Firefox 3 displays five bars at the top of the application window before it is starting to show the website’s contents. There is the title bar, the menu, the navigation toolbar, the bookmarks toolbar and the tabs of course. They take up about 132 pixels in height on the screen which is more than a fourth of the screen estate of an Asus eeePC 7 and still an eights of the popular 1024×768 screen resolution.
If you analyse the elements of the Firefox header you notice that there is lots of free space there. That’s wasted space that could be put to much better use.
The following article is going to show how you can save more than 60% of that header space. It is not necessary to apply all the changes. If you feel that you need the title bar or the status bar then you are of course free to keep them. The article however will be radical and outline how to use minimal screen estate in Firefox.
All the changes outlined are applied by customizing the Firefox toolbars and installing several add-ons. Links are give when needed. Let us start:
Here is a picture of the default Firefox interface:
And here how it can look like after making the changes
The minimal interface combines several toolbars into one bar and removes the title and status bar. The status bar and the tab bar are set to automatically hide. They will appear when they are needed.
1. Install Tiny Menu
Tiny Menu compresses the Firefox menu that contains the File, Edit etc entries into one menu item that can be displayed as text or as an icon.
2. Merging the Navigation Toolbar with the Menu bar.
We are now starting to merge toolbars to get rid of some of them. A right-click on blank space in the Menu toolbar will open a menu with the option to customize. Select that option.
Now drag and drop all elements that you need from the Navigation Toolbar (Reload, Home, Stop, Address Bar and Google Search) to the right side of the menu bar.
3. Remove the Navigation Toolbar
The Navigation Toolbar should now only contain items that you have not moved to the Menu Bar. Right-click the bar and uncheck Navigation Toolbar from the context menu. This should remove that toolbar from Firefox and give us some valuable screen estate.
4. Merging the Bookmarks Toolbar with the Menu Bar
Right-click on a free space of the Menu Bar again and select customize. Now drag and drop the Bookmarks Toolbar Items to the Menu Bar and click on Done. This should clear the Bookmarks Toolbar from any items.
5. Disable the Bookmarks Toolbar
Now right-click on the Bookmarks Toolbar and uncheck it from the menu. This should remove the Bookmarks Toolbar from Firefox as well.
6. Autohide the Status Bar
We already removed two toolbars from Firefox and are half-way through. Install the Autohide Statusbar add-on for Firefox to automatically hide the Status Bar when it is not needed.
7. Disable the Title bar and move the captions to the menu bar
This one is optional. The title bar might be useful for several purposes. It is for instance used to move the window around on the screen. Once it is gone it cannot be moved anymore (only maximized, minimized). The size of the window can be altered but its position cannot be changed. The title bar is also displaying the title of the current website which might be helpful for some users.
Install the Hide Caption add-on for Firefox to remove the title bar.
8 Autohide the Firefox Tabs bar
This is another optional step as it seems that many users like to have a view of their tabs bar all the time. If you can live without it for most of the time you might want to consider putting it on auto hide. Moving the mouse into the area where it should be will display the tab bar.
The add-on had to be modified to work with the latest Firefox 3.04 build. You can download it directly here: hide_tab_bar_10dev3a
Now for comparison:
It might not be that easy in the first hours of working with the new interface. Not everything has to be implemented which means that it should be easy to create your very own minimized version of Firefox.
Please feel free to comment, ask or add to the article in the comments.
Related Articles:
How To Customize The Firefox LayoutLittlefox Theme Optimizes Firefox Screen Usage
Firefox Hide Menubar
Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar Tweak
Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar is not showing bookmarks
Holy Cow!!!
I’d hit F11
to get entire screen real estate!
F11 is faster
Well you said it. You hit F11. Try entering a new url in your setup or accessing a bookmark.
@ Martin
Gosh, people are so tech savvy!
Martin hit F11 then if you want to acess your url or book marks simply move your mouse near the top of your sceen then the top bar will pop out. Use it well.
Start typing your bookmarks and thanks to awesome bar they will show up in the result. thanks to Awesome bar I never digg into my book marks.
Here is a tip, try to see what Ctrl+L does.
Funny I cannot access the bookmarks when in F11 mode. So yes you could use the awesome bar to load the bookmarks but that’s probably not the same.
Oh and yes, you still have to press F11 at least once a day :)
Ctrl+I or Crtl+B for bookmarks
see also http://preview.tinyurl.com/6of96f
Still, I didn’t have to read your article (I just jumped in after reading the title) and didn’t have to mess much!
:)
#7 Remove Title Bar prevents moving window
I believe that AltDrag will allow title bar-less windows to be moved.
There’s also an add-on to merge the refresh and stop buttons… in order to save even more screen real estate!! I’m that geeky, I know :)
Here’s the link : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/313
hey, i wanted to add that you should get vimperator (if you are a vim user) or for those _emacs_ users, conkerer, it basically makes firefox be lke vim, or conkerer makes all XULRunner apps, so, Thunderbird and Firefox into emacs. That was you dont need any of the the standard toolbars, only the usual status bar at the bottom. Now if we could only get rid of the title,
also, muttator, makes thunderbird behave like vim
Awesome, thanks … wow … now my screen can compete with chrome !!! YEY
looks very good tips we can have a choice of screen size instead of using the full screen mode.
thanks for all of these tips
:)
Great tips…Really useful to save some real estate…
Actually i use keyconfig to hide all the bars except titlebar, and access my most visited websites through keywords.
great tips
thx for this article
I experienced a little trouble with the hide caption addon; For some reason all of the tabs displays a constant “Loading…” instead of the page title. Anyone else with this problem?
Bernard no I did not have that problem. Are you using any other tab related add-on?
I am using Tab Mix Plus, but I don’t see how that interferes with this? It might, I haven’t really dug into it. Besides the tab hiding, everything else seems to work fine. Nice trick! :-)
I have the StumbleUpon toolbar as well, it’s been compressed down to a couple of buttons to fit in the menu toolbar, but it totally screws up the overlay with the other items.. :/
Thank you so much. All other minimal schemes just did not work for me. I have a bit of a tweaked version of this. but the tab hider and removing the top bar is so sweet. thank you for sharing.
This is one fine guide to make some of the firefox annoyances go away. Thank you.
Thanks, Thats the great firefox tip.
Great post and great comments. When I use F11 (fullscreen) and normal screen, I use “alt-D” (to enter new url) and “alt-D + TAB” to move into my search-field.
Using F11 with a LCD-resolution width of 1900px seldom makes sense, though – it’s only the height I’m interested in. What I miss is F11-like functionality for the height only without loosing “Status bar”.
I’ll be looking into your suggestions, thank you.
Thanks for this. FF should be set up like this by default.
A good add-on to use with this setup is Fission, which shows your loading bar behind the page URL. I have a couple of other space-saving measures for netbooks outlined in my guide on msiwind.net :)
http://forums.msiwind.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3371
Thank you for these tips,
I could not get the Hide Caption to work as describe on my machine it just display the page title on the same bar as the browsing buttons … do you have an alternative add-on ?