Below is a short tutorial on how to make Firefox space friendly.
I have a netbook which my sister borrows from time to time and although my main browser is Opera 10 on it, my sister insists on using Firefox.
To make things a bit more bearable for her, i tweaked it to allow as much room as possible for actual browsing and less wasted space on buttons, icons and boxes.
1. Uncheck the bookmarks and status bar.
Reason: The amount of people who use Firefox who NEVER add ANYTHING to the bookmarks bar is, quite frankly, astonishing. In all the time my sister has used Firefox she hasn’t touched the bookmarks bar; the same 3 default “bookmarks” are sat there collecting dust and taking up room.
Whether people just never see it, i don’t know! Either use it or lose it is my motto!
The status bar offers no real incentive to be kept on show on my netbook. Sure it’s informative, but that’s quite a few vertical pixels taken up by superfluous-ness – especially since secure sites display “secure status” in the URL bar as well as the status bar.
2. Install AdBlock & Enable Blank Space Removal
This may sound like a weird one when discussing “space” related gripes on netbooks, but adverts that you’re not interested in seeing take up space. Simple as.
Having blank spaces where ad’s would’ve been doesn’t help either, so make sure you enable “Collapse Blocked Elements” in the preferences menu to squash away all of the blank space.
3. Small Icons On The Taskbar
Next up i checked ‘Show Small Icons’ in the customize dialog.
Big icons are handy on small screens, but not at the expense of browsing – shortcut keys are far quicker, too.
4. Combine Stop/Reload
This is a logical move as well as a practical one.
Do you ever refresh a while a page is loading?! Or stop a static page? No.
All it takes to combine them is this user-script: http://mail.userstyles.org/styles/10
(You’ll need Stylish to use it.)
5. Omnibox & Fission
Omnibox merges the URL and Search box together – kind of like Google Chrome’s address/search bar.
Fission creates a “page loading” animation inside the URL bar like the browser ‘Safari’ has.