まさかここがバレたとは.....

If you are a fan of Firefox, you probably knew about the latest version that was just released a few days ago, Firefox 3.6. Or, your Firefox should have told you about it and urged you to upgrade. Mine didn't do that for some reason, so I did a manual update. And I'm now running Firefox 3.5.7, again.

Before you cry blasphemy, let me explain my little situation.

After I went through the normal update route, it checked my add-ons and informed me that NicoFox isn't compatible, which was understandable because it's an experimental add-on and requires manual update. So I installed the compatible version and clicked on the restart Firefox button in the add-ons manager.

Guess what? The button asking me to restart is still there when I checked. So I clicked on it again. After a couple restarts and it still refused to go away. The only difference I could see between the restarts is the increasing number of Personas appearing under the theme tab, possibly loaded from my list of favourites each time the browser restarted. I also detected a subtle but still noticeable indication that it's Firefox loading the Personas and not the Personas add-on that I've been running. There seemed to be a very faint outline/shadow around the text, which blended the text better with the background colour and image, but made it slightly less clear to my very bad eyesight.

Appearance is a big thing for me (one of the reason why I hate Vista), so I decided to go back to 3.5.7 for now until they either notice this and make a patch for it, or that it's here to stay and I absolute have no other option but to upgrade. But I made a wrong move here and ran the 3.5.7 installer without first uninstalling 3.6. It refused to run at all.

To cut the long story short (trust me, I can keep going and make this even longer), I uninstalled Firefox and even deleted the whole Mozilla folder. I was to start from scratch. Unfortunately, I did a bit of customization before so it took me a while to find the lines and restore it to the way I like it. Seeing how this will likely not be my last fresh install, I've opted to take note along the way and chronicle it so I can just copy and paste and find the add-ons easily next time.

If you are new to Firefox, hopefully this can give you some hint of what you can do to customize your own.

1. Tools -> Options
+ Main Tab
- Set "http://www.google.com/" as homepage
- Set it to restart and show my windows and tabs from last time
- Uncheck the showing of download window
- Ask me where to save the files
+ Content Tab
- Uncheck everything under Advanced JavaScript option
- Set fonts for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) and Japanese as (top to bottom) Sans Serif, MS　Pゴシック, Arial, MS ゴシック
- Set minimum font size for the above languages as 12, Western as 13
- Set default font as Arial
- Add Japanese and Taiwan under English as preferred languages for displaying pages
+ Privacy Tab
- Use custom setting for history to ask me every time for cookie acceptance
+ Advance Tab
- Set it to search as I type
- Uncheck autoscrolling
- Ask me what to do when there's a new update

2. Right-click on navigation bar to customize
- Remove search bar
- Drag new tab button to the far left of the bookmark bar
- Use small icons

3. Import bookmark and password files from old profile. (Preferably also prefs.js, but I forgot to copy it... I'm not sure what's in there exactly, but it might be why I had to do step 4 & 5?)

4. about:config
- keyword.URL: http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q= (Search Google by typing directly into the address bar, 'cause I'm lazy like that :Q)
- browser.tab.tabMinWidth: 60 (I usually have over 2 or more dozens of tabs open, this way I can see more tabs and select the one I want easier)

5. Remove the add new tab button on the right side
- userChrome.css: .tabs-newtab-button {display: none}
(I'm pretty sure I did it with about:config the last time, but I haven't been able to find the article so far... Will update if I stumble upon it)

That's pretty much all the configurations I did, I think. I'll post the Add-ons tomorrow as this post is getting ridiculously long with hardly real content in it...