Network tab

Network tab

Connection

Your organization or Internet service provider may offer or require you to use a proxy. A proxy acts as an intermediary between your computer and the Internet. It intercepts all requests to the Internet to see if it can fulfill the request using its cache. Proxies are used to improve performance, filter requests, and hide your computer from the Internet to improve security. Proxies are often part of corporate firewalls.

Connection Settings Dialog

Direct connection to the Internet

This is the default Option. Choose this if you don't want to use a proxy.

Auto-detect proxy settings for this network

Choose this if you want Firefox to automatically detect the proxy settings for your network.

Manual proxy configuration

Choose this if you don't have a proxy location (URL). Ask your system administrator for the names and port numbers of the servers running proxy software for each network service and enter the information in the appropriate fields.

Automatic proxy configuration URL

If your workplace has a proxy configuration file, ask the system administrator for its URL and enter it here. Click Reload to load the settings.

Cache

Pages you view are normally stored in a special cache folder for quicker viewing the next time you visit the same page. You can specify the amount of disk space the cache can use here. You can also immediately clear the contents of the cache.

Use up to ... MB of space for the cache

Allows you to specify the maximum size, in megabytes, of the cache on your computer.

Clear Now

Immediately clears the current contents of the cache, freeing the disk space used by the cache.

Update tab

Firefox can check whether updates to installed add-ons or to Firefox itself are available.

Automatically check for updates to:

By default Firefox automatically checks for updates to itself, to add-ons, and to search engines so you'll always know you have the most up-to-date version. You can change this behavior by changing the appropriate checkboxes here.

When updates to Firefox are found,

Ask me what I want to do

Updates to Firefox are installed automatically by default. Select this Option to manually control how and when updates are installed.

Automatically download and install the update

When this Option is selected, Firefox updates will be automatically downloaded and will be installed the next time Firefox is restarted. The Warn me if this will disable any add-ons Option determines whether you will be warned before the installation of an update which would require an incompatible add-on to be disabled because no newer, compatible version exists. The warning will allow you to postpone installation of the update, though at the expense of improvements included in it.

If all extensions and themes are compatible or can be updated to be compatible, the Firefox update will be installed. Upon restart you will be asked to install any needed add-on updates so that you can continue to use them.

Show Update History

Firefox automatically records the updates you have installed. You can view information about these updates by clicking this button.

Note: You must be running Firefox as an administratorroot or as the user who originally installed Firefox to install Firefox updates.