Preparing Mozilla Firefox for Lizzy

In this entry I’m going to go through a few things that you should do inside Firefox so that things work as smoothly as possible.  One of the things I’m sure most have noticed by now is that you should never hit the back button, because Lizzy never really left that first page since you’ve logged in.  This is because Lizzy is not an average web application but is rather 100% AJAX driven.  This means that your menus that show up when you click on things are not really there at all until you click them.  Your locate contact forms and view correspondence controls, also not there until you view them.  Operating in this way allows Lizzy to move as little data back and forth between your browser and the server as possible, which makes things run as quickly as possible.  However, what to do with that default behavior where hitting the backspace key in FireFox when you’re not actually in an edit field and it acts like you clicked the Back Button.

To disable this feature which most only know exists when they mess up and hit it and then wonder what just happened, follow these 3 simple steps.

1) In your browsers URL field (the place you type in all your www addresses, enter this instead and press enter:  about:config

This will open the configuration page for Firefox and there are lots of things that you can change.  We’re going to only focus on that backspace key problem.

2) Scroll down to the entry called browser.backspace_action

3 – Double-click on the row and it will pop up a dialog box asking you to enter a value. The current value will be 0, change it to be 2 then click OK.

Next we’ll fix Firefox so that when you exit, it will clear all your cache and get things ready for a clean slate in the morning.  This works in all versions and OS’s of the browser.  Open your properties window for the browser.  On Mac its under the Firefox Properties menu, on Windows I believe it’s in the Tools Options menu.  Once you have Properties open, click on the tab or button at the top labeled Privacy.  This is where you tell Mozilla what you want to save and what you don’t.

We’re going to look towards the bottom of this page and click the checkbox that says “Always clear my private data when I close Firefox” and then click the Settings button beside it to tell it specifically which things we’d like to clear.  Here is the way my Settings looks

The primary box we want to be sure is checked is the one that says Cache. Make sure you check this box and then any others you may want and click Ok.  Now when you exit Firefox it will be sure to clean things up so the next time you open it’s ready to go.

Lastly I’d like to give you a little process you can do that speeds Firefox up a little bit as far as opening websites.

In URL type about:config and click any warning that comes up to open it.

In the search box type “network” without the quotes of course.

Next scroll down and locate:
network.http.piplelining and double click it to set it to true.

Just below that double click on:
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set it from 4 to 10.

Well, for now that’s it.  Just wanted to be sure everyone has their browsers setup and working as cleanly as possible to hopefully minimize any problems out there.

–glenn hancock