Author: Chris Ilias

Firefox 2 has a lot of small usability changes, that are great. I’m sure we’ve all accidentally middle-clicked on a bookmark folder, or live bookmark, only to be bombarded with many many tabs opening many many web sites at once. In Firefox 2, if you trigger an action that will open 15 or more tabs at once, Firefox will ask for confirmation.

But what if you want to change that threshold? Well there’s a preference setting for that. 🙂
Enter about:config in the address bar. In the resulting page, search for the preference browser.tabs.maxOpenBeforeWarn.
Double-click on it, and set the value to the number of tabs in which you want to start receiving the warning.

In a somewhat controversial decision, it was decided that if you open a group of tabs (middle-click on a bookmark folder) in Firefox, those new pages will be opened in the currently opened tabs, rather than being added. There is, however, a setting to make groups of tabs be opened in new tabs, rather than the existing ones.

Enter about:config in the address bar. In the resulting page, search for the preference browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace.
Double-click on it, which should change the value to false.

Among the changes in Firefox 2 is that the ‘Go’ button is now attached to the address bar, when customizing toolbars. Some Firefox users may prefer not to display the ‘Go’ button, because they use the |Enter| key, or use the Paste and Go 2 extension.

You can get rid of the ‘Go’ button by entering about:config in the address bar. In the resulting page, search for the preference browser.urlbar.hideGoButton.
Double-click on it, which should change the value to true.

Firefox 2 users may have noticed that the built-in spell checker does not automatically check single-line text fields, such as Google.com. Instead, you need to open the context menu (right-click), and choose Spell check this field. With multi-line text fields (for example, the Detailed Comments box at hendrix.mozilla.org), the spell checker is automatically turned on.

To get the spell checker to automatically check all text fields, enter about:config in the address bar. In the resulting page, search for the preference layout.spellcheckDefault.
Double-click on it, and change the value to 2.