Set New Preferences Interface as Default in Firefox

Firefox 31 has been released and as with every major release, it also has come with some new changes. The new version of Firefox has much more improved preferences interface which can be compared with the preferences interface of Google Chrome. You can open this preferences interface screen that opens inside a tab by typing about:preferences in the Firefox address bar. It has all the same options and settings to be configured as you would find in the Firefox Options window (that can be opened from the menu bar Tools → Options). But the problem is that even in this version of Firefox the new style preferences interface is not set to be the default way to customize Firefox settings.

Set New Firefox Preferences Interface as Default

You can follow these instructions to set the new preferences interface as default in Firefox:

  1. Open Firefox browser, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
  2. This will open the preferences list in the raw format showing the names of the preferences, their types and their values.
  3. In the Search field, type preferences to narrow down the list to only the preferences that we are interested in.
  4. Double-click on the preference named browser.preferences.inContext to change its value to true. Similarly, double-click on the preference named browser.preferences.instantApply to change its value to true.Set New Firefox Preferences Interface as Default
  5. That’s it. New style preferences interface is now your Firefox’s default way of changing the options.

Now even if you try to access Firefox options from the menubar, only the new preferences interface (that is usually accessible through about:preferences) will be opened. Furthermore, you won’t have to press OK to make the new changes in preferences take effect – new changes will be applied instantly the moment you change them.