I Finally Upgraded to Firefox 2

Today I finally upgraded to Firefox 2.0.4 from Firefox 1.5 for my work machine, which was the last one still running FF1.5. Why did I wait so long?

A few reasons:

• For the most part, Firefox 1.5 just worked.
• Every plugin I liked was compatible with 1.5.
• I heard a lot of grumbling about speed and other issues in early betas and releases of Firefox 2.0.
• Bookmark Synchronizer, one of my favorite Firefox extensions needs some tweaks to allow installation on Firefox 2.0.

Why did I finally take the plunge?

• Mozilla announced that Firefox 1.5.12 would be the last release in the 1.5 series, so no more security updates.
• I wanted to install Search Marker, a new plugin that requires Firefox 2.0.

Some obligatory tweaks to Firefox 2.0 to make it seem more like Firefox 1.5, accessible from the about:config URI. I found a lot of them over at Lifehacker:

• Changed browser.tabs.tabMinWidth from 100 to 25. I like to open many tabs at a time, from an average of 8 to a reasonable maximum of 30. I recognize the favicons for most of my favorite web sites, so it’s not a problem to identify them by icon alone.
• Changed browser.tabs.closeButtons from 1 to 3. Again, since I have so many tabs open, the default of an [X] close button on each tab is just distracting. I’ll use the Ctrl-W keyboard combination a lot more than any clicking to close a window.
• Changed network.prefetch-next from true to false. I know where I’m surfing and don’t need you to crawl the web for me, thank you very much.
• Changed browser.cache.memory.capacity from 22000 to 15000. This reduces the typical memory footprint of Firefox to be something more reasonable.
• Changed browser.search.openintab from false to true. This makes searches from the toolbar open in a new tab instead of the current one.

I’ll update this list as I think of it. In the meantime, visit the MozillaZine Wiki for a complete description of all configuration parameters.