Phoenix's Firefox Recommended Installation Guide

This is the way I setup my Firefox to make it look and function like the old pre Australis based Firefox yet still have support for all the latest add-ons and security patches.

So why not just use Pale Moon which looks like the old Firefox? Because it is a pile of garbage ever since their developers decided they don't want it to be a Firefox fork and rather went their own way, making a lot of webpages not display correctly and most add-ons don't work properly with it like LastPass or Ad-Block Plus just to name a few.

So why not use Cyberfox? because it looks no different than the latest Firefox out of the box and requires a lot of heavy tweaking the same way as I would need to do in Firefox, so, I'd rather tweak Firefox to keep the add-ons compatibiliy and its update manager is appalling.

about:config tweaks

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How to disable One-Click Search in Firefox

Why do this? because with One-Click search, often if you search for something and get suggestions, it may open in a new tab and is just too annoying with all the suggestions from all the search engines. If I choose Google as my search engine, then I want only suggestions from Google!

If you don't like the annoying new feature Mozilla introduced lately that basically gather suggestions from all search engines at once when you start typing anything in the search bar, you can turn it off completely in order to have the old classic search back.

1) Type about:config in the address bar then accept the warning if you haven't accessed the about:config page before

2) In the search, type browser.search.hiddenOneOffs

3) Double click on it to set the value to 1

4) Restart Firefox

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How to always get the latest version of a webpage in Firefox

Why do I do this? Because a lot of time I am looking at a webpage, a forum, or software/drivers site and I know for sure that there is an update, yet the page is displaying the old content so I would have to CTRL + F5 to do a hard refresh to display the latest content. So instead of always sitting there trying to guess whether I am looking at the latest version of a webpage or not, I do the below tweak and set the value to 1.

If you want Firefox to automatically refresh pages when you load them so that you always get the latest page when you access a site (very helpful in Message Boards to ensure you are viewing the latest threads and posts), do this:
1)

• In the Firefox address bar at the top, type about:config
• Then type in browser.cache.check_doc_frequency
• Change the value to 1 to force a cache refresh so that the page is refreshed automatically upon every visit.

Other values you may want to consider (ie. you want to revert back to the normal refresh mode):
3 - only check if it seems outdated
2 - always use cached version
1 - always check for newer version
0 - check for newer version once per session



This will force Firefox to always get the latest version of the webpage rather than load it from cache
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How to disable heartbeats rating

in about:config , copy/paste the below text in the search field

browser.selfsupport.url


Then change the vlaue/URL to:

“”

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How to disable newly opened tabs in Firefox from stealing focus

Why do I do this? Because a lot of time I would be on a page, then I want to open a bookmark from my bookmarks toolbar in the background yet I want to continue doing or reading what I am reading on the page I am currently on so I don't want the focus to switch to the newly opened tab.

If you want to open new tabs of links or bookmarks but don't want to lose the current active tab focus and just wanted to load the newly opened tabs aside for later viewing, then you need to type about:config in the Firefox/Pale Moon/Cyberfox/Waterfox address bar then agree to the warning message when given.


Next, copy paste the below code and change its value to True:

browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInBackground

this will prevent focus from being stolen from the current tab

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How to disable Pocket

Another bloated feature in the new Firefox that I don't need.

in about:config, search for the 2 lines below and disable each one of them by double clicking on them to change the value to False:

extensions.pocket.enabled
reader.parse-on-load.enabled
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How to disable waiting before installing an add-on in Firefox

Why do I do this? Simple, because if I install an add-on, I know I have requested to install it so once it's downloaded it I wanna install it right away without waiting for the countdown timer. It's not like add-ons will install before you click install anyway.

1) In the Firefox address bar, type: about:config

2) Search for security.dialog_enable_delay

3) Double click on it and change the value to 0 to disable

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Disable Geo Location to stop websites from identifying your location

1) In the Firefox address bar, type: about:config

2) Search for geo.enabled

3) Double click on it and change the value to FALSE

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Disable Network Prefetching

Firefox has a spooky feature called “Prefetching” that downloads pages that it thinks you are going to click on. (note: this is a good excuse for how those pages ended up in your history). It’s also a waste of CPU and bandwidth that slows Firefox down.

