Getting Firefox backspace work on Ubuntu

For some like me who love the keyboard, more than mouse at times, Firefox on Ubuntu could get a little irritating to navigate between already surfed pages. On WinDoze, Firefox by default allows backspace to take you back to last visited page (while shift+backspace takes you one page forward). Of course, this is only with default settings and mostly everything is customizable. However, being the lazy me, I didn't do anything about it thus far.

Today, I did the following simple change to get it working and it didn't even need a browser-restart :)

i) Go to about:config by typing the same in the URL.
ii) Promise to be careful with it :)
iii) Type backspace in the filter-bar.
iv) Change the value of browser.backspace_action to 0 (by default, its 2)

You're done. No need to close the browser. Just press backspace and go back to where you left off before irritating yourself because backspace didn't work! ;)

Firefox Shiretoko

Firefox 3.5, code-named Shiretoko, has a brand new feature called private browsing. Its very useful if you share the laptop with some visitors every now and then, but not often enough for them to have a Firefox profile.

This feature, as some might think, is not proxy-browsing which hides and translates your IP into something else. Its also not really a setting which deletes all your history, cache and cookies when you close the browser. Its some of it and a little more. With Shiretoko, you can privately browse while keeping your old tabs intact. So if your friend drops by and wants to check his mail on your laptop, you just give him private browsing, without actually logging out of your mail and other accounts, while he gets a clean browser and leaves it clean too. Shiretoko continues just where you left off when he's done browsing privately!