Firefox/Tweaks
This page contains advanced Firefox configuration options and performance tweaks.
Performance
Improving Firefox's performance is divided into parameters that can be inputted while running Firefox or otherwise modifying its configuration as intended by the developers, and advanced procedures that involve foreign programs or scripts.
This section contains advanced Firefox options for performance tweaking. For additional information see these MozillaZine articles.
Change Performance settings
Firefox automatically uses settings based on the computer's hardware specifications .
Adjusting these settings can be done in Preferences or by changing the dom.ipc.processCount value to and browser.preferences.defaultPerformanceSettings.enabled to manually in .
However you may want to manually adjust this setting to increase performance even further or decrease memory usage on low-end devices.
In this case the Content process limit for the current user has been increased to 4:
WebRender
WebRender is a high-performance, GPU-accelerated 2D rendering engine written in Rust. It is the compositor that powers Firefox and the Servo browser engine project. As of Firefox 93, it is enabled by default for all users and uses hardware rendering by default if the hardware it is running on supports at least OpenGL 3.0 or OpenGL ES 3.0 (as of 2021-04) and meets minimum driver requirements. If your system does not meet these requirements it will fallback to software rendering using Software Webrender.
If you are experiencing rendering issues with up-to-date drivers on your machine, you can force-enable Software Webrender by setting the preference to true in .
Stop urlclassifier3.sqlite from being created again
Removing all urlclassifier* files can prevent the use of megabytes of storage in your firefox profile. If you remove all the urlclassifier* files, you may find out that keeps growing again after a certain time. Here is a simple solution to avoid it for now and ever.
$ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile_dir> $ echo "" > urlclassifier3.sqlite $ chmod 400 urlclassifier3.sqlite
This effectively makes the file empty and then read-only so Firefox cannot write to it anymore.
Turn off the disk cache
Every object loaded (html page, jpeg image, css stylesheet, gif banner) is saved in the Firefox cache for future use without the need to download it again. It is estimated that only a fraction of these objects will be reused, usually about 30%. This is because of very short object expiration time, updates or simply user behavior (loading new pages instead of returning to the ones already visited). The Firefox cache is divided into memory and disk cache and the latter results in frequent disk writes: newly loaded objects are written to memory and older objects are removed.
An alternative approach is to use settings:
- Set to
- Verify that is set to
true, more information about this option can be found in the browser.cache.memory Mozilla article - Add the entry (right click > new > integer) and set it to the amount of KB you want to spare, or to for automatic cache size selection (skipping this step has the same effect as setting the value to )
- The "automatic" size selection is based on a decade-old table that only contains settings for systems at or below 8GB of system memory. The following formula very closely approximates this table, and can be used to set the Firefox cache more dynamically:
41297 - (41606 / (1 + ((RAM / 1.16) ^ 0.75))), where is in GB and the result is in KB.
- The "automatic" size selection is based on a decade-old table that only contains settings for systems at or below 8GB of system memory. The following formula very closely approximates this table, and can be used to set the Firefox cache more dynamically:
This method has some drawbacks:
- The content of currently browsed webpages is lost if the browser crashes or after a reboot, this can be avoided using anything-sync-daemon or any similar periodically-syncing script so that cache gets copied over to the drive on a regular basis
- The settings need to be configured for each user individually
Move disk cache to RAM
An alternative is to move the "disk" cache to a RAM disk, giving you a solution in between the two above. The cache will now be preserved between Firefox runs (including Firefox crash recovery), but will be discarded upon reboot (including OS crash).
To do this, go to and set to , where is your user's ID which can be obtained by running id -u.
Open to verify the new disk cache location.
Longer interval between session information record
Firefox stores the current session status (opened urls, cookies, history and form data) to the disk on a regular basis. It is used to recover a previous session in case of crash. The default setting is to save the session every 15 seconds, resulting in frequent disk access.
To increase the save interval to 10 minutes (600000 milliseconds) for example, change in the setting of to
To disable completely this feature, change to .
Defragment the profile's SQLite databases
Firefox keeps bookmarks, history, passwords in SQLite databases. SQLite databases become fragmented over time and empty spaces appear all around. But, since there are no managing processes checking and optimizing the database, these factors eventually result in a performance hit. A good way to improve start-up and some other bookmarks and history related tasks is to defragment and trim unused space from these databases.
