How to personalize your Firefox browsing experience
From themes and homepage to toolbar and fonts, Firefox gives you different ways to customize your browsing experience. You use your browser for just about everything you do online, so why not make it look great while you’re using it.
Here, we’ll discuss everything you can customize in Firefox, along with brief guidelines for doing so.
How to Customize the Firefox Home Page
The homepage is where your browsing experience begins, so that’s the first thing you need to customize. To do this, go to Settings > Home.
First, choose the page you want to appear in new windows or tabs. If you want a clean interface, you can select a blank page. Or you can set a custom URL as your homepage if you want to go straight to your favorite search engine or website.
If you stick with Firefox Home, you can customize what appears there. You can decide if you want to see Shortcuts, Sponsored Shortcuts, and Recent Activity.
If you’ve turned on recent activity, choose whether you want bookmarks, visited pages, saved pages in Pocket, or downloads to show.
How to Change Theme in Firefox
The easiest way to give Firefox a new look is to switch from the default theme. Firefox has Dark, Light, and Alpenglow themes by default. Moreover, several beautiful Colorways themes are also available.
To change the theme, click on the menu icon and select Add-ons and Themes. Here you can see all installed themes and the option to activate them. The good thing is that thousands of other themes are available in Firefox as add-ons.
To install these themes, go to the Firefox Add-ons page and select Themes. Themes are categorized into abstract, fashion, nature, sports, music, vacation, etc. Browse through the different themes and install the one you like.
How to create your own theme with Firefox Color
Can’t find a decent theme to use? You can design your own with Firefox Color.
To start creating a custom Firefox theme, install the Firefox Color add-on. After installation, a new tab opens where you can design your theme. Firefox lets you choose colors for the toolbar, search bar, and pop-up text.
From Advanced Color tab, you can select colors for more elements, like selected tabs, button background hover, sidebar borders, etc. Next, choose the background pattern for your theme. You can upload a custom image or select from available templates.
If you feel overwhelmed with the choices, you can choose a pre-made theme as a starting point. When you make changes, they are applied in real time. But you can also share them via a link, save them locally as a ZIP file, or upload them to the Firefox Add-ons Market.
If you want to restore the default Firefox theme, disable the Firefox Color extension.
Firefox gives you the ability to customize your toolbar, so you can easily access frequently used features. To customize your toolbar, click the menu icon and go to More Tools > Customize Toolbar.
By default, Firefox lets you add toolbar items to either side of the address bar. However, you can add additional flexible space (containing the shortcuts) anywhere on the toolbar or tab bar.
Since Firefox allows you to add multiple flexible spaces, you can create shortcuts for all the tools you use frequently.
Adding too many items to the toolbar clutters your screen. Luckily, Firefox offers an overflow menu to let you organize your toolbar items.
The overflow menu only appears when you click on the >> icon. This way, you can easily access toolbar items without cluttering your browser. You can customize the overflow menu from the Menu Icon > More Tools > Customize Toolbar.
Firefox also lets you decide whether or not to keep the menu bar, title bar, and bookmark toolbar.
To show/hide them, go to Menu Icon > More Tools > Customize Toolbar. At the bottom, you’ll see options to enable the title bar, menu bar, and bookmarks toolbar.
The nice thing about the menu bar is that you can add the flexspace (and other toolbar items) to it. Also, if you frequently open your bookmarks, it is better to set it as always shows Where Show only on new tab.
Finally, you can change the Density at To touch if you are using Firefox on touch devices. This enlarges all buttons and icons, making it easier to select options.
How to Change Webpage Fonts and Colors in Firefox
Firefox lets you change the font, font size, and text color on every web page you visit. To do this, go to Settings > General > Language & Appearance.
Choose the font and font size from the drop-down menu. Click on Advanced. Apart from selecting the font size, you can also select the proportional, serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts.
Finally uncheck Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above to ensure that all web pages adhere to these settings.
How to Customize Firefox’s Address Bar and Search Suggestions
The search suggestion is a very practical and fast function. But if you don’t want to receive suggestions or a specific type, you can customize search and address bar suggestions.
Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Address Bar and select all the types of suggestions you want to appear in the address bar.
Then go to Settings > Search > Search Suggestions. By default, Provide search suggestions is checked, but you can disable it. Similarly, you can decide whether or not to get search suggestions in the address bar and private window.
How to Customize Firefox Tab Settings
Firefox gives you several ways to customize your tab settings. Go to Settings > General > Tabs. From here you can enable tab cycling and tab previews and change other settings.
How to Change Site Permissions in Firefox
Although site permissions are mostly related to your privacy, some features affect your browsing experience. For example, video autoplay is one of the most annoying web trends.
To change these site permissions, go to Settings > Privacy & Security and scroll to Site permissions. You can choose to enable notifications and provide website access to your VR devices.
From Autoplay settings, you can block audio or both audio and video. Additionally, Firefox allows you to set exceptions for specific websites from the Settings button.
Personalize your browsing experience
One of the best things about Firefox is that you can customize the way your browsing experience looks. With themes, you can change the look and feel of your browser. Likewise, you can navigate faster by adding your frequently used tools to the toolbar and overflow menu.
Besides the default features, Firefox allows you to install add-ons to further customize your experience and speed up browsing.
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