Mozilla Firefox is without doubt the browser that you can customize and tweak the most. Even the regular options that are made available to all users are quite extensive, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Experienced Firefox users know that there is about:config, a special page that is part of Firefox that displays hundreds of additional preferences that users can modify.
The sheer size is too much for the options of the browser but the main reason why those preferences are not displayed to all users is that wrong values can easily wreck the browser or some of its functionality.
The developer of Pale Moon, a Firefox fork that has seen a surge in popularity after the introduction of the new Australis interface in Firefox, has created a browser extension for Firefox and Pale Moon that introduces an advanced options menu in the browser.
The new advanced options menu is added to the Tools menu which you can display with a tap on the Alt-key in the browser. A new window opens when you activate it that looks similar to Firefox’s options window but with the difference that you find advanced preferences listed here.
Note: This is a frontend to Firefox’s advanced configuration which means that changes that you make here will remain even if you uninstall the Pale Moon Commander add-on at one point in time. The add-on ships with a reset preferences button which will set all preferences — not only those that you modified using it — to their default values.
Here are a couple of useful tools and information about Firefox’s about:config page:
- Add information to Firefox about:config preferences
- Advanced Firefox Configuration Tips
- Firefox Preferences Monitor gets pref cleaning capabilities
Here is a short overview of the preferences that the add-on lists in its interface.
Graphics
- Use workarounds for specific driver bugs.
- Set initial paint delay.
- Enable Direct 2D Acceleration and force use of Direct2D
- Layers acceleration enabled and enforced.
- Set Layer acceleration mode.
- Use old (deprecated) rendering method.
- Prefer OpenGL for WebGL.
- Force antialiasing on and level of antialiasing.
- Use GDI table loading for DirectWrite.
- Enable Graphite font rendering.
- Various ClearType related preferences.
- Various Color Management System preferences (CMS).
Network
- Automatically try to fix incomplete addresses and set prefix and suffix.
- Enable IPv6 lookups and DNS lookup prefetching, set cached DNS entries and DNS expiration.
- Use fast IPv6 to IPv4 fallback, and configure HTTP timings and connections preferences.
- Many pipelining related preferences.
- Enable SPDY protocol and set additional connections preferences.
Performance
- JavaScript related preferences, e.g. completely disable JavaScript.
- Various Garbage Collection preferences.
- Enable Disk Cache and set the size automatically or manually.
- Various other disk cache and memory cache settings, like cache compression.
User Interface
- Various address bar related preferences, like address auto-completion or domain highlighting.
- Various tab related preferences, like animated tabs, tab resizing, tab close button location and tab switching functionality.
- Configure Jump Lists in Windows 7 and newer version.
- Configure Full Screen and HTML5 Full Screen behavior.
Security
- Configure what JavaScript can do.
- Enable JavaScript JIT hardening.
- Show the security padlock icon and define where.
- Configure pop-up window preferences, what is allowed what not.
- Configure SSL related preferences, like lowest and highest supported protocol, SSL hardening.
- Set allowed ciphers.
- Privacy related preferences, like cookie, caching and referrer settings.
Other
- Misc settings such as enabling or disabling the pdf viewer and configuring bookmark backups and HTML5 local storage settings.
Closing Words
Pale Moon Commander is not the first add-on for Firefox. Gui:config has been around for some time for instance and it is more or less a frontend for about:config.
Pale Moon Commander improves the accessibility of important Firefox preferences without displaying preferences that can wreck the browser completely or part of it.