You can use profile-cleaner to do this, while Firefox is not running:
| SQLite database | Size Before | Size After | % change |
|---|---|---|---|
| urlclassifier3.sqlite | 37 M | 30 M | 19 % |
| places.sqlite | 16 M | 2.4 M | 85 % |
Firefox provides a tool to defragment and optimize the places database, which is the source of most slowdowns and profile corruptions. To access this tool, open the page, search for and click the button.
Cache the entire profile into RAM via tmpfs
If the system has memory to spare, can be used to cache the entire profile directory, which might result in increased Firefox responsiveness.
Disable Pocket
If you do not use the Pocket-service, you may want to disable it by setting to false in .
Appearance
Fonts
See the main article: Font configuration
Configure the DPI value
Modifying the following value can help improve the way fonts looks in Firefox if the system's DPI is below 96. Firefox, by default, uses 96 and only uses the system's DPI if it is a higher value. To force the system's DPI regardless of its value, type into the address bar and set to 0.
Note that the above method only affects the Firefox user interface's DPI settings. Web page contents still use a DPI value of 96, which may look ugly or, in the case of high-resolution displays, may be rendered too small to read. A solution is to change to system's DPI divided by 96. For example, if your system's DPI is 144, then the value to add is 144/96 = 1.5. Changing to 1.5 makes web page contents use a DPI of 144, which looks much better.
If this results in fonts that are undesirably large in releases after Firefox 103, change browser.display.os-zoom-behavior to zero. Then, type into the search bar, select the circle next to 'number,' click the plus button to add the setting key, and edit its value to 100 times your value. For example, if that was set to 1.25, should be set to 125.
See also HiDPI#Firefox for information about HiDPI displays and for calculating the DPI.
Default font settings from Microsoft Windows
Below are the default font preferences when Firefox is installed in Microsoft Windows. Many web sites use the Microsoft fonts.
General user interface CSS settings
Firefox's user interface can be modified by editing the userChrome.css and files in (profile_dir is of the form hash.name, where the hash is an 8 character, seemingly random string and the profile name is usually default). You can find out the exact name by typing in the URL bar, and searching for the field under the section as described in the Firefox documentation.
This section only deals with the userChrome.css file which modifies Firefox's user interface, and not web pages.
Change the interface font
The setting effectively overrides the global GTK font preferences, and does not affect webpages, only the user interface itself:
Hide button icons
Enables text-only buttons:
~/.mozilla/firefox/<profile_dir>/chrome/userChrome.css
.button-box .button-icon {
display: none;
}
Hiding various tab buttons
These settings hide the arrows that appear to the horizontal edges of the tab bar, the button that toggles the "all tabs" drop-down list, and the plus sign button that creates a new tab.
Horizontal tabs
To place the tab bar horizontally stacked along the sides of the browser window:
Hide title bar and window border
To replace the title bar with the tab bar, enable browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar in .
Or go to "Menu", then "Customize" and then at the bottom-left corner find checkbox named "Title Bar". Uncheck it. If the checkbox is missing, make sure the environment variable is correctly set and/or the environment variable is set to "client".
Hide only title bar in KDE
With the setting above, Firefox adds in KDE the minimize/macimize/close buttons to the tab bar, but the title bar will still be there.
It can be removed by right-clicking on it, then More Actions > Configure Special Application Settings. Add a new property there for "No titlebar and frame" and be sure to not forget activating it, "Yes" must be chosen. (As you have now no titlebar anymore there, to later change the rule, you can go to System Settings > Window Management > Window Rules.)
However, that will also remove the frame, it is basically impossible to change the window size. An alternative is go to System settings > Application Style > Window Decorations, choose "Breeze" and change its settings. In the last tab, Window-Specific Overrides, add a new one. Use the button Detect Window Properties to get the name. There is a button Detect Window Properties. Alternatively, if you want to set this override for all windows, not just Firefox, you can enter a dot (.) in the regex field. Afterwards, set the Decoration Options to hide the title bar only.
Unreadable input fields with dark GTK themes
When using a dark GTK theme, one might encounter Internet pages with unreadable input and text fields (e.g. text input field with white text on white background, or black text on dark background). This can happen because the site only sets either background or text color, and Firefox takes the other one from the theme. To prevent Firefox from using theme's colors and dark themes in web pages respectively confirm and are set to in .
