General Tab

To NoSquint, a site is a web location where all pages have the same zoom level and color settings, and the site name is derived from the page's URL.

In most cases, the site is the domain. For example, if the current page is www2.ibm.com/index.php, NoSquint will consider the site name to be ibm.com. NoSquint will also take into account common country-specific second-level domains. For example, if you're visiting www.bbc.co.uk, NoSquint will consider the site name to be bbc.co.uk.

The default behaviour should work almost all the time. When it doesn't, you can control how NoSquint determines site names in the Exceptions Tab.

Per-site settings (color and zoom)

Remember per-site settings between Firefox restarts
With this option selected, NoSquint will remember any changes you make to the zoom levels and color choices for a given site, and the changes are stored on disk so they can be applied even if you restart Firefox.

Both full page zoom and text zoom levels are remembered independently. Next time you visit that site, NoSquint will use the zoom and colors previously used on that site.
Forget settings for sites not visited in the last ...
With the "Remember per-site settings between Firefox restarts" option enabled, NoSquint keeps track of all zoom level and color changes for sites, even sites you only visit once. This option is house cleaning: if you haven't visited a site (for which you've set a non-default zoom or color setting) for the specified number of months, NoSquint will forget the setting.
Erase NoSquint site history when Firefox clears private data
When you change the default zoom levels or colors for a given site, NoSquint remembers that change, which means it must keep a record of those sites. From a privacy perspective, this is similar to your browsing history. If this option is selected, when Firefox clears your private data (via Tools | Clear Private Data for Firefox 3.0, and Tools | Clear Recent History for Firefox 3.5), it will also purge all site-specific data associated with NoSquint.

Note that user-added exceptions are not cleared.
Forget all per-site settings when Firefox closes
Per-site settings will be retained only for the current Firefox session. They are never written to disk, and will therefore not be remembered if you restart Firefox.

An alternative would be to use Firefox's Private Browsing mode (Firefox 3.5 and later), which NoSquint supports. When Private Browsing is activated, even if "Remember per-site settings between Firefox restarts" is selected instead of this option, NoSquint will never store any per-site settings to disk which have changed while in that mode.

Zooming Tab

The options in this tab let you control the default zooming behavior as they apply to all sites. You can override the zoom levels for individual sites using the Site Settings, which can be managed by left-clicking on NoSquint's status bar icon, or selecting NoSquint Site Settings from the page's context menu.

Default Zoom Options

Primary zoom method
The primary zoom method specifies the behaviour of the standard zoom adjustment shortcuts (ctrl-plus, ctrl-minus, ctrl-mousewheel). With Full Page Zoom, both images and text will be zoomed; with Text Zoom, only text is zoomed. Whichever zoom method is not set to be primary is referred to as the secondary method.

The shift key can be added to any of the shortcuts to control the secondary zoom method. For example, if the primary zoom method is set to Full Page Zoom, and ctrl-shift-plus is pressed, only text size will be increased.
Default full page zoom level
This is the full page zoom level (affecting both images and text) which will be applied to all pages by default. A value of 100% is the standard Firefox zoom level without NoSquint. With NoSquint, you can override this value to be larger or smaller.

Modifying the full page zoom level when visiting a web page will override this value for that site.
Default text-only zoom level
This is the text zoom level (affecting only text) which will be applied to all pages by default. A value of 100% is the standard Firefox zoom level without NoSquint. With NoSquint, you can override this value to be larger or smaller.

Modifying the text zoom level when visiting a web page will override this value for that site.
Zoom increment
You can change the zoom level for a page from the View menu, by using one of the zoom shortcuts (ctrl-plus/minus or ctrl-mousewheel), or by using the optional toolbar buttons. NoSquint can remember these changes. This setting specifies what increment, in percent, to use when changing the zoom level.
Enable zoom with ctrl-mousewheel
Selecting this option allows you to adjust the zoom level by pressing and holding the control key while moving the mousewheel up or down. If ctrl-shift-mousewheel is used, this controls the secondary zoom method.
Show current zoom levels in status bar
Selecting this option shows the zoom levels (both full page and text zoom) in the status bar for the current web page. When hovering over the status panel, a tooltip will appear providing more information.

Colors Tab

Sometimes website creators choose to use rather questionable color choices which can significantly hinder readability. NoSquint lets you override the standard text colors for all sites here. Or (probably more usefully), you can modify per-site colors via the Site Settings, which can be managed by left-clicking on NoSquint's status bar icon, or selecting NoSquint Site Settings from the page's context menu.

Text and Background

Text
Overrides the foreground color for all text on the page.
Background
Overrides the background color for the page.
Disable background images
Some sites may overlay text on background images, rendering the user-selected background color (above) ineffective. You can disable those images by selecting this options.

