minimalizE/trim down your firEfox browsEr

Are you a firefox fan?

Do you love the Google chrome interface for its sleek and minimalistic interface but love Firefox for its openness and functionality?

That's the case with me.

So I decided to trim down Firefox by removing the unnecessary elements from the browser and increase the screen real estate. After some help from the net and some configuration file edits, this is how my Firefox looks like.

So here's how;

Open Chrome and the first thing you notice is the absence of a Title bar. I wonder what this screen hogging useless crap does which is none in particular. For this, the plethora of Firefox extensions come in handy. Download and install the "Hide Caption Titlebar Plus" add-on for Firefox and voila your title bar is gone. With a few adjustments on the add-on options you can opt to hide the title bar of all your Firefox windows and pop-ups. 

You might have seen the three toolbar- menu, navigation and bookmarks. What I did was to drag all the buttons from bookmarks and navigation bar into the menu bar. You can do this by right clicking any of the toolbar and opting for "Customize". From the customize window, you can add/remove and  move all of Firefox buttons, address bar, search bar and other elements to wheresoever you wish. Once all the components were moved to Menu bar, hide the navigation and bookmarks bar. This can be done by unchecking these toolbar from View->Toobars->.

After doing the above steps you may find the address bar and search bar too small. For this I came across another solution. The menu bar, which has all the File, Edit, View, History and miscellaneous menus are seldom used in the course of a normal browsing session. So why not compress this into a single menu button, which when clicked displays the menus? For this after some search I came across another addon- "Tiny Menu". Install this add-on and all your menus are compressed into a menu button. A great savings in screen estate. This is how it looks like;

Another element which eats up my screen is the status bar. But removing this? That's tricky. I wouldn't know what's the status when a  web-page loads and neither would i be able to see if a link is pointing to some ad site. For this too the solution came in the form of another add-on, "autoHideStatusBar". This is exactly the stuff I was looking for- it will hide the status bar whenever there is some activity whose status needs to be shown- like loading of a web-page. This has also configurable options to show the link when the mouse is hovered over hyperlink for some time. 

This is how the status bar will look like when the page is loading;

And this is how it will look like after the page loads;

That's how I saved my Firefox from falling prey to Chrome.
At the end of the day, a comparison of Chrome and Firefox seems reasonable and FF is no longer a spendthrift of your valuable pixels.