Since we like on the bleeding edge here at eriwen.com, I wanted to share some of the most useful about:config entries that are new to Firefox 3. You probably know that you just need to type "about:config" into your URL bar to get set up for these gems. If you haven’t already you will also want to check out the Firefox 3 chrome tweaks to really customize your favorite browser.

Bleeding Edge: Force Extension Compatibility

WARNING: I take no responsibility if enabling all your favorite extensions borks up your browsing experience. Hence the “bleeding” as it were…

extensions.checkCompatibility -> Toggle to false
extensions.checkUpdateSecurity -> Toggle to false

Credit may go to Lifehacker’s article for posting this first.

Location Bar

This is a good alternative to the userChrome.css hack to trim down that huge auto-complete list on your URL bar. Note that the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults one does not like to display more that 12 as far as my testing goes. I personally set mine to 3.

browser.urlbar.maxRichResults -> # results for URL auto-complete list

Zoom, Zoom

These are most useful for presenters that need the ability to zoom in very close for their audience when showing them Firefox. You can also make Firefox 3 behave like Firefox 2 by settingbrowser.zoom.full to false. As you might have guessed, putting browser.zoom.siteSpecific at false takes off site specific zoom settings.

zoom.maxPercent -> Set to 400 for the ability to zoom closer
zoom.minPercent -> 10 will let you can zoom out further
browser.zoom.full -> Set to false for Firefox 2-like text zooming only
browser.zoom.siteSpecific -> False removes site-specific zoom settings
toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues -> You can change zoom levels here

Random

Toggle extensions.getAddons.showPane if you don’t care for the Add-ons search part of the Add-ons dialog. You can also crank up the space you make available for the shiny new offline capabilities of Firefox 3!

extensions.getAddons.showPane -> False removes Add-ons search
browser.cache.offline.capacity -> Increase offline cache (I set to 20480)

As always you may want to stay tuned because a lot of these were added with beta 5 and I’ll be posting more as I get them. I would also recommend subscribing to the comments on this one in particular as the readers here tend to have good additional hacks! Thank you commenters!