I’ve recently moved to Firefox 3, and I’m pretty pleased with the performance. Firefox 3 feels snappy, seems to handle JS and memory leaks well, and is all-around pretty impressive. Here are my tweaks:
I’m not a fan of the awesome bar – I simply don’t like interfaces (like Google Suggest) that create a lot of activity while I’m typing. To disable the URL bar, set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to -1.
Also worth noting is that the malware and phishing protection that come default in Firefox 3 do send your browsing history to Google. This is not new from Firefox 2, but it is worth mentioning, as you are uniquely identified and correlated in the data. To turn this off, de-select the two “Tell me…” options under Firefox’s Security settings. I ran packet traces and verified this does stop Google data collection.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
