Firefox is a fantastic web browser. It’s fast, secure, and customizable. Unfortunately, by default Firefox wastes an awful lot of space with its prodigious amounts of chrome. Each piece can be conquered, though. That’s what I’ve set out to accomplish in this, the first (and probably last) edition of a series I’m calling “TweakerFox” in which I’ll bring you cool Firefox extensions, or something!
First off, the status bar. The status bar is easy. Just uncheck “Status bar” from the View menu. Want something more elegant? There are some status bar auto-hide extensions available, but I don’t really care for any of them. YMMV, of course.
Now that that’s gone, let’s address the bookmark bar. There’s an extension called “Bookmark Autohider” that does the job just fine. I highly recommend disabling the hide animation if you’re using these tweaks on a netbook, though, as it can be rather slow and unpleasant. Anyway. Properly configured, this extension will hide the bookmark bar until you mouse over the Location bar. One nice side affect of this design is you won’t trigger it by accident when using the other navigation controls.
Next up, the tab bar. If you don’t see any good reason for the tab bar to stick around when you’re not clicking on tabs, take a look at the aptly named “Hide Tabbar” extension. It can be configured to respond to key combinations or to auto-hide, which is what I prefer. Check the preferences for delay configuration and what not.
Last, but not least (annoying), is the menu bar. I, for one, almost never use the darned thing. “Hide Menubar” is one extension which will get it out of your life until you summon it with the Alt key. If you prefer something different, there are quire a few options including one which puts all the menu items under one button which you can then stick off to the side of the navigation bar a la Google Chrome.
There you have it! We have bit-by-bit reduced Firefox to a single navigation bar. I suppose we could get rid of that too, but then we’re probably starting to sacrifice too much functionality. I would like to make an extension that does all of this in one go, auto-hiding the entire top panel until the mouse moves up there, but it turns out triggering things off the window frame doesn’t work too well, so instead of having a blank area to mouse into, it might as well just be the navigation bar.
I hope this has inspired you to trim some fat off your browser!
Stay tuned for the next edition (yeah right) of TweakerFox!