If you use Gmail as your primary email client, Firefox 3.5 makes it easy to associate any mailto links that you might encounter to us Gmail as the default email client. While this has been possible with previous versions, you don’t need to jump through any hoops or use any add-ons with Firefox 3.5.

If you are concerned about your privacy and don’t wish for Firefox’s new Location-Aware Browsing feature, you have probably noticed that there is no setting to turn it off in the Preferences screen. You can disable this feature though, you just have to use about:config.

Private Browsing allows you to surf the web without recording a history of the sites visited and without saving any information about the session. If Firefox is to be installed on a public computer, then starting it in Private Browsing mode is a must.

TraceMonkey is the magic pill that makes the new Firefox much quicker. Unfortunately, the beta version has this feature disabled. By changing the value of a couple of configuration settings, you can easily enable TraceMonkey and enjoy its speedy goodness.

If you install Firefox extensions (and who doesn’t?), then you are very familiar with the ghosted Install button with the countdown that requires your to wait for it to say Install Now. You can disable this and have immediate access to the Install Now button by altering the default configuration of your Firefox browser.

Use Firefox’ 3′s Live Bookmarks and the RSS feed for your Gmail Inbox to get easy access to your incoming email from the Bookmarks Toolbar.

If you keep having problems with Firefox eating up too much memory, you can add a preference that will allow Windows to swap out memory when the application is minimized.

By default, Firefox reloads Live Bookmarks every 60 minutes. If this is not frequent enough for your needs, you can change the update rate by adding an unlisted preference to about:config.

By default, Firefox 3 uses anti-aliasing on all rendered text, regardless of the text size. However, you may want Firefox to follow the OS X system preference of turning off the anti-aliasing of smaller sized text to improve how it is displayed on your screen.

One thing I dislike about Firefox 3 is that the specialized themes for Windows XP and Vista both leave you with a Back button that is out of proportion with the other buttons on the toolbar. You can tame the oversized button by following this Tech-Recipe.