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Show of hands: Who here uses Firefox’s search bar almost exclusively?

The search bar is that little search textbox on the upper right hand of the Firefox window. Just choose the search engine, type your search terms, hit enter, and the results will be displayed on your browser.

Firefox comes preloaded with Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Answers.com, Creative Commons, and I’m guessing, Wikipedia.

Add search engines. You can add items in your search bar. You’ll probably want Wikipedia & del.icio.us, but more can be found here.

Keyboard shortcut. A handy keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+K. This will automatically place the cursor on the search bar.

Removing search engines. If you want to remove some of the preloaded search engines, click on the dropdown button of the search bar, and select Manage Search Engines. Then select the search engines that you want to remove, and click the Remove button.

Open search results in a new tab. And let’s not forget Firefox’s about:config which allows your search results to open in a new tab. First, enter about:config in your address bar. Scroll down to browser.search.openintab. Then double click it to change the value to true.

In Mozilla Firefox, your bookmarks, passwords, and settings are saved in something called a profile. This is stored in your hard drive.

Your profile is typically located at C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default

Whenever you need to reinstall Windows, this might create problems, as most of us don’t usually back up our Application Data folder. You probably would want to save your profile instead in your data directory (or folder that you back up frequently)

To move your profile:

1. Exit Firefox.
2. Move your profile folder to your desired directory. For example, at E:\Settings\Firefox
3. Locate profiles.ini. This is typically located at C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\
4. Open profiles.ini in your favorite text editor. You should see the following:

   
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default
Default=1

   Note: xxxxxxxx is an eight-character random value that is automatically assigned by Firefox upon installation.

5. Change this to:

   
[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

   [Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=E:\Settings\Firefox\xxxxxxxx.default
Default=1

   IsRelative is changed from 1 to 0 because absolute paths (not relative) are used.

   The Path value is changed to reflect the new path of the profile. Simply replace this with your new path, then replace xxxxxxxx.default with the name of your profile directory.

6. Save profiles.ini
7. Restart Firefox.

Firefox 2.0? Ho-hum. After all, how can such a great browser impress us further? But a spellchecker’s there, & that’s always good; and a feed reader, which unfortunately didn’t live up to the standards of Sage.

The scrolling tabs need some time to get used to. The tabs are also wider. This means that it only takes a few tabs to be open for it to start scrolling — not fun for the multi-tasker in you.

There is a way to decrease the size of the tabs, though:

1. Enter the following in the address bar:
   about:config

   

2. Look for browser.tabs.tabminWidth & doubeclick it.