Web Worker Daily

I’ve written before about TweakGuides.com, and the truly extensive guides for customizing both Windows XP and Windows Vista offered for free there. Recently, I’ve been diving into the free TweakGuide for Firefox that the site offers. It’s not as extensive as the Windows TweakGuides, but if you spend a little time with it you can definitely make Firefox more efficient for you.

One of the great strengths of Firefox, of course, is that it is so extensible. Many people are hip to really useful extensions, but Firefox is also very customizable under its own hood. That’s what’s good about the Firefox TweakGuide.

The Firefox TweakGuide was extensively modified in July to reflect changes in Firefox 3, but not everything in it applies to Firefox 3. The vast majority of the customizations will work in Firefox 3 and Firefox 2, and there are many “new to Firefox 3″ citations in bold.

The TweakGuide begins with a discussion of Settings which is basically a walkthrough of how to optimize the browser using the options menus. These let you get warnings if opening multiple tabs will slow the browser down, or if closing multiple tabs will cause a problem, and much more.

The best stuff in the TweakGuide, though, comes in the several Advanced Tweaking guides. There is helpful information on backing up and restoring various versions of your Bookmarks, retrieving selected items from cache, and even scripts for changing the look of the browser. You can change the colors of your tabs, for example.

Many web workers spend more time in Firefox than any other application. If that’s you, you’ll especially benefit from the Firefox TweakGuide.