Creating more screen space in Firefox

This page will show you how to shrink and de-clutter Firefox to free as much screen space as possible for actually viewing web pages.

Firefox is not brilliant for the EEE, because of its height. In order to make it more usable, you could try any or all of the following:

1. Remove the navigation and bookmarks toolbars
2. Install the Tiny Menu or Compact Menu 2 extension, which shrinks your menu down to one entry or icon. Read the developer's comments on the download page for the extra instructions how to use it.
3. Install a compact theme like Whitehart or Minifox. For Firefox 3, Classic Compact is a good equivalent of Minifox.
4. Use full-screen mode or install the Fullerscreen add-on. Also try the Full Fullscreen extension.
5. Globally reduce the font size (for menus and such).
6. Removing unnecessary menu options
7. Remove the status bar (under the 'View' menu)
8. Users of the default OS can also hit the far-right arrow to shrink the bottom menu.
9. Configure tab bar to use single common close button instead of individual buttons for each tab

See also How to shrink Thunderbird

If you like to know, what the result of following the subsequent guides might look like.

This is an example-Screenshot of the Firefox-Toolbar with the following additions / changes:

- The Firefox text-menu was shrunk to one single toolbar-item using the Tiny Menu Extension.

- The bookmark and navigation toolbar are removed. Following these steps: Using a single toolbar

- The Stop-Button and the Reload-Button are combined using the Stop-or-Reload extension.

- The overall font-size was reduce to 8pt using this guide: Changing the overall font size

- The second-right toolbar-button toggles your statusbar. Find it here.

Firefox itself provides a means to maximize vertical screen space, by getting rid of bookmark and navigation toolbars, after moving the wanted components from the navigation toolbar up into the menu toolbar. This probably works best in combination with a compact Firefox theme.

1. After running Firefox, select View→Toolbars→Customize.
2. A window pops up allowing you to change the organization of the toolbars.
3. Drag the “home page” button into the customize toolbar window (discarding it).
4. Drag the other navigation buttons up onto the topmost (menu) toolbar, at the left.
5. Drag the url bar into the menu toolbar at the right.
6. Drag the search bar into the customize toolbar window (discarding it) and close the customize window.
7. Finally, go back to Firefox's View→Toolbars and disable display of the Navigation and Bookmarks toolbars.

The idea behind dispensing with the search bar is that google and other searches can already be performed from the url bar, and so the space can be freed.

If you enter search terms rather than a url in the url-bar, Firefox will take you to a page based on a google search on what you typed. But, depending on how google feels about the result, it may take you to an “I'm feeling lucky” result instead of showing the search results page. To change this you can go to about:config (in the Firefox url bar), search for keyword.URL (in the filter input) and double-click the result to change the value there to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q= ¹⁾.

Incidentally, to make even more and better use of the url bar, you might like to look at the Autocomplete Manager

If you miss the bookmarks toolbar try creating a folder on it with no name. Move all of your links into the nameless folder then do customise and move it onto your single toolbar. You now have a single icon with your links in that works in a similar way to tiny menu.

You may also want to try keyboard shortcuts to replace the Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh buttons:

- Press 'Alt + (right arrow)' button to go Forward

- Press 'Alt + (left arrow)' button to go Backward

- Press 'Alt + Esc' button to Stop loading a page

- Press the 'F5' button to Refresh

If you like having your Bookmarks toolbar handy, but don't like how it clutters up your Eee, try the Smart Bookmarks Bar. After installing you can set the extension up to automatically hide the bookmarks bar and show it again when you move your mouse cursor towards the toolbars. This extension also allows you to hide the names of your bookmarks and minimize the space between them so that all you see is the Favicons of your bookmarks.

1. Launch Firefox and go to the Tools→Add-Ons menu then select the Themes tab.
2. Click the Get Themes button at the bottom right.
3. On the webpage that comes up, scroll to the the Browse Themes by Category link and choose Compact.
4. Pick your favorite compact theme. I chose Whitehart: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/364
5. Another compact theme option is Minifox.
6. Download the theme and install it according to the instructions on the website (click the Install Now button and Firefox should automatically install it).
7. Restart Firefox to finish the installation.
8. You'll need to go back to the Themes window (Tools→Add-Ons) and switch to the new theme after installation

• When in Firefox, press F11 to go full-screen mode.

• Firefox's fullscreen behavior can be improved by installing the Fullerscreen add-on. It hides the toolbars and status bars, showing them when you mouse near the top/bottom of the screen. it also shows the status bar when it's appropriate: like when you mouse over a link (so you can see where it goes) or you are loading a page (so you can see progress).
• The one downside to FullerScreen is that switching tabs becomes less natural (you have no visual indicator of what tab you are switching to). However, SHIMODA's excellent Stack Style Tabs add-on is a perfect compliment and gives you an alt-tab styled view of your tabs when you hit ctrl-tab.
• Another option to consider is Full Fullscreen.

Reduce the font size of the firefox menus by doing this:

• Open a terminal then change to the firefox chrome directory as follows (if * doesn't work replace it with whatever variation it is on your system, something like 9unly32k.default):

cd /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/chrome/

• Now open up userChrome.css in your favourite editor:

kwrite userChrome.css

• Change it to look like this:

* {
    font-family: sans-serif !important;
    font-size: 8pt !important;
}

• Save and exit. Now restart firefox.

More space can be found in the menu toolbar by removing unnecessary menu options such as Help or History and Bookmarks which can be opened in a side window using the appropriate shortcut keys.

• Open userChrome.css as described above in changing the overall font size.

• Add the following code to remove the Help, History and Bookmarks menu options. Should you wish to retain any of these menu options then remove its menu[label=””] entry along with the comma separator:

menu[label="Help"], menu[label="History"], menu[label="Bookmarks"] {
    display: none !important
}

• Save and exit. Now restart firefox.

This will remove the top-bar, the logo and ads from the Google page results.

1. Install the Firefox Stylish plugin
2. Install this custom style

This Addon is great for people that miss the status bar at the bottom. Really it's for those that like some of the functionality and aesthetics of Safari. When configuring Fission, be sure to add the check box for “Active link/mouse-over link in the address bar”. This will reclaim/force some double duty for the limited eee real estate. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951

The Vimperator addon changes Firefox to act, look and be controlled like the editor Vim. With it, screen real estate is maximized, as neither the address bar nor the toolbar are necessary any more. Just about everything is handled with keyboard shortcuts. It takes a bit of learning, but previous Vim users will feel perfectly at home.

SiteLauncher is an add-on that can be used for giving quick access to sites you use often. SiteLauncher saves screen space because instead of being displayed all the time bookmarks are shown in an overlay only when CTRL+SPACE (or CTRL+ALT on Mac) is pressed. Each bookmark in the overlay is shown alongside its associated key, which when pressed opens the given URL.

1. Type about:config in the url field.
2. Find option browser.tabs.closeButtons and change the value to 3.
3. Now you should see only single close button on the right end of the bar.

• Some content originally from Maximizing screen space
• Font size change based on method from Reducing the Height of the Interface in Thunderbird
• My (BlueC) experiences doing this
• http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=49375 for comments/feedback
• Additional edits provided by 'deicidist' after his post here.