My Favorite Firefox Tricks

To celebrate the long-awaited release of Firefox 1.0, I'm going to share a few of my favorite Firefox tricks and techniques.

  1. Middle-clicking. I read a lot of articles with links peppered liberally throughout. Firefox allows me to middle-click links and continue reading while the new pages load up in background tabs. When I'm done, all those pages are finished loading and ready to read! (If your mouse has a scroll wheel instead of middle button, click the scroll wheel.)
  2. Text-zoom. Web designers absolutely *love* the look of microscopic font. Evidently, their mantra is "Let not the content interfere with the design". Well, pooh on them. I just zoom until the font size suits my taste. Text-zoom is [CTRL +] and [CTRL -]. [CTRL 0] resets the font to original size.
  3. Kiosk mode. AKA fullscreen mode, kiosk mode is when the viewport (the part of the screen that shows web page) is stretched from edge to edge, minimizing the amount of scrolling and other UI distractions. Hit F11 to toggle to kiosk mode. (Combine text zoom with kiosk mode to make web pages more visible for presentations, etc.)
  4. Block images from... If a web page insists on using banner ads that would induce seizures in epileptics and annoy anyone else, right click on the ad and choose "block images from...". Reload the page and all ads from that server will be gone.

Posted on: Nov 11, 2004

Posted by: greimer

Category: General

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Comments:

For those of us over 50, the tiny print issue is even worse. I set up the simplest mouse gesture to be another way to bump up the size.

Posted by Doug L. on November 11, 2004 at 07:38 PM MST #

You can hold Ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel up or down to change font sizes as well.

Posted by Keith Lea on November 11, 2004 at 08:10 PM MST #

Also you might want to check out the Tabbrowser extension, which lets you do all sorts of neat stuff - my favourites are: re-opening recently closed tabs, and preventing Firefox from opening additional windows (opening them as tabs instead). http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_tabextensions.html.en

Posted by Jonathan Aquino on November 12, 2004 at 12:11 AM MST #

For those who like "Kiosk mode" here is an extension to enhance it : http://www.krickelkrackel.de/autohide/autohide.htm It allows toolbars (status, menu, tabs, bookmarks) to be in auto-hide mode. So this is really a fullscreen mode and you only need to put your mouse at screen top border to display toolbars.

Posted by Fvr on November 12, 2004 at 01:25 AM MST #

There's also an excellent repository for Firefox Adblock available here.

Posted by Dave on November 15, 2004 at 12:08 PM MST #

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