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How to: Consolidate Firefox's "chrome"

lifehacker.com — While the Firefox team has done a great job of creating an interface that accommodates most web surfers, you're not most surfers. There are a bunch of unnecessary buttons, menus and doodads in the Firefox control area (the "chrome") that you don't need, taking up space you could be using to see and do more with your web pages and tabs...

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  • Ninjab3ar, on 10/12/2007, -66/+4yay! first comment!
    • Babalou, on 10/12/2007, -43/+3@Ninjab3ar
      You will get dugg down to death!
    • Nodren, on 10/12/2007, -31/+5and i thought there wasn't any losers who did that on digg, guess i was wrong, at least we can mod him down.
    • detroitsux, on 10/12/2007, -33/+4alright! You're first! Digg++



      /s
    • dwight0, on 10/12/2007, -32/+4@Babalou you also got dugg down to death. HA HA HA! TEE HEE!
    • donatj, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3There are better ways to do the removing of buttons, ie: when you're in the customize menu just drag the buttons back into the menu...
  • maiku00, on 10/12/2007, -5/+31An easy way to give yourself much more room is do download the "Tiny Menu" extension. It groups all the File, Edit, View (etc) menus into one single dropdown menu. You can then move your navigation from the navigation bar onto the bar containing the Menu button. Turn off the navigation bar, and boom. You have all your ***** on one line (two if you have tabs open).
    • Merkidemis, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Thanks for the info on Tiny Menu, that's slick.
    • Lord_oftheTrons, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7By using All-In-One Gestures you can eliminate the refresh, stop, and any other buttons if you assign it to a mouse gesture. Best extension in my book. I will have to try out Tinymenu like you mentions.

      One other random good thing about Firefox 2.0 is the built in spell checker. No excuse for poor spelling now that you can't blame it on being too lazy to hit the check spelling button!
    • surfing, on 10/12/2007, -8/+2well it wurks here, but not in all fourm feelds.
    • dgendreau, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2A good alternative to the All In One Gestures extension is a free windows app called StrokeIt:
      http://www.tcbmi.com/strokeit/

      It lets you bind gestures for any windows app and it is highly configurable. I primarily just use left and right gestures for forward and back, but being able to also use the same forward/back gestures in explorer and VisualStudio is a big plus.

      I also have some global gestures set up to pause winamp (down,up) and skip to the next song (down,right). That way I can easily pause my music if the phone rings even if winamp is minimized or behind something.
  • undersky, on 10/12/2007, -16/+2wow no positive digg here, tough crowd.
  • aerospace, on 10/12/2007, -8/+5I just happened to be looking around today for a way to get rid of the annoying giant "search" button. Hooray!
  • mikechml, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2I did something like this the other day: http://mike.littlewhitey.com/ff.png
    Works great.
  • detroitsux, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15Combine that with TinyMenu (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1455/) for an even more minimal look.
  • phort99, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15My screen space isn't so precious that I need to shrink my controls down just for ten or twenty pixels of extra Internets.
    • DooDooFace, on 10/12/2007, -14/+28There are kids in Africa who would love to have so much screen space. You selfish, wasteful bastard.
  • geuisteses, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Was thinking about this today. Didn't go as far into editing the default files, but did rearrange the nav bar. woot
  • bonzooznob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Anyone got a hack to make the Firefox 2 tab bar, behave like 1.x?

    E.g. I don't mind, if after 50 tabs, each one is only 25 pixels wide... what I do mind (read: hate) is not seeing all my tabs at once... which I now suffer from with the scrolling...

    PS I don't mind the drop down list at the far right... in fact I quite like it... but I hate the scrolling tabs.... hate, hate, hate.... them.... and yet I absolutely LOVE Firefox.
    • Slashriffs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Go into about:config
      find browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
      and set it to 0 to make it like 1.5
    • H3g3m0n, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I preferred the system my tab extension (Tab Mix Plus I think, although I have a few) uses where it just makes another tab bar, unfortunately because of the changes it doesn't work with the new Firefox yet.
    • Slashriffs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@H3g3m0n
      Just use Tab Mix Plus 0.3.5 RC1 available here
      http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3515
      Works with 2.0
  • tackle, on 10/12/2007, -12/+5Is there a way to turn off the "firefox" stories? There is one for apple (thank god!). It would be great if there was one such option for firefox.
    • selkie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Maybe you could use a GreaseMonkey script? Oh wait... :)
  • alky, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2He seems hard pressed to remove all the buttons he can, but for some reason leaves the "reload page" button behind. Anyone using this already knows to hit "F5" to refresh.
    • Cl1mh4224rd, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Hah. Good catch.

      Also, using the *Chrome.css files to remove the throbber and the home button is pointless. Just right-click, choose "Customize..." and drag them off of the toolbar and into the Customize Toolbar window.
  • gunut45, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Why can't we just use F11? It seems so simple! :)

    One thing that I would like removed is the history tap. Any Ideas of how to get rid of this?
    • mikechml, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1#navigator-toolbox menu[label="History"] { display: none !important; }
      in userChrome.css
  • nakedape, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Great article. I used it to achieve maximum minimalism for my lo-res display...

    http://img422.imageshack.us/img422/6555/ffqh4.jpg
  • weirdbro, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Theres an option besides TinyMenu, for people who actually like some of their menus intact.
    Use Menu Editor, move Preferences to Tools if you use Linux, hide the help menu, and hide the edit menu.
  • theotherme, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2dumbasses

    go to View->Toolbars->Customize

    Drag and Drop

    Done
  • mozzep, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5You can also get rid of the search box next to the address bar. Just go to the search engine you use a lot, right click it, and select "add a keyword for this search." Then you can just preface a search with that keyword in the address bar. For instance, go to google.com, add a keyword "g" for the search, then in the address bar type "g bachelors are unmarried males" and firefox will search google for "bachelors are unmarried males."
    • RichardBronosky, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I was going to post about keyword searches too. I hate the search box. It takes too much work to install custom searches for all the sites that you would search on, and then to have to use the dropdown to change engines... I have probably 30+ searches I use regularly, from Yahoo (y) to Wikipedia (wp) to MythTV Users mailing list (goss) to Wiktionary (wd)

      I love keyword searches. I'm always one CTRL-L away from any search I need.
  • shockme17, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1just use compact menu and uitweaker..

    this whole article is too confusing and tedious for the average user.
  • whiteguysamurai, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1VERY COOL!
    In fact firefox looks so good, i'm inspired to post a screen shot.
    If it's annoying, i understand if you digg me down.
    http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/7420/desktophb9.jpg
  • psychoselya, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Buried because of the first sentence.
    "You're a power web surfer, so of course you use Firefox."
    Assumptive assholes.
  • Spacemanspif, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Is there any way to make links in the toolbar folder never display the name, just icon? I know that you can just remove the name, but that gets tedious. You can do it for the forward,back,home, etc buttons, why not bookmarks too (you can do it in opera, but google calendar doesn't work right in opera).

    Also, is there a way to make the toolbars narrower? There is like 3-4 pixels of margin on each side of those things.
    Is there a way to make the tabs narrower? What about the status bar on the bottom, can that be narrower?
  • hinterteile, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2http://img136.imageshack.us/img136/1200/firefoxko4.png
    Screenshot of my setup. I use Compact Menu, Stop-or-Reload Button, and All-in-One Sidebar.
  • Pharaoh777, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Lol. Windows.
  •  

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