Thank You, Mozilla!

Ryan Baxter — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:54:00 -0700

I’ve been a devout Firefox user since Phoenix. That is until this past week. Tiring of its horrible CPU spikes and insatiable hunger for memory, I contemplated switching to Opera. The only thing that kept me from making the transition was Opera’s lack of an Xmarks plug-in. Not being able to use my favorite Bookmarks manager killed any hope of an alternate browser on my computers.

sudo rm -rf ~/lawn/kids*

99% CPU spikes and 350+ MB memory usage are unacceptable, but when using Firefox 3.0 they’re an every day experience. With all hope lost, I installed the latest Firefox beta. Since then, Firefox has yet to exceed 75% CPU utilization or consume more than 225 MB of memory. All this, even while watching the latest high-def SWTOR cinematic trailer (which is awesome btw). JavaScript heavy websites still consume resources, but with much less cost.

Years ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about installing a beta, but time has eroded my brazen disregard for a stable computer. Firefox Beta 4 may not restore your youth, but it will reallocate your memory. Thank you, Mozilla!

Missing Firefox Tab Close Buttons

Ryan Baxter — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 13:34:00 -0800

If you’re like me then you’re constantly thinking of new ways to tweak Mozilla Firefox. This morning I installed an addon called Vertigo. This extension stacks Firefox tabs vertically on the left-hand side of your browser. It worked well enough, but I soon grew tired of having to click twice to a close a tab.

I uninstalled Vertigo and with it went the close button on each of my tabs. To fix this I opened up Firefox’s advanced configuration by typing about:config in the address bar. I filtered by browser.tabs.closeButton and changed the integer value to 1.

The close buttons immediately reappeared. Alakazam!

For the curious:

0 - Close button on active tab only.
1 - Close button on every tab.
2 - No close buttons.
3 - Close button at the end of the tab bar (ala Firefox 1.5).

crunchlife: Tag Firefox

Thank You, Mozilla!

Missing Firefox Tab Close Buttons