied, but they would also aid in increasing the speed for FF3.0 as well.