Customize Firefox to get more web viewing area

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Ban those toolbars.. NOW!!!

Does your browser look like this? And then you wonder why your internet is slow? First of all, do not install any toolbars which sneak in with these “free” utilities that you download. They not only take up viewing space, many contact their websites to refresh their buttons and contents causing the page load to be delayed. You may not notice this on a broadband connection but if you are on a slow network, you can see the toolbar refreshing itself before the page load begins.

 

Lets see what Firefox gives us by default

When you install Firefox for the first time and run it, you are greeted with a standard layout consisting of Titlebar, MenuBar, Navigation Bar, Bookmark Bar (Personal Bar) and Tabs. While on a standard size monitor there is enough space remaining for viewing area but on laptops and netbooks it greatly reduces the viewing area and causes a lot of scrolling. With a little tinkering and tweaking, you can increase the vertical size of the viewing area. The newer browsers like Chrome and Opera are focussing on larger viewing sizes too. Upcoming Firefox 4 (due Sep 2010) also has made UI layout changes by giving options to move the tab bar to the top. We can achieve the same thing in Firefox 3.6.x by tweaking the menu bar and other toolbars.

Default viewing area across browsers

The image compares four popular browsers on Windows with their default toolbar area height. From left to right – Chrome 5.x, Opera 10.6, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6.x. To begin with, Firefox looks a bit kludgy and takes up the maximum height. That's because the other browsers do not show a menu bar any more. Most of them have put the menu bar either on the title bar (Opera) or tucked them away on the toolbar (Chrome and IE). In addition, Firefox has a separate Bookmark bar below the navigation bar taking up an extra row. While Firefox 4.0 will move the menu to a single drop down like Opera 4, it is still possible in Firefox 3.x to hide the menu to gain extra room.

Lets reduce the height of Firefox toolbars

 

1. Uncheck the menu bar and bookmark toolbar: First thing you can do is to uncheck the Menu Bar and Bookmarks Toolbar. This will immediately give you a lot of vertical space. Later we will be able to add the menu as a dropdown on the Navigation Toolbar itself. 

As you can see the browser height is now increased, going past IE and becoming the same as Opera.

2. Use small icons on the navigation bar: Now we can further reduce the height of the toolbar by specifying “Use Small Icons” from Toolbar Customize Menu.

Now the vertical height approaches the height of Chrome. Its difficult to reduce it any further (without hacks) because Chrome puts it tabs on top. In fact the previous image is when both browsers are not maximized because when they are, Chrome actually put the tab on the title bar (non client area) and suddenly the difference is widened.

But Firefox is known for its Add-on which can dive deep into browser’s internal structures and come up with amazing things. One such trick is to remove the Tabs from top altogether. You can see that apart from the tabs (top in Chrome and bottom in FF), navigation height is roughly the same

3. Remove tabs from the top:
How do you do that? Well, its a bit of cheating and might defeat the overall purpose of getting more viewing area. But there are 2 add-ons – Tab Sidebar and Showcase Sidebar. Download them and configure them to hide the tabs bar when they are active. This way you get more vertical height but lose some horizontal width. If you want to recover the horizontal width too, you can install another add-on which retracts the sidebar when not in use. (Later on that add-on). So here goes…

Now the height of both the toolbars in Chrome and FF are exactly the same giving you more vertical viewing space. Chrome briefly flirted with vertical tab bars too when it had introduced –enable-vertical-tabs option in its command line switch, but as of Chrome 5.x I cant get it to work. Maybe the option will get polished further and make a comeback in Chrome later.

4. Put the menu/bookmark on toolbar: We have hidden the menu to gain more vertical height but we would need to use the menu occasionally.  This can be done pressing the ALT key once and releasing it which brings up the menu (not a behaviour of FF but of windows). For those who might find this confusing or want to use mouse to use the menu can install Compact Menu 2 add-on. It puts the entire menu as a button on the navigation toolbar. The other add-on is called Bookmark Menu which similarly put the entire bookmark bar in a dropdown form on the toolbar. You can customize the location of these Compact Menu/Bookmark Menu using the Toolbar Customize option.

5. Add a touch of gloss: Nothing to do with gaining height but this add-on called “All glass” makes the toolbar semi transparent using the Windows Alpha Blend and will work only on Vista and Windows 7.

Conclusion

So with tweaking and using add-ons, we have not only been able to increase the viewing height of Firefox to that of Chrome but it even surpasses Chrome in non maximized state. This should be a bit of a help when browsing on small screens of netbooks, tablets and laptops. Here is a screen shot (Left to Right) of Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, Opera 10 and IE 8.

Happy Browsing