Party with Profiles

Firefox stores all your customized settings in a profile folder small enough to fit on a USB key, so you can transfer your preferences to another PC. To get started, first enable viewing of hidden files and folders. Open My Computer, highlight Tools from the menu bar, and select Folder Options. Click View and check the “Show hidden files and folders” radio button. Next navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\[USER NAME]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and copy the contents of the default folder.

Profiles also come in handy if you share a PC with other family members. Profiles allow each of you to have a personalized browsing experience without cramping each other’s style. Or you can create a custom profile for the kids that has extra security features enabled and avoid having your own setup filled with links to Nickelodeon.com and the Ultimate SpongeBob fan site. To create a new profile, first close Firefox. Click the Start menu and select Run, type firefox.exe –ProfileManager and hit Enter. In the Profile Manager, click Create Profile and follow the prompts. Be sure to give your new profile a descriptive name, such as Test Box or Kids and uncheck the box that says “Don’t ask at startup.”

What's All This About about:config?

Installing an assortment of extensions and themes is all well and good, but this is Maximum PC and that means digging down to the nitty-gritty. A wealth of advanced configuration options are hidden beneath the surface of Firefox, and we know just where to find them. Now would be a good time to back up your default profile or create a new one as a test bed before proceeding.

In Firefox’s URL bar, type about:config and hit Enter. This brings up a set of preference keys that should look familiar to anyone who’s ever poked around a system registry. Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of options, we’re just going to zero in on a handful of enhancements. Let’s start by removing the close button on inactive tabs. Locate and double-click browser.tabs.closeButtons and change the value to 0. Next, being power users, we’re going to change the width of our tabs, so we can see more of them before scrolling kicks in. Find browser.tabs.tabMinWidth and change the value to 75 or less. Finally, we want to train our download manager to clean up after itself without us having to nag. Select browser.download.manager.retention and change the value to 0.

We’ve only scratched the surface here, but don’t worry, we won’t leave you hanging. For an explanation of what each entry does, head over to www.tinyurl.com/8swbh and start experimenting!

We love that Firefox 2.0 brings tabbed scrolling to the table, but the default width leaves us scrolling prematurely. By decreasing the size of each tab, we can fit more of them into our browser window.

Kiss Online Ads Goodbye

We don’t mind a well-placed ad here and there, but who wants to have their peripheral vision bombarded with a flashing banner or Cialis advertisement when trying to read a website? AdBlock Plus nukes these annoyances before they have a chance to load.

Head over to Firefox’s add-ons page and install the AdBlock Plus extension. Restart the browser, then click and subscribe to EasyList in the installation window. This configures AdBlock with filters for many common ads, though you can still manually add specific entries by clicking Tools and selecting AdBlock Plus. Next, supplement AdBlock with the Filterset.G Updater extension. As new ad servers are discovered, Filterset.G updates itself and integrates the new entries into AdBlock, and it contains a whitelist of entries to help eliminate false positives.

The one-two punch of AdBlock Plus and the Filterset.G Updater knocks out most online ads all on their own, but should the tag team miss an online nuisance, just add a customized filter.

Modernize Your Bookmarks

We’re living in a blogger’s paradise, where social web browsing has proven to be more than a passing fad. It’s for this reason that del.icio.us delights us with its online bookmark-organization scheme and its link-sharing among a network of users.

First head over to http://del.icio.us/ and register an account. Once you’ve created a username, you’ll be prompted to install the del.icio.us extension. Notice the two buttons added to Firefox right next to the URL bar. When you’re ready to bookmark a website, click the Tag button and enter a description, notes about the site, and relevant search tags. For example, popular tags for MaximumPC.com include “magazine,” “reviews,” “technology,” “computer,” “hardware,” and so on. When you want to view links in only a particular category, click the tag and all other links will be filtered out.

To share your bookmarks with other users or access them from another computer, use your account’s URL. This will appear as http://del.icio.us/[USERNAME]/. And don’t worry about that Mac|Life bookmark, just check the “do not share” box when saving a favorite link you wish to keep private.