Firefox, the lightweight browser based on Mozilla, has been garnering quite a bit of attention lately. I’ve been a Mozilla user since 0.5, but only use the browser component, so I thought I’d give Firefox a try. It works great, and is very similar to IE (by design, no doubt). But browsing is a habit of mine, and, like anybody else, I don’t like to change my habits. Luckily, it was easy to change Firefox to fit my needs.
1. Have the search bar respond to my shortcuts (i for google images, g for google search, q for qwestdex search). This was no different than setting it up for Mozilla.
2. Firefox by default saves form entries. I don’t like that–it’s the paranoid in me. Easily changed: go to Tools / Options / Privacy / Saved Form Information and deselect the “Save information…” checkbox.
3. Firefox blithely closes a window when there’s more than one tab open. Wow! I don’t like that at all–Mozilla gives me a warning and 99% of the time, I was aiming at the wrong window or had forgotten that I had multiple tabs open. Feedster handed me this post so I knew I wasn’t alone; a bit of searching on MozDev turned up this handy extension: tab warning. Installing this was a snap, and now my browsing experience is back to what I expected.
One problem I haven’t figured out how to fix: in Mozilla, when you open a link in a new tab, the new tab gains focus. In Firefox, the old tab remains in front.