This is controlled by the browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete setting (edit it via about:config): set it to false to disable the highly annoying “download finished” popup which sloooooowwwwly appears and then diiiiiiiiisappeeeaaaars every time a file has finished downloading (this thing is particularly slow when your GPU is busy doing something else).

How to skip antivirus scanning of incoming files + don’t tag downloaded exe’s as coming from Internet

This is controlled by the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone setting: set it to false to disable the bloody time-wasting virus scan at the end of every file download. This never caught a single virus for me anyway… Also, it makes the downloaded files bypass Windows security policy checks (the former preference browser.download.manager.skipWinSecurityPolicyChecks was merged into this one), ie when you launch a downloaded executable Windows won’t bother you with the warning popup “this program was downloaded from Internet, are you sure you want to run it?”.

How to delete words from the personal dictionary

For some reason, I find it extremely easy to accidentally add misspelled words to the personal dictionary – I guess that menu item is somewhat misplaced. On the other hand, deleting them is then a pain in the ***, notably the GUI provides no way to do this. You’ll have to manually edit the dictionary file…
It’s located in your profile folder (on Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista/Se7en, it looks like %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default – just browse to %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ then it will be obvious -, for other OSes, check out Profile folder on MozillaZine, or even simpler go to about:support and click on “Profile Directory – Open containing folder”) and is named persdict.dat. You can edit it with any plain text editor supporting Unix line breaks (for instance Notepad++ is good, the standard Windows notepad isn’t). Make sure that Firefox isn’t running, as it will overwrite the file when you close it. Source

How to configure several profiles

Close Firefox (make sure there’s really no more firefox.exe running in the background), then relaunch it with the -profilemanager argument. On Windows, the easiest way to do is is probably to hit [Windows key]+R (for “Run”), and then type firefox.exe -profilemanager. After that, you should get the profile manager window, which should be self-explanatory enough. If you need more details, this post should be helpful.

How to prevent Firefox from trimming link URLs

That stupid feature was added when they replaced the status bar with that retarded add-on bar. Before that, when you hovered a link it’s target would show up in the status bar. As far as I remember, they then moved that preview to the address bar (with big fat huge trimming, as this is a limited and already well-filled space), and due to enough people getting upset with it, they moved it back to the bottom of the window (to the bottom-left, or when the find bar is opened (bug?), to the bottom-right), but this time above the add-on bar. BUT they didn’t remove the trimming: that URL preview is by default limited to 50% of the window’s width. Why the heck not 100%?? Anyway, to change that, go to your chrome folder (you might need to create it manually), which is located in %appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\chrome (see the section about dictionary entries for more details and alternative OSes), then edit or create (with a plain text editor) the file userChrome.css. In this file, add the following section:
statuspanel {max-width: 100% !important;}
And voilà, when you restart Firefox link URL previews will be able to use the whole width of the window, so they shouldn’t get trimmed often, then…

How to decrease the minimum tab width

As in the previous tip, you need to create/edit userChrome.css. Add the following code (edit sizes as you wish):
.tabbrowser-tab[fadein]:not([pinned]) {
min-width: 15px !important;
max-width: 250px !important;}

How to force Firefox to display the full URL in the address bar

By this I mean, the real full URL, including the bloody http:// part. Well, I long thought this was impossible, but eventually a setting was created for this! In about:config, just set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false. The change will be immediately visible!

Well, that’s all for today… Those are pretty much all the dirty hacks I need to perform when dealing with a new Fx install, apart from the ever changing extensions.checkCompatibility mess. Keeping them on a single page should make my life easier the next time I need them…

First, unfortunately, there is a pretty high requirement: you need to be somewhat involved in the development of Firefox itself. Well, you don’t definitely have to, but in both the proofs of concept I’ve seen (see below), the author met that requirement, it makes the first step much easier. Ok, the guide now:

• The first step is to get a useful feature removed from Firefox.
  Example number 1: Mike Beltzner [:beltzner] got Dave Townsend [:Mossop] remove the extensions.checkCompatibility setting (see bug 521905 – and the post about it on moronmoronical.com). Nice move. Screwed basically all nightly testers and more generically pretty much every beta enthusiasts.
  Example number 2: Dão Gottwald [:dao] removed the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth setting (see bug 574654). Now all your tabs must be at least 140 pixels wide. Thank you Captain ScrewUps.
• If you’ve been following properly, I bet you already guessed the second step: simply, create an extension that performs exactly the feature that you removed!
  Oh, I know what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute… this is too big, I’d never get away with this! This post is a joke, this can’t work.” Well, trust me it can (although this post is indeed a joke). But I guess bringing on proofs can do no harm, there you go:
  Example 1: Dave Townsend aka Mossop published the Nightly Tester Tools, the primary feature of which used to be to remove compatibility checking (NB: as of today it seems that that feature got move into the Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension).
  Example 2: Dao Gottwald aka dao published the Custom Tab Width, the only feature of which is to add back an easy way to configure minimum and maximum tab width.