Link Colors

Unvisited
The foreground text color to use for all links that have not been visited before.
Visited
The foreground text color to use for all links that have been visited before.
Always underline links
Some websites make it difficult to tell the difference between links and regular text. Selecting this option will force hyperlinks to always be underlined.

Exceptions Tab

Because not all web sites are structured the same, sometimes the default logic NoSquint uses to determine the site name doesn't work the way you want it to. Using exceptions, you can control how NoSquint determines what constitutes a separate site.

Use Cases

Exceptions are powerful and expressive, and unfortunately can be confusing. They are specified using a simple custom grammar, not regular expressions. Before going into a detailed explanation, let's first examine some common use-cases. Hopefully one of these examples applies to your case.

Problem: different subdomains on SourceForge, e.g. freevo.sourceforge.net and audacity.sourceforge.net, are wrongly treated as the same site (sourceforge.net)
Solution: add an exception with the pattern *.sourceforge.net
Problem: example.com/users/mary and example.com/users/john are wrongly treated as the same site (example.com)
Solution: add an exception with the pattern example.com/users/*
Problem: I use Google Mail (mail.google.com) and Google Reader (google.com/reader) and would like these treated as sites separate from google.com
Solution: add an exception with the pattern mail.google.com; add another exception with the pattern google.com/reader
Problem: my company's intranet is at intra.example.com, but I'd like our wiki, located under intra.example.com/wiki to be treated separately from the rest of the intranet.
Solution: add an exception with the pattern intra.example.com/wiki
Problem: Google Mail, Google Groups, and in fact all hosts on Google should be treated as separate sites. But the country (the top-level domain) shouldn't matter. So mail.google.ca should be the same site as mail.google.de, but a different site from groups.google.de, which itself would be the same site as groups.google.fi
Solution: add an exception with the pattern *.google.[*]
Problem: my company has several web applications that are distributed across multiple servers. example.com/server1/apps/app1 should be considered the same site as example.com/server2/apps/app1, but there could also be example.com/server1/apps/app3 that should be a separate site.
Solution: add an exception with the pattern example.com/[*]/apps/*
Problem: same scenario as the previous one, but sometimes the server isn't in the URL, so example.com/apps/app1 is the same site as example.com/server1/apps/app1.
Solution: add an exception with the pattern example.com/[**]apps/*

Gory Details

What follows is a technical explanation of exceptions. If you're not an advanced user, this section may create a fair amount of confusion; refer instead to the use-cases above to follow by example.

Exception patterns may contain zero or more of the following possible wildcards:

* – When included in the host name, matches any character except a dot ('.'). When included in the path, matches any character except a slash ('/'). Does not match the empty string.
** – Matches any sequence of characters. Does match the empty string.

Site names are arbitrary strings that represent a given site and are computed by NoSquint based on the current page's URL and the user-defined list of exceptions. For instance, both foo.example.com and myapp.*.example.com could be site names, depending on the exceptions defined. NoSquint looks up zoom levels based on the site name. The site name, as determined by NoSquint, can be viewed in the tooltip by hovering over the magnifying glass in the status bar, or by opening the Site Settings dialog by left clicking the magnifying glass in the status bar.

When a wildcard is enclosed in square brackets (i.e. [*] or [**]), the literal wildcard (* or **) will be used in the site name instead of the characters the wildcard matches. This is allows you to group together locations. For example, if the page's URL is google.ca and you've defined an exception google.[*], the site name will be google.*. Since google.fi matches this pattern, the site name would also be google.*. Therefore, google.ca and google.fi would be considered the same site.

Hostnames and paths are evaluated separately; an exception pattern is split into two sub-patterns, one for the host, and one for the path. These sub-patterns match substrings, but hosts are right-anchored, while paths are left-anchored. This means that any wildcards specified in the host name will not match any characters in the path, and vice versa. When the hostname part of a pattern is only *, it matches the domain of the page's URL. For example, for www.google.com, a single * matches google.com; for www.bbc.co.uk it matches bbc.co.uk.

Hostname parts can optionally contain a port number, which is delimited from the hostname with a : (colon). For example, *:8080 will cause port 8080 for all domains to be treated separately, so that www.example.com is considered a different site than www.example.com:8080 (but, assuming no other exceptions than this, www.example.com:8001 is still considered the same site as www.example.com or www.example.com:4242).

Any exception whose host part is the null string – in other words, the exception begins with a / (front slash) – is applied only to file:// URLs. So the exception /home/* for Linux or /C:/Users/* for Windows Vista causes all home directories to be treated distinctly from one another.

When multiple exception patterns match a page's URL, NoSquint will use the exception that matches the most non-wildcard characters in the host name. If there are still multiple exceptions in that narrowed list, the exception that matches the most non-wildcard characters in the path is then chosen. If still there are multiple exceptions, the first one that matched is chosen.