Setting up Firefox

I really liked the Mozilla browser's default keybindings on Unix, until they changed somewhere around the time early versions of Firefox appeared.

Use emacs-style keybindings for editing

When using Gnome 2.8 or greater, invoke gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs --type string. [reference]

Use Alt key instead of Control

Again, from the about:config screen, set ui.key.accelKey to "18". Set the ui.key.menuAccessKey to "0". This change wants the browser to be restarted. [reference]

Middle button loads the URL in the clipboard

Open about:config and set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to true. Also, set editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines to "3" to remove pasted newlines. [reference]

Disable the "Additional plugins are required to display all the media on this page" dialog box.

This tries to fade in, which seems to be slow on most of my computers. From about:config, set plugin.default_plugin_disabled to "false".

Disable IPv6 DNS lookups.

I've noticed that some websites, notably a well-known online brokerage firm, don't play well with DNS and IPv6. From about:config, set network.dns.disableIPv6 to "true".

Make invalid SSL certificates slightly less annoying

I'm a developer; I interact with a lot of invalid or self-signed certificates regularly. To make this better, set the following setting in about:config: browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert=true.