Today's useful browser tip.

[theweaselking]

Visti about:config
Filter for "showquitwarning"
Change browser.showQuitWarning to TRUE.

(This will cause Firefox 4 to behave like Firefox 3 or lower when closing - it will prompt you to save your session and, if you tell it to save, will restore your session automatically on your next startup. Without this option, Firefox does not save your session specifically when closing, and you must manually restore your last-save-of-previous-session from the History menu when restarting.)

Comments

[maelorin]

thanks!

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Do you know a convenient switch/toggle for embedded-audio in Firefox 3.x/4? IE has/had a radio button in Tools that allows me to kill audio on demand but FF doesn't seem to have caught up with the 1990s yet in that regard. I was told many years ago there was a magic combination of chicken-sacrifice and rolling my face across the keyboard that would do this but it never worked for me.

[matgb]

So, as I haven't upgraded yet (Jennie has, so it's installed in a different directory), what are the benefits of Fx4? Because all I'm seeing is various things to get it to behave sensibly, plugins to move ui elements back to where they should be, etc.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

A single tab crashing no longer takes the entire browser out, and the "sync across multiple computers and also my phone" thing is AWESOME.

[matgb]

The first is actually really good, might actually consider switching soon (there are some plugins I'm waiting for, as always), the latter no use yet, Fx won't work on my current phone, but will on the handset I'm getting soon. Opera Mobile remains a damn fine browser though.

Danke, I've only thus far seen bad things, and while I'll get used to the tabs moved, and the extra real estate on my netbook will be good, I was putting off changing.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The tab bar can be moved back to a non-stupid position with two clicks.

(Also: It's faster. Noticeably, visibly faster.)

[andrewducker]

Also, the latter was available is available as the Firefox Sync addon (I use it to keep laptop and desktop in sync, and also as a backup of my bookmarks).

I moved to FF4 and am perfectly happy with it. Tabs at the top works just fine for me.

[matgb]

I'm trying it, and it is noticeably faster. However, the tabs have moved down underneath the address bar when I turned that back on, it was hidden on first run.

I'm guessing that the many years of profile hacking have confused the poor thing--may use Sync and create a new profile to see what it's like raw.

The speed is noticeably better, Gmail now moves fast, I'll have to retry the Twitter web interface with it, see if it's still a horrible resource hog like it was before.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

I’m sure you know this, but while we’re restoring Firefox 3.x behavior:

about:config
set keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=

This brings back the Google “browse by name” functionality for the location bar, which is what allows it to send you directly to a page if it’s sure enough what you want (e.g. if I type in just “theweaselking” and hit enter) and act like a regular Google search otherwise. I just mention it because it can be annoying to fix if you don’t know what it’s called.

[scixual.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose you, or any of your groovy readers, know of a way to keep error alerts from changing focus to the misbehaving tab? I really, really, hate that, especially if I am in the middle of something while another site is loading int he background.

[en-ki.livejournal.com]

The way I've been using Firefox for years is to set "When Firefox starts" to "show my windows and tabs from last time". I never found the idea of a "home page" very useful anyway, and I have a home button if I want that.

[dscotton.livejournal.com]

Same. Having a prompt every time I close the browser sounds like a pain in the ass, and I never don't want to reopen my old tabs.