Mozilla’s Hidden Preferences

Posted on December 11, 2002

I’ve been meaning to post this one for a long time:

If you use Mozilla (or a Moz-based browser like Netscape, Chimera, K-Meleon, etc.), you know how much control it gives you over the way it works. For most things, you can set them however you like in the Preferences control panel. There are some preferences, however, that aren’t visible in that panel; to set these, you’ll need to read Mozilla’s Hidden Preferences. Armed just with a trusty text editor (Notepad will do fine) and a desire to tweak, you can do some really great things to Moz, including:

• Turn on XML prettyprinting, just like Internet Explorer
• Make the browser display ALT text for broken images, rather than just the stupid broken-image graphic
• Turn pop-up images off for specific sites, rather than globally
• Make mailto: links open in a mail program other than Mail/News (great for those who browse in Moz and handle e-mail in Outlook or Eudora)

… and much more. Check it out!