The Firefox Browser Settings You Should Tweak Right Now

Even if you’ve been with Firefox since the very beginning—2002, to be precise—there are always new tricks and features to discover inside Mozilla’s browser, which continues to grow and evolve.

These are our favorite Firefox productivity tweaks and hacks to help you work faster and more efficiently. If you’re heavy into Apple’s ecosystem, try our guide to Safari on iOS and macOS instead. If you’re a Chrome diehard, we’ve got you covered here.

1. Pick up where you left off

Having a brand new, empty tab greet you when you start up Firefox certainly has some advantages, but a lot of the time you’d rather just carry on with what you were doing last time. To do so, head to the Preferences option on the Firefox menu (three bars, top right), then choose Restore previous session under Startup on the General tab.

2. Reach your favorite features quickly

Firefox gives you plenty of control over how the browser toolbar is arranged and what it includes. Open the Firefox menu and choose Customize; from there, you can drag and drop shortcuts to certain features—including edit tools, your browsing history, and private browsing—into the toolbar, so they’re always available to you.

3. Forget what just happened

One of the shortcuts you can add to the Firefox toolbar (see above) is a Forget button, which will erase a very specific part of your recent browsing history for you. Click the button and you can wipe out the last five minutes, two hours, or 24 hours, clearing the history and any logged cookies; all traces of that browsing period will be deleted.

Courtesy of Wired staff via Firefox

4. Customize the new tab page

The new tab page can be a very useful jumping off point for getting around the web, showing pages you’ve visited recently, pages you visit a lot, and bookmarks you’ve saved in the browser. To change how much you see of each, open the Firefox menu, click Preferences, then scroll to Firefox Home Content under Home.

5. Share large, encrypted files

If you’ve got large files to share with other people, Firefox can take care of this for you—it has its own service called Firefox Send, which you can find on the web here. Sign in with your Firefox account and you can send files up to a total of 2.5 gigabytes via a simple online link, with end-to-end encryption as standard and the option to password protect the link.

6. Add tags to your bookmarks

You’ve got two ways to organize bookmarks: by using folders and by adding tags. Tags give you an easy way of collecting bookmarks around certain topics or ideas, like work, leisure, family, research, or whatever. You can add tags when you save a bookmark via the star icon on the address bar, and through Show All Bookmarks on the Bookmarks menu.

About The Author