Maximizing Firefox Real Estate

Some folks don’t mind losing a little screen space. I resent every square centimeter, every lost pixel. It probably goes back to my VGA days…or maybe I’m just stingy in general. Whatever the case, I don’t want my browser’s controls taking up any more room than they have to. If they’re big enough to see and not too small to mouse — that’s big enough. For me, a browser is a workspace where I spend a great deal of time, not a playhouse.

One of the many reasons I don’t like Internet Explorer is because it doesn’t give me this amount of control — or, if it does, I haven’t taken the trouble to find out how to do it, having opened IE precisely once a month for the past several years. It might be possible with a shell extension of some kind. I don’t really care, but if someone wants to write an article about it I’ll think about publishing it here — with credit, of course.

However, I’ve managed to get Firefox down to the point where I feel as though I’m getting my money’s worth, screen-wise. I did that through use of a couple of extensions and themes, and a bit of tweaking. Here’s essentially what I did, but I’m leaving the details up to you.

If you’ll click on the small screenshot, it will take you to a full-size version at 1024×768, to give you an idea of the actual amount of space saved.

First of all, I installed the miniFox theme. That reduced the toolbars and other controls down about as far as you can get them while keeping a useful size. Then I installed the Tiny Menu extension. This handy little number takes the menu that normally occupies the left side of the menu bar and turns it into a drop-down which I positioned at the upper left.

With the menu bar clear, I opened the navigation and Google toolbars, and with Firefox in Customize mode (right-click the top bar) I dragged the tools I wanted to the top bar. Then I cleared all the other stuff off the navigation toolbar by dragging them to the Customize window, and dragged the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder up to the navigation bar. (I keep all my bookmarks in that folder, arranged in sub-folders.)

[You could accomplish the same thing by disappearing the nav bar and using the bookmarks toolbar instead, with one difference: at least when I did it, you couldn't put any other buttons on the bookmark bar, when by using the nav bar I had that option. That could have changed a few versions back though, since I've had this arrangement for a year or so. You could try it out.]

After getting the top and navigation bars the way I wanted them, I right-clicked the top bar again, and closed the Bookmarks and Google toolbars. This left me with the arrangement you see, which works for me. If you’re a screen space freak like me, the same or a similar arrangement may be what you’re looking for. Just think what I’ll be able to do with a widescreen monitor!