3 Top tips for Firefox in Windows, Mac and Linux

Copy multiple items in Firefox

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If you are browsing the web using Firefox and you want to copy some text that is on a page, you can click and drag over it with the mouse to select it and then press Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard (Use Command instead of Ctrl on the Mac). You can then switch to another program and press Ctrl+V to paste in the text you copied. If there are several blocks of text on the web page that you want to copy, you could repeat the process for each one, but why not save time and effort by copying them all in one go?

Click and drag the mouse cursor over the first block of text to select it and then hold down the Ctrl key as you click and drag over other the blocks of text on the page. When you have selected everything, press Ctrl+C and all the selected blocks are copied to the clipboard and can be pasted elsewhere.

This is a temperamental feature that sometimes works, but not all the time. It seems to depend on how the web page is constructed. It doesn't like this page for example. Use it when you can and it's a handy feature.

Faster Firefox

It can take quite a long time to fully download a web page and display it, so every 0.12 seconds Firefox displays the bits that have downloaded so far. This is partly to give you something to look at and partly to give the impression of the page downloading. You don't want to sit and stare at a blank page until the whole lot has downloaded before Firefox displays it, or do you? It actually wastes time constantly redrawing the screen and this slows down Firefox a little. If Firefox could refresh the page less often, it would have more time to spend download pages and would be faster.

To change the refresh rate enter about:config into the address box. Right click on the page and select New, Boolean. Name it content.notify.ontimer and then set the value to True. Right click again and select New, Integer. Name it content.notify.interval and set the value to 500000 (that's 500,000 microseconds or 0.5 second).

Tweak your tabs

In the latest version of Firefox there is a close button on every tab you have opened. If you would prefer a cleaner look you can completely remove the close buttons on each tab except on the current one. Enter about:config into the address box and then type tabs into the filter. Double click browser.tabs.closeButtons and change the value to 0 for no close buttons or 1 to show the close buttons.

When you right click a link on a web page and open a new tab, is it inserted immediately after the current tab or is it added to the end of the tabs. It's actually your choice and you can have it either way. Double click browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set it to true or false as you prefer. Try it both ways.