So, have you been able to apply this guide? Congratulations, you’ve published a successful Firefox add-on! Maybe you also pushed a few hundreds of thousands of users a bit more towards Chrome (I wish I could say Opera), but who cares anyway?
As a token of appreciation for your brilliant work at making Firefox a better worse browser, I’ll reveal to you the third and last bonus step to this guide:

• Abandon your add-on. Example 1: Dave Townsend aka Mossop abandoned the Nightly Tester Tools.

Muhahaha. All Ur about:config R belong to Us

Adobe published a few days ago the first release candidate of Flash 11 in their labs. Amongst the key new features of this version we find the Stage 3D API (3D GPU acceleration), support for a new audio codec G.711 as well as the JPEG-XR image compression format. Also, a 64 bits version of the plugin is available, too.
This RC1 is labelled 11.0.1.129 (you may also see 11.0.r1.129), and here is the portable version of the 32 bits version (I don’t think there are any portable browsers in 64 bits at the moment, except for the latest Fx nightly, but I don’t think many people use a 64 bits nightly as their portable browser…). Edit: mkay, I forgot about Palemoon, I wasn’t exactly counting such rare forks indeed. So here’s the 64 bits portable Flash (NPSWF64_11_0_1.dll).

As usual, to install this Flash portable, unpack it into the plugin folder for your browser, which is FYI:

• Firefox Portable: Data/plugins
• Opera USB: program/plugins
• Iron or Chrome Portable: Iron/plugins

Here is the zip containing NPSWF32.dll and flashplayer.xpt. It’s hosted on filesonic, but below you’ll also find a link to a megaupload mirror. Note that the files hosted on FileSonic vanish after 30 days without a download, so usually only the latest versions (latest stable + latest preview if newer than stable) remain online there. So for older versions you’ll want to grab the Megaupload link.

Flash 11.0.1.129 (11 RC1) for portable browsers (FileSonic)
Flash 11.0.1.129 (11 RC1) for portable browsers (MegaUpload)

This post in a nutshell: disable the Tab Mix Plus extension.

Since a month or two, tab dragging (drag and drop to move the tabs around each others, but also to move a tab into a new window) has been broken in the Firefox versions I use (Nightly 8 then 9, but also Aurora 8). I lived with that for a while because I was using mainly Opera for tab-intensive browsing, but eventually got too pissed-off with it not to try and deal with it.
Searching about that didn’t yield any useful results. At first I found this remarkably unhelpful post on Ubuntu forums, showing how Linux guys like to give answers in form of a riddle (“see solution code [FOT002] in that 51 pages long thread”) instead of a straight answer (direct link to the mentioned solution, anyone?). I eventually manage to find what this solution referred to (not by finding that solution, but by finding someone who mentioned how applying it failed), it doesn’t work.
Then I found a very old post about tab dragging in Firefox 1.0 and 1.5. It was referring to TabBrowser Preferences: apparently, by the time of Fx 1.0, tab dragging was only available through the TabBrowser Preferences extension, whereas it was implemented natively into Fx 1.5. So I thought maybe there’s some interference between TabBrowser Preferences (or rather, its successor Tab Mix Plux) and tab dragging. Indeed, disabling it fixed the issue. Note that if you do and were using the session restore feature of Tab Mix Plus, you’ll want to re-enable Firefox’s session restore functionality: it’s in Options => General => Startup => “When Nightly starts” => Show my windows and tabs from last time.

This navigation toolbar is becoming more and more useless… Of course, the drop-down history menu is still there, accessible either by holding the left mouse button or by right clicking (I actually found out about this one pretty recently, it’s decently comfortable IMO, but not possible in Opera). Still, I liked to have a dedicated button so I looked for ways to add them back in Opera and Firefox.

In Opera, you can add/remove buttons from the navigation bar by right-clicking on it, then go to Customize => Appearance… => Buttons => Browser and drag and drop the normal back and forward buttons. To remove the buttons with no down arrow (actually, that’s just one button), right-click it, then go to Customize => Remove from toolbar.

In Firefox, you need to use an extension, for instance Backward Forward History Dropdown. Yeah, that’s a one-line solution… not too satisfying, though, the need to add yet one more extension every time they dumbly remove an important feature.

Re-sults!