10 Coolest Hidden Firefox Settings You Should Know

Written by Preethi Ranjit / Courtesy of Hongkiat

There are plenty of settings that Firefox offers besides general ones you can find in the Options menu. Many of these advanced settings can be found on specific browser pages that use the about: protocol. In this article, I’m going to show you 10 less-known Firefox settings that can come useful in your everyday workflow.

When you visit any of the about: pages in the list below, and are prompted with a warning message, just click either the OK or the I’ll be careful, I promise! button — whichever one you encounter.

1. Perform DNS Lookup

You can perform an in-house DNS lookup (finding the IP address of a domain) in Firefox.

Type about:networking into the URL bar, and press Enter. On the upcoming page, click “DNS Lookup” in the sidebar menu, type the domain name, and click Resolve to see its IP address(es).

2. Block Auto-Refresh

Sometimes web pages come with Refresh HTTP headers that make pages refresh frequently.

If you want to stop that from happening, go to about:preferences#advanced, and under the subtitle Accessibility, check the checkbox labeled “Warn me when websites try to redirect or reload the page”.

3. Search As You Type

Pressing Ctrl+F opens an in-page search-box in Firefox that allows users to search for a string in a webpage. But it’s possible to spare the key combo pressing and start searching as you start typing.

In the “Accessibility” section of the about:preferences#advanced page check the checkbox labeled “Search for text when I start typing”.

From now on, when you start typing, and the cursor isn’t in a text input field on the page, Firefox will immediately start looking for the text on the web page.

4. Unmap Backspace Key

To prevent being surprised by someone trying to sneakily backspace their way into your browser history, you can replace the backspace action with one that scrolls the page up on pressing Backspace, scrolls it down on Shift + Backspace. You can also configure the Backspace key not to give any action at all.

Go to about:config, and type browser.backspace_action into the search bar. The default value of this browser setting is 0.

Double-click on it, and change it to 1 for mapping scrolling action to the Backspace key, or change it to 2 for unmapping it from any action.