Anyone who’s ventured into the depths of their Mozilla-based browser’s configuration settings with the immortal line, about:config, will appreciate the effort behind this browser add-on. It’s been developed by the brains behind the Pale Moon browser for Windows, but while the tool has been developed with that variant in mind, many of its functions will work in Firefox for Windows too.

Once installed, open your browser’s main menu, click Options and select Advanced options… to open the Pale Moon Commander dialog. The available tweaks are divided into six separate sections, each of which splits its available tweaks in tabs – it’s basically the same layout as used by Firefox’s own Options dialog, so should be familiar to most.

Notable tweaks include enabling and disabling various developer tools (as well as the inline PDF viewer) via Other > Tools. Fancy enabling the HTTP pipelining tweaks, which *might* boost page-loading times? Do so via Network > Pipelining. Boost maximum HTTP connections per server via Network > HTTP, and enable JIT profiling via Performance > JavaScript.

Also check out the User Interface section, where you can tweak tabs, the Windows 7/8 Jump List feature and change the way your browser displays web addresses via the General section. Missing the browser padlock that highlights a secure site? Visit Security > Padlock where you can bring it back, choose where to place it and implement border shading for additional emphasis.

Several of the tweaks are specifically for Pale Moon users only – enabling these in other Mozilla variants will simply have no effect either way. If you go too far, you’ll find a reset button under Other > Reset, but it won’t simply undo any changes you’ve made using Pale Moon Commander; it’ll reset all your browser preferences to their defaults, so as the developer says, use it – as you would with the about:config tweaks themselves – with extreme care.

There are other similar add-ons out there – Configuration Mania is cross-platform, for example – but Pale Moon Commander’s interface and selection of tweaks make it worthy of a closer look.

What's new in 3.0.0?

- Obsolete preferences removed
- Added new WebGL preferences
- Added network predictor preferences
- Added WASM preferences
- New cipher suites for TLS 1.3