Otherwise, if the previous modification did not solve the issue, it is possible to launch Firefox with a light GTK theme by adding a new string in named widget.content.gtk-theme-override and setting it to a light theme like or .
Override input field color with CSS
The extension Text Contrast for Dark Themes sets the other color as needed to maintain contrast.
Alternatively set the standard colors explicitly for all web pages in or using the stylus add-on. The style sheet is usually located in your profile folder (visit for the path) in , if not you can create it there.
The following sets input fields to standard black text / white background; both can be overridden by the displayed site, so that colors are seen as intended:
urlbar and searchbar to be white remove the two first :not css selectors.Change the GTK theme
To force Firefox to use a light theme (e.g. Adwaita) for both web content and UI, see GTK#Themes.
Change the GTK theme for content process only
To force Firefox to use a light theme (e.g. Adwaita) for web content only:
- Open in the address bar.
- Create a new
widget.content.gtk-theme-overridestring type entry ( > New > String). - Set the value to the light theme to use for rendering purposes (e.g. ).
- Restart Firefox.
Web content CSS settings
This section deals with the file in which you can add custom CSS rules for web content. Changes to this file will take effect once the browser is restarted.
This file can be used for making small fixes or to apply personal styles to frequently visited websites. Custom stylesheets for popular websites are available from sources such as userstyles.org. You can install an add-on such as superUserContent to manage themes. This add-on creates the directory chrome/userContent.css.d and applies changes to the CSS files therein when the page is refreshed.
Block ads
See floppymoose.com for an example of how to use as a basic ad-blocker.
Mouse and keyboard
Mouse wheel scroll speed
To modify the default values (i.e. speed-up) of the mouse wheel scroll speed, go to and search for . This will show the available options, modifying the following:
- Set to
1. - Set to the desired number ( to are common values).
Alternatively, to use system values (as how scrolling works in Chromium), set mousewheel.system_scroll_override.enabled to .
Mozilla's recommendation for increasing the mousewheel scroll speed is to:
- Set between and (default: )
Pixel-perfect trackpad scrolling
To enable one-to-one trackpad scrolling (as can be witnessed with GTK3 applications like Nautilus), set the environment variable before starting Firefox.
If scrolling is undesirably jerky, try enabling Firefox's Use smooth scrolling option under Preferences > General > Browsing.
Enable touchscreen gestures
Make sure is either set to 1 (enabled) or 2 (default, auto-detect).
Add to /etc/security/pam_env.conf and then logout or reboot your system for the changes to take effect.
On some devices, it may be necessary to disable xinput's touchscreen gestures by running the following:
$ xsetwacom --set device Gesture off
Mouse click on URL bar's behavior
In older versions of Firefox it was possible to tweak the behavior of the address bar in , but this has been removed in March 2020.
In order to for example disable the behavior that selects the contents of the address bar on first click, or to allow to double click the URL to select it in full, see user contributed scripts such as https://github.com/SebastianSimon/firefox-omni-tweaks
Smooth scrolling
In order to get smooth physics-based scrolling in Firefox, the configurations can be changed to emulate a snappier behaviour like in other web browsers. For a quicker configuration, append the following to (requires restart):
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.lines.durationMaxMS", 125);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.lines.durationMinMS", 125);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS", 200);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMinMS", 100);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.msdPhysics.enabled", true);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.other.durationMaxMS", 125);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.other.durationMinMS", 125);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.pages.durationMaxMS", 125);
user_pref("general.smoothScroll.pages.durationMinMS", 125);
Additionally the mouse wheel scroll settings have to be changed to react in a smooth way as well:
user_pref("mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount", 30);
user_pref("mousewheel.system_scroll_override_on_root_content.enabled", true);
user_pref("mousewheel.system_scroll_override_on_root_content.horizontal.factor", 175);
user_pref("mousewheel.system_scroll_override_on_root_content.vertical.factor", 175);
user_pref("toolkit.scrollbox.horizontalScrollDistance", 6);
user_pref("toolkit.scrollbox.verticalScrollDistance", 2);
If you have troubles on machines with varying performance, try modifying the until it feels snappy enough.
