Last Updated on July 9, 2023 by Mathew Diekhake
Mozilla Firefox (or simply Firefox) is a free and open-source web browser developed by The Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation. Firefox is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, illumos and Solaris operating systems. Its sibling, Firefox for Android, is also available. Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine to render web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards. In 2017, Firefox began incorporating new technology under the code name Quantum to promote parallelism and a more intuitive user interface. An additional version, Firefox for iOS, was released on November 12, 2015. Due to platform restrictions, it uses the WebKit layout engine instead of Gecko, as with all other iOS web browsers.
The Mozilla Firefox web browser claims to be currently 30% lighter than Google Chrome on Speedometer 2.0 benchmark — a modern way of evaluating web browser speed. Firefox also comes with tracking protection. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users’ online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach and demonstrate a 67.5% reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set during a crawl of the Alexa top 200 news sites since Firefox does not download and render content from tracking domains. Tracking Protection also enjoys performance benefits of a 44% median reduction in page load time and 39% reduction in data usage in the Alexa top 200 news sites.
Firefox comes with lots of settings that can be adjusted from the menu. Over time you may wish to reset them to the default and go back to the way Firefox was originally designed instead of using it with the customizations you had added.
The following tutorial demonstrates how to remove the malware from your computer.
How to Reset Firefox to Its Default Settings
Here is how you can reset the browser settings from the More menu in Firefox:
1. Click on the More button and then click on the Help link. (click to enlarge screenshot below)
2. Click on the Troubleshooting Information link. (click to enlarge screenshot below)
3. Click on the Refresh Firefox button. (click to enlarge screenshot below)
4. Click on the Refresh Firefox button when you get the confirmation dialog box.
You can now close the Firefox settings and continue using your web browser with the default settings restored.
That’s all.
April 26, 2019 @ 08:45
Excellent guide as usual, Mathew.
I still prefer using Firefox over Chrome because I’ve always used it and it allows me to share the same extensions between operating systems.
I believe as a web developer this is one of the main reasons why so many people use Firefox as well — we each have the extensions that we want to use across platforms and don’t want to live without.
Why Firefox is able to do this and yet other brands are not I’m not quite sure. I know that the new Microsoft Edge is apparently going to offer Chrome extensions which I think is a good move for both parties. But I’m still a while away yet from warming to Microsoft’s Edge. I tried it a few times and didn’t think there was much to rave about.
April 26, 2019 @ 08:49
> I know that the new Microsoft Edge is apparently going to offer Chrome extensions which I think is a good move for both parties.
It makes a lot of sense for Chrome extensions to be available on Edge. Microsoft needs to get some more people using their browser while Chrome will be happy to get more usage from their extensions — the developers will appreciate additional people using the extensions which should result in some of those developers doing more work that Chrome will benefit from.
> But I’m still a while away yet from warming to Microsoft’s Edge. I tried it a few times and didn’t think there was much to rave about.
I share the sentiments about Edge — a lot of the settings seem to be where Chrome and other browsers haven’t put them rather than where the best positions for them are. But I am looking forward to trying out the new Chromium-based Edge. I’m not sure exactly why but there is something that excites me about what may be coming.