Firefox Bookmarks

[RHFHandle]

Hello

I am testing the water here, having got fed up with spam, advertising (especially noisy video clips) when I am doing research on line (using IE). I understand I can get add-ons with Firefox to eliminate those intrusions. I'll look into that later. This post is not addressing that; just giving the reason for the possible change.

Meanwhile, I have tried Firefox, and note immediately that it appears to import my favourites from IE and make them bookmarks. It re-arranges them but I think I can deal with that. What is troubling me is it shows 'most visited' and there is spam. Stuff I have NOT visited. Intrusion again! What is the solution. How can I remove the whole concept of 'most visited' or edit items?

EDIT: Have now worked it out!

[kreemoweet]

All major browsers have ad-blocking extensions, even IE. FF comes by default with some pre-installed bookmarks, search engines, and categories in the Bookmarks Toolbar. Just delete whichever ones you don't want to keep. It's really quite unrealistic to expect a FREE piece of software to be configured out of the box exactly as you would desire.

[RHFHandle]

Yes, accepted! I have already re-arranged my bookmarks. Quite instinctive really. I was just thrown by the initial unfamiliarity!

[Reflective]

You can get into the guts of Firefox and make changes which affect the way it displays and behaves. It's called about:config and you have to copy/paste that into the location bar and hit Enter.

This results in a warning to which you just have to confirm that you'll be careful. If you don't want to receive the warning again, remove the checkmark (I always do).

Here are a few options which I usually configure.

dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled
This lets sites know what you did when you visited and whether you copied anything on a page and which part of it that was. If you don't want give them that info copy/paste the highlight into the filter at the top and when it appears on its own, double click it to change it from its default true setting to false. You'll see that it'll change to bold type.

full-screen-api.warning.timeout
Changing the default setting of 3000 to 0 will prevent Youtube from displaying a warning when you enable full screen viewing.

image.animation_mode
Animated GIFs can become an irritation after a while but there are a couple of options available to change their behaviour. The default is normal. I always change it to once which means they'll play just one time and then stop. You can also change it to none

network.http.sendRefererHeader
This tells the next site the name of the one you last visited, or if you clicked on a link somewhere which took you there, which site that was. The default is 2. Changing it to 0 means sites won't get that information. It does mean though that if for example you clicked a link to a special offer somewhere where the original site receives commission for their promotion of the product that they won't get paid because the site where you landed won't know where you came from.

accessibility.blockautorefresh
Generally speaking this will prevent pages from reloading unexpectedly although it doesn't seem to work on the reuters.com site for some unknown reason. When it does work you'll see a message at the top of Firefox. You can then either click "Allow", or just click the X.

You'll find hundreds more here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQ ... ig_Entries

For troubleshooting or how to do things: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox

Have fun!

[lovemyfoxy]

UBlock Origin will take care of the ads, when you get that far.

As bookmarks tend to pile up, you might want to set up folders by topic. It's lots easier sooner than later.

[dickvl]

It is better to leave network.http.sendRefererHeader at its default (2) and instead set network.http.referer.spoofSource to true.
That way you avoid issues with servers that have hotlink protection.