For a more advanced configuration which modifies the mass-spring-damper parameters, see AveYo's natural smooth scrolling configuration.
apz.gtk.kinetic_scroll.enabled, which defaults to true. If you find that these tweaks do not work, try setting this value to false.Set backspace's behavior
Disable middle mouse button clipboard paste
Emacs key bindings
To have Emacs/Readline-like key bindings active in text fields, see GTK#Emacs key bindings.
Miscellaneous
Force-enable hardware video decoding
Although is enabled by default, one may need to force-enable hardware video decoding by setting to true.
Remove full screen warning
Warning about video displayed in full screen mode ("… is now fullscreen") can be disabled by setting to in .
Change the order of search engines in the Firefox Search Bar
To change the order search engines are displayed in:
- Open the drop-down list of search engines and click Manage Search Engines... entry.
- Highlight the engine you want to move and use Move Up or Move Down to move it. Alternatively, you can use drag-and-drop.
"I'm Feeling Lucky" mode
Some search engines have a "feeling lucky" feature. For example, Google has "I'm Feeling Lucky", and DuckDuckGo has "I'm Feeling Ducky".
To activate them, search for in and modify its value (if any) to the URL of the search engine.
For Google, set it to:
For DuckDuckGo, set it to:
Secure DNS with DNSSEC validator
You can enable DNSSEC support for safer browsing.
Secure DNS with DNS over HTTPS
Adding magnet protocol association
In set network.protocol-handler.expose.magnet to . In case it does not exist, it needs to be created, right click on a free area and select New > Boolean, input network.protocol-handler.expose.magnet and set it to .
The next time you open a magnet link, you will be prompted with a Launch Application dialogue. From there simply select your chosen BitTorrent client. This technique can also be used with other protocols: .
Prevent accidental closing
There are different approaches to handle this:
This behavior can be disabled with property set to true in
An alternative is to add a rule in your window manager configuration file. For example in Openbox add:
<keybind key="C-q">
<action name="Execute">
<execute>false</execute>
</action>
</keybind>
in the <keyboard> section of your file.
The Disable Ctrl-Q and Cmd-Q extension can be installed to prevent unwanted closing of the browser.
Jerky or choppy scrolling
Scrolling in Firefox can feel "jerky" or "choppy". A post on MozillaZine gives settings that work on Gentoo, but reportedly work on Arch Linux as well:
- Set to 40
- Set and to false
- Set to something really large such as 2100000000 but no more than 2140000000. Above that number Firefox will not accept your entry and complain with the error code: "The text you entered is not a number."
- Set to at least 512K
Now scrolling should flow smoothly.
Run Firefox inside an nspawn container
Disable WebRTC audio post processing
If you are using the PulseAudio PulseAudio#Microphone echo/noise cancellation, you probably do not want Firefox to do additional audio post processing.
To disable audio post processing, change the value of the following preferences to :
media.getusermedia.aec_enabled(Acoustic Echo Cancellation)- (Automatic Gain Control)
- (Noise suppression)
- (High-pass filter)
Fido U2F authentication
Firefox supports the Fido U2F authentication protocol. Install for the required udev rules.
Get ALSA working back
As long as Arch keeps building Firefox with ac_add_options --enable-alsa, then Firefox works fine without pulse on the system, without needing any special configurations, and without apulse (unless using pulse on the system and wanting Firefox to avoid using it). It used to be one had to allow ioctl syscalls, blocked by default by Firefox sandboxing, and required by ALSA setting in about:config, to the right ioctl syscall number, which is 16 for x86-64 and 54 for x86-32, but not anymore. For reference, see:
Force-enable WebGL
On some platforms WebGL may be disabled even when the user desires to use it. To force-enable WebGL set to true, to also force-enable WebGL anti-aliasing, set to true.
If you get an error similar to this: then you can try the solution explained in Firefox bug 1480755 :
Set security.sandbox.content.read_path_whitelist to
Enable Recommended by Pocket
If you do not see "Recommended by Pocket" (Preferences > Home > Firefox Home Content - between "Top Sites" and "Highlights"), you can enable it by setting and to true in about:config. Although the option will still not show in Preferences, newly opened tabs/windows (if set to ) should now display Pocket recommendations.
Prevent the download panel from opening automatically
As of Firefox 98, the download panel (with ongoing/recent downloads) always opens whenever a download starts.
You can disable this behavior by setting the preference to in about:config.