
Configure Firefox Under the Covers #60
Chapter 8, Desktop Programs
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HACK
dialog box. Everything else it hides away. This has the benefit of making
Firefox simple to use for most users, whereas power users can jump under
the covers to tweak many different settings.
Entering Configuration Mode
Firefox has a number of different modes that give information about how
the browser is running. To see one such mode, type the following into the
address bar and press Enter:
about:plugins
This page gives you information about the plug-ins that are configured for
the browser. There are a number of modes, including
about:mozilla, about:
credits
, about:, and most interestingly, about:config, the main Mozilla con-
figuration interface.
When you enter
about:config, you see a number of lines listed down the
page. Each line refers to a different setting that can be configured. As an
example, one of my lines is:
browser.startup.homepage user set string http://www.jonobacon.org/
This setting simply sets the default home page that is loaded when the
browser is started. The status column refers to this as
user set, because this
option was configured in the dialog box in Firefox. The type column refers
to this setting as a
string because the setting browser.startup.homepage
requires text strings as a value. The final value column actually states the
desired page for the setting. You can see that most of these settings follow ...