Camino09Website:Support:HiddenPrefs

Camino's interface is designed to be simple, giving easy access to the main, most useful options. However, you might want to gain more control over your browser behavior.

This page only lists hidden preferences we think are usefull to Camino users. For more advanced hidden preferences visit the Preferential mozdev project, containing the most extensive preference list for Mozilla-based applications.

This page contains a list of "hidden" preferences which can be activated by adding a plain text file called user.js to your Camino profile folder (in your home folder ~/Library/Application Support/Camino).

Hidden Preferences

Disable Bookmark Icons

You can disable the display of "favicons" (a.k.a. site icons) by adding the following code to your user.js file:

// Disable Bookmark Icons
user_pref("browser.chrome.site_icons", false);
user_pref("browser.chrome.favicons", false);

Use error pages instead of dialog messages

By default, Camino displays error messages in a sheet if a connection fails. To turn off the error messages and use pages instead, add the following code to your user.js file:

// Instead of annoying error dialog messages, display pages:
user_pref("browser.xul.error_pages.enabled", true);

Note that this feature is still a bit buggy as it removes the last visited page from the Back button history.

Disable target="_blank"

Camino has a built-in pop-up blocker. However, it doesn't stop web pages from opening in new windows by using the target="_blank" or the illegal target="_new" properties. To force such links to open in the same window, add the following code to your user.js file:

// disable target="_blank" (open in same window):
user_pref("browser.block.target_new_window", true);

Tweak Find-As-You-Type

Find-As-You-Type, a fairly new feature introduced in Camino, has a few hidden preferences that can be changed to better fit your needs. Add the following code to your user.js file:

// Find-As-You-Type-Configuration:
// Set this pref to false to disable Find-As-You-Type:
user_pref("accessibility.typeaheadfind", true);

// If you set this pret to true, typing can automatically start Find As You Type.
// If false (default), you must hit / (find text) or ' (find links) before your search.
user_pref("accessibility.typeaheadfind.autostart", true);

// Set this pref to false if you want Find As You Type to search normal text too:
user_pref("accessibility.typeaheadfind.linksonly", true);

// Set this pref to true if you require that the link starts with the entered text:
user_pref("accessibility.typeaheadfind.startlinksonly", false);

// This is the time in milliseconds for the Find As You Type to stop watching for keystrokes:
user_pref("accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout", 3000);

For information about what Find-As-You-Type is, read the documentation.

Enable Broken Bookmarks Checking

The bookmarks manager is capable of checking bookmarks to see if their url is still available. Unfortunately this feature was causing some concerns with users working at offices as Camino would automatically (in the background) connect to every bookmark. To enable the feature add the following prefs to your user.js file:

user_pref("camino.bookmarks.autoupdate", true);

Disable blinking or marquee elements

You probably just find the blinking above annoying. To stop it, add the following code to your user.js file:

// Put an end to blinking text!
user_pref("browser.blink_allowed", false);
// Put an end to marquee text!
user_pref("browser.display.enable_marquee", false);

Disable Image (gif) Animations

Some people find gif animations very annoying, or just want to disable them so less cpu cycles are used. To stop them, add the following code to your user.js file:

// Put an end to image animations.
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "none");

Disable image loading

People using a dialup internet connection might not want images to load due to the costs. To stop images from loading, add the following code to your user.js file:

user_pref("network.image.imageBehavior", 2)

Note that more options are available: 0=accept all images, 1=originating server only, 2=no images.

Force frames to be resizable

Many sites use frames to display their contents, and sometimes the frames are too small. To force all frames to be resizable, add the following code to your user.js file:

// Force frames to be resizable
user_pref("layout.frames.force_resizability", true);

Note that this will also make the frames appear with a fixed-width border and thus, may make the pages look funny.

Speed up page rendering

By default, Camino doesn't try to render a web page for 250 milliseconds, because it's waiting for data. If you add the code below to your user.js file, Camino immediately tries to render the page, even without complete data. The drawback is on slower machines where doing a "reflow" may actually cause the total page load time to be longer.

// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);

Turn Off Disk Cache

The Disk Cache is the place where visited pages are stored for future visits, so next time they are shown faster.

// Change the Disk Cache size (default is 51200 kilo bytes)
user_pref("browser.cache.disk.capacity", 0);

Enable Pipelining

Pipelining is an experimental feature, designed to improve page-load performance, that is unfortunately not well supported by some web servers and proxies. To try it out, add the following code to your user.js file:

// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests", 100);

How can Camino pretend to be another browser (by spoofing the User Agent)?

Some website have a "browser check" which allows them to only let certain browsers to enter a website. In most cases Camino is perfectly capable of entering them if it weren't for the browser check. You can however make the website think Camino is another browser by adding the following code to your user.js file:

user_pref("general.useragent.override", "User Agent");

Examples of user agents are:

Internet Explorer 5.2, Mac

   Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.2; Mac_PowerPC)

Internet Explorer 6.0, Windows

   Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows 98)

Netscape 6.2, Mac OS X

   Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.4.1) Gecko/2002

Netscape 4.7, Mac

   Mozilla/4.75C-CCK-MCD {C-UDP; EBM-APPLE} (Macintosh; I; PPC)

Netscape 6.1, Mac

   Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/2001

AOL 7.0, Mac

   Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020730 AOL/7.0

Opera 6, Windows XP

   Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows XP) Opera 6.01 [en]

OmniWeb, Mac OS X

   Mozilla/4.5 (compatible; OmniWeb/4.1-v422; Mac_PowerPC)

XEmacs, Linux

   Emacs-W3/4.0pre.46 URL/p4.0pre.46 (i386-suse-linux; X11)

Lynx 2.8.4rel.1, CygWin

   Lynx/2.8.4rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6b

To go back to Camino's default User Agent, just remove the code you put in user.js.

Wrap long lines in Source View

When viewing the source of some pages you might have a horizontal scrollbar because the HTML document contains very long lines. To stop this from happening, add the following code to your user.js file:

user_pref("view_source.wrap_long_lines", true);

Disable the dotted focus ring that appears when I click on a link

When clicking on links (text and images) a dotted ring appears around it. Note that this feature is needed when using full keyboard access.

user_pref("browser.display.focus_ring_width", 0);

Disable Quartz font smoothing

On Mac OS X it's possible to give fonts a smooth edge instead of the rough, pixelated edge you see on Windows. By default this is turned on in Camino. You can stop this by adding the following line to your user.js file:

//Control font smoothing
pref("browser.quartz.enable.all_font_sizes", false);