So I’m going through the pain/joy of moving to a new laptop. My battle worn but bullet proof T42p is being replaced by an second-hand T60p to go alongside a new Macbook that I’ll be getting soon. Reckon I’ve had the T42p about three and a half years and remarkably it’s still run the original XP installation since as I said … bulletproof hardware with bulletproof software if managed properly.
However, the downside is that I have a very, very, very tweaked and personally optimized installation and now I’ve got to try and replicate that on my new machine. Hence, begins lots of headscratching as I try to rediscover how I tweaked things originally.
First off … Firefox. I’d held off upgrading to Firefox 3 on my old box, but with the Flash/Firefox 3 problems now fixed I’m starting with Firefox 3 on the new one. The vast majority of my core plugins have long been available for Firefox 3, but there was one that was never going to be there. To set the scene, I always try to maximize the useful real estate in applications and so I hate superfluous menus, toolbars and icons. Hence I’ve used a Firefox plugin called MenuX for many years which allows(ed) me to hide all the menus and instead access them via a single button in my icon bar. However, MenuX was never developed beyond Firefox 1.5! I hacked it for Firefox 2.0, but thought that for Firefox 3.0 it was probably a step to far. Consider my immense joy when I discovered a Firefox 3 plugin called Personal Menu that does exactly what I want.
Anyhow to the real purpose of this post. Basically I’m planning on capturing key tweaks and hacks in a number of posts. Both for my personal records but also to share them with others who might find them useful.
I’ve always considered the download manager in Firefox a bit of a “give away” since by default it’ll show a history of what you’ve downloaded. You can clear its entries via the privacy options, but somehow I had my existing installation delete each entry automatically once it’d finished downloading. This isn’t an option accessible via the usual options UI so …
You need to start by accessing the advanced configuration options by typing about:config into the location bar.
- To get Firefox to clear the download manager history set browser.download.manager.retention to 0 to clean up the moment the download is completed, or to 1 to have them cleared when you quit Firefox. The default value of 2 discards nothing.
- Documents you’ve downloaded are also added to the My Recent Documents folder on the Windows’ Start menu. Disable this by setting browser.download.manager.addToRecentDocs to false.
- Finally junk the popup download complete notification by setting browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete to false.