1) In the Firefox address bar, type: about:config

2) Search for network.prefetch-next

3) Double click on it and change the value to FALSE

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How to force the Google Search toolbar to stay on .com

Why do I do this? Because I use a VPN so when I connect to a VPN in another country, let's say Romania, now when I search on anything from the Search Toolbar, it would search on the localized Google of that site, I want it to always search on Google.com and not some Romanian, German, etc, Google....

If you visit www.google.com/ncr once then use the toolbar, it will then always force Google Search to stay on .com and not the country specific search for Google
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My Recommended Add-Ons
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Classic Theme Restorer

After you install it, import my preferences via its options then hit ok and restart Firefox when prompted.

This will give you a nice headstart and from then on you can tweak certain things to your liking but this is as close as you can get to the old Firefox.

After Firefox has restarted, right click anywhere on the top and choose CUSTOMIZE

- Move the Home button icon to the far left to the left of the address bar
- Drag the REFRESH button from the bottom left all the way up to the left of the Home Buttom next to the Address bar.
- Drag the STOP button from the bottom left all the way up to the left of the Home Buttom next to the Address bar but place it to the left of the REFRESH button.
- Right click on the new Bookmarks icon on the top lift that looks like its split into two icons and select REMOVE FROM TOOLBAR
- You will notice that after we have installed Classic Themes Restorer, we now have the old bookmarks button placed on the far most right of the bookmarks toolbar, drag it and take it to the far most right next to the search toolbar.
- Drag the Downloads button and place it on the far most right but to the let of the bookmarks buttons.
- Right click on any other icon you don't want and select REMOVE FROM TOOLBAR such as the Chat Button icon for example.

After doing the above, you should end up with something that looks like this:



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Classic Toolbar Buttons

To further complement the tweaks above, install the Classic Toolbar Buttons to make the icons look like the old Firefox. No tweaking in the options is required to achieve the above icons look as I posted in the example above but you do have the choice to choose other options if you wish to do so in the options of the add-on.
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Adblock Plus

After installing it, click on the icon in the top navigation bar, then select Filter Preferences and uncheck the option which says Allow some non-intrusive advertising.


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Fokus

Allows you to press the F button of the add-on which will be placed on the top nav bar then you can select some text and have the focus only on that to let you only focus on what you want to read rather than on the whole page which sometimes if contains a lot of text may distract you from the topic you are trying to focus on.
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Lazarus: Form Recovery

Ever typed a lot of info in a page and after hitting that submit button the page crashes and you realize you have to re-type everything again from scratch? this add-on comes to the rescue. You simply right click on any field and you will notice that you have the option to recover the text you have previously typed.

This comes in hand a lot when for example I have a shipment tracking number that I copy/pasted in let's say, UPS, next time I visit the page, I don't need to fetch that tracking number again, all I need to do is right click in the field where the tracking number is and recover the previously typed tracking number. This is just one example of how useful this add-on can be
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IE Tab

Sometimes you visit a page but it doesn't display right in Firefox and you may want to try loading it in IE to see if it works better. Well no need to leave your browser anymore, just right click anywhere in the page and select LOAD IN IE TAB and it would reload the page is if it was IE. It will even have different cookies since it is actually IE that is loading the page but with the Firefox frontend.

You can also load the page in IE by clicking on the little Firefox icon that you will see in the bottom right corner of your browser, that will switch the rendering engine to IE or to Firefox.

I use this to play some quick games on MSN Games which only work with IE and have IE TAB configured to automatically load those pages in IE when I access them.
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Xmarks

I use this to sync and backup my bookmarks across all browsers.
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New tweaks added to disable sites from knowing which site you were previously on and to disable sites from identifying your location and finally how to disable the spooky network pre-fetch of Firefox.