I say “top” because I haven’t found better than these. I’ve been using Firefox for a few years now and it had been clogging up all the time till one day I wanted to fight back. When you are visiting a site how much use do you make of the other browser elements? To be totally honest you do but not so much that you can’t clean things up a little. Here’s the top 5.
- Hit F11 – F11 shows you the site in full screen mode. The tab bar auto-hides allowing you to hover your mouse at the top to make it visible. Just so you don’t miss some key functionality learn a few keyboard shortcuts – CTRL+T to open a new tab. For closing you can simply click the cross on the tab. Another F11 will toggle the browser from the fullscreen mode.
- Small icons – Why are the icons on the navigation bar so big? Cut them to size by going to the View menu > Toolbars > Customize and check the box “Use small icons”.
- Get rid of the navigation bar – Let me show you what I did. Similarly as in the previous step go to View menu > Toolbars > Customize. Now you are in control. While you have this box open you can rearrange all icons. I grab all icons from the navigation bar and drop it over the Menu bar right next to the URLbar (more popularly known as the awesomebar or the address bar). Now the navigation bar doesn’t have anything on it, so I get rid of it. The URLbar occupies a lot of space. I never type URLs that long, I can’t remember them or bother to type them, if I have to I bookmark them and of course I never care to see them in full either. So a smaller URLbar is in many ways is better than a full sized URLbar. So finally after rearranging the icons I go to View menu > Toolbars and uncheck the navigation toolbar.
- Get rid of the bookmarks bar – Note that I’m not advising you to get rid of the bookmarks but just the bookmarks bar. At the most it can contain from 7 to 11 custom bookmarks (4 are there by default) depending on the display resolution. I just set keywords for them. I don’t use the bookmarks bar always so I decide to disable it. When I need to access my bookmarks, I can just type in the URLbar – it’s awesome – it searches through your bookmarks automatically and eitherways you can just go into the bookmarks menu to get them.
- Trim your context menu – I designed FfChrome for my own use. It’s one good example of how easy it is to program Firefox addons – if somethings is not there, create it. I found it useful and I released it to the public. It trims your context menu. It arguably does bring ease of use to the user interface and does bring you more space in terms of browser real-estate.
In the end the point is, somehow we never use the usability built into the software. Help is available right by hitting F1 but we go to the help menu to open it up.
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Hmmm, I have to disagree about the bookmarks bar. You can get a lot more than 11 bookmarks on it. Screenshot of my Layout. And it can be especially useful for Bookmarklets. And rather than waste real estate on a few individual bookmarks, put folders on the bar instead. The trick to squeezing as many bookmarks as possible onto the bar involves a simple userchrome.css hack and a distinctive favicon image:
1. Place the desired bookmark/folder on the bookmarks bar, making sure it has a unique name – it doesn’t matter what you call it, just that it is unique.
2. Place the image you want to use in the same folder as userchrome.css
3. Insert the following code into userchrome.css, replacing “Your Bookmark Name” and “Your Image Name.png” with the name of your bookmark and image.
/* change folder icons for bookmark toolbar folders */#personal-bookmarks toolbarbutton[label="Your Bookmark Name"] .toolbarbutton-icon {
display: block !important;
list-style-image: url('Your Image Name.png') !important;
-moz-image-region: auto !important;
}
/* hide bookmark toolbar folder name */
#personal-bookmarks toolbarbutton[label="Your Bookmark Name"] .toolbarbutton-text {
display: none !important;
}
Just repeat this for each bookmark or folder. Works for bookmarks or folders. Works better than any extension I have found so far.
And there’s a better FullScreen Option available. The extension Autohide offers real full screen with elements that hide away and slide down (or up) when you move the mouse to the edges of the screen. I have used it forever and find it far more robust and customizable then the built in Firefox option, even in the newest version.
If you open a tab with CTRL+T, you could use CTRL+W to close. CTRL+SHIFT+T to reopen the last tab closed.
But, with full screen, pressing CTRL+W to close the only tab open will close Firefox, but, it’s another useful shortcut.
BookwormDragon: Good catch. If space is not a priority it’s an excellent way to use bookmarks.
Jorge: Thanks for the additional shortcuts. They come in real handy especially when you have to move away your hand to grab the mouse relocate the pointer and click.
In this page http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+Shortcuts you could find a list from Mozilla shortcuts. Maybe you can find another interesting shortcut.
Recently i discover to use the ALT+Home to go directly to the Homepage.
I already do these while wondering why it isn’t natural for most people to want to tweak the interface to suit them. I dislike browsers that don’t at least let you minimize and move around the navigation icons. I like keyboard simple shorcuts for common tasks (glad mozilla has that page to document what there is) and how the mouse middle click gets used nowadays in browsers for opening and closing tabs, But Firefox could use something like “ctrl-click” images to save them. Stuff like that, just like ctrl-T to open new tabs (and ctrl-W and ctrl-Tab,Page Down) simply makes browsing that much nicer to do when your not the kind of person who only has one tab open and never goes off on tangents on a Web full of wonders and whatever.
WOW!!! Thanks for the great tips!!! LUV, LUV, LUV – F11 !!!
As netbooks come into favor and people like me try to make use of 10″ again, F11 is a must-learn habit.
The most annoying thing about F11 is that everytime your mouse goes near the top, then the address bar and tabs drop down and the page rerenders. With my 1.5″x1″ trackpad, that is common.
Here’s how to stop Firefox autohiding the addressbar and tabs at the top and leaving them in place, using not much real estate.
into the firefox address bar, type: about:config
use the filter to type: fullscreen
right click on browser.fullscreen.autohide and toggle to false
this works on PCs. I’m afraid that I’ve never been near a non-windows system, so I don’t even know if it is different.
Jeminar: good handy tip there.
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