Conquering Various (and mostly unnecessary) Firefox Shenanigans

Here’s where I’m going to be documenting the “fixes” I find for the annoying “features” in Firefox. Most of these features, mind you, are pretty stupid and shouldn’t have been put into the browser in the first place, but I digress. Right now I’m using all my energy to avoid filling this page with “four-letter words”.

So with that, let’s go.

Issue: Firefox is ridiculous when it comes to caching web pages, to the point that when a particular page’s content changes, the browser doesn’t even notice. A “normal” refresh (clicking the refresh icon or pressing F5) is not enough to goose it; rather, you have to “force refresh” the page by typing CTRL-F5.

Some examples of scenarios where you might see this behavior are:

• Logging into a web site that has a dynamic menu, but the menu doesn’t update accordingly after logging in
• Sites with “bookmark” pages or other lists that you can add things to, but the lists don’t seem to update afterwards

This is my #1 complaint with Firefox since migrating to it from Chrome back in 2020 – their caching is off the rails. It took some serious digging to find a “fix” for this, but I finally did and here it is:

• Type about:config into the location bar and hit enter
• Acknowledge the “Accept the Risk and Continue” button
• Paste browser.cache.check_doc_frequency into the search box and click the pencil button on the right side
• Change the value to 1 and click the checkbox

My extensive testing so far has been very positive, thankfully.

Issue: Hitting the backspace key takes you to the previous web page. Whose drug-addled idea was this? Nothing is more annoying than having to hit backspace to correct some typing faux pas (some of us have to do it more often than others) and suddenly finding yourself on the previous web page. I have been browsing the internet for roughly 3 decades now and I have yet to find a reasonable use case for this feature. Here’s how to kill it:

• Type about:config into the location bar and hit enter
• Acknowledge the “Accept the Risk and Continue” button
• Paste browser.backspace_action into the search box and click the pencil button
• Change the value to 2 and click the checkbox.

You’re welcome.

Issue: Initiating a download/save of a file from Firefox results in the download popup showing up, which one must close or otherwise be annoyed by.

• Type about:config into the location bar and hit enter
• Acknowledge the “Accept the Risk and Continue” button
• Paste browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel into the search box and click the pencil button
• Set the value of browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel to false

Issue: Firefox restores (or at least tries to) open tabs after a controlled reboot or system crash. This is a huge personal annoyance of mine as, more often than not, the tab recovery doesn’t go well. I have never found an instance where I wished the browser restores an open tab, so I dug around to figure out how to disable it:

• Type about:config into the location bar and hit enter
• Acknowledge the “Accept the Risk and Continue” button
• Paste browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash into the search box and click the pencil button
• Set the value of browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false

Issue: Google search results take FOREVER to load. This aggravated me so much that I finally fired up a packet capture to see what was going on. Lo and behold, I found that Firefox is now attempting to communicate w/ Google via QUIC, a supposedly faster option than communicating over TCP. I dug around and found that we can force the browser to go back to TCP via disabling http3 (allegedly the future of the internet but, from where I’m sitting, I’m not buying it). Mikey’s rule #1 – if it’s working, don’t try to fix it. So let’s “unfix” this issue…

• In about:config, search for network.http.http3.enable and disable it.

Enjoy the speedy search results.

Issue: Highlighting information on a web page, followed by right-clicking, displays a menu with the ‘Copy’ option grayed out. Holy shit, Mozilla, are you really trying to get me to go back to Chrome? Because I’m almost there.

I thought I had this fixed but it no worky. The only workaround I have found that has consistently worked thus far is to ALT-TAB to another program, then back to Firefox. Copy should no longer be grayed out when you right-click. Careful though, it still seems iffy.

Issue: Firefox pops up preview balloons when you hover over a browser tab. You say picky, I say annoying.

• In the normal place, search for browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled and mark it false.

08/22/2024 – Note: The above “fix” only seems to hold for the current browser session; if you close the browser, then the browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled option gets reset to true when the browser starts again. Still working on a fix for this, but it might involve dumping Firefox for a different browser. More to come.