[Techtalk] Mozilla/Firefox customization (was Double-click selection)

[Riccarda Cassini]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> Riccarda Cassini writes:
> > Today I learnt, that you can type "about:config" in the urlbar to get
> > a complete listing of all hidden browser preferences, that you can't
> > otherwise access via the GUI. And, you can modify them to your heart's
> > content (by right-clicking on the entries) - in case you know what
> > you're doing.
> > This is ingenious...   The only thing I'm missing there is another
> > column with a detailed explanation of what each option is for - people
> > like me cannot always immediately guess from the option's name itself.
> 
> A few are documented at http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html
> and a few others at http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html

Another good one I've come across in the meantime is here:
http://preferential.mozdev.org/preferences.html

This document seems to be rather complete (although a little concise,
at times).  I say "seems", simply because I myself have only tried a
tiny subset of all the settings mentioned there, so I cant't really say
anything about how much of it actually works in practice, or with a
specific browser version... At least, it was the only document that had
some info about the possible settings of "browser.history.grouping" -
although what's mentioned there still doesn't give me the behaviour I
liked with Firebird [*].

(Btw, it took me a while to realise that the above mentioned doc at
mozilla.org is actually maintained by you, Akkana :-)  Nicely done!!)


> > PS:  anyone knows of any other "about:*" tricks I might want to learn
> > about?  My first guess "about:about" didn't have the desired effect...
> 
> I've long wished there was a good description of all the about: tricks,
> but haven't seen one written up anywhere.
> 
> If you wanted to make a try at that, it looks like it's implemented
> in the netwerk/protocol/about directory.  If you don't want to pull a
> whole source tree, you can browse mozilla source with lxr, e.g.:
> 
> http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/netwerk/protocol/about/

Funnily, there actually appears to be an "about:about". At least that's
what the existence of the code line

    { "about", "chrome://global/content/aboutAbout.html", PR_FALSE }

suggests to me. Typing "about:about" has no effect, though... I tried
hunting for that "aboutAbout.html", but it doesn't seem to be included
anywhere with the files that come with the Firefox installation. Not
even hidden somewhere in one of the .jar files.  Well, maybe it's
planned for future versions to come...
(My guess about that "chrome://" protocol is, that it is typically
referring to internal files - I could be wrong, though...)

In addition to the "about:" keywords appearing in nsAboutRedirector.cpp
there is apparently "about:cache" (and the subordinate key
"about:cache-entry?...") - just in case anyone is interested...

Thanks for the useful hints, Akkana!

Riccarda


[*] ...there seems to have been some rather neat sorting of history
entries based on frequency of usage or something, so the most useful
(i.e. often-used) entries eventually bubbled up in the list.  I found
this to be a rather nice alternative to bookmarks, because it adapted
dynamically, depending on what I actually kept using in practice... 
This doesn't appear to work that way any longer.  It might just be out
of operation *temporarily*, though... in my "nightly build" version of
Firefox that I'm currently using.
Btw, has anyone found a way to delete *individual* entries from the URL
history (without editing "history.dat" and restarting the browser)?
Removing trash entries would allow me to find the useful ones among
them more easily...  Also, the new format of "history.dat" looks
slightly more intimidating now, than it did in Netscape 4.x days ;-)



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