Minimalist’s Firefox – GUI Tweaks
April 22nd, 2008 by smoove
While Firefox is definitely my favorite Browser for both, work and surfing at home, I always found the GUI quite overloaded. Everywhere are buttons and toolbars I never use that take away a whole lot of viewport space. So, in this article I will show you how to minimize Firefox’s GUI in a few easy steps.
How to minimize Firefox’s GUI in a few easy steps
1.The Theme
The biggest improvement can be archived by replacing the default Firefox Theme with a smaller one, in this case my choice was miniFox.
MiniFox reduces the space buttons and toolbars take up to a good extend, but there still is room for improvement.
2.The Searchbar
By default the searchbar in the top right corner takes up a lot more space than it actually needs.
To fix this behavior I installed Searchbar Autosizer.
This Add-on will reduce the size to a minimum (which you can specify) and automatically increment the size while you type in a keyword. As a bonus you can also choose to automatically clear the searchbar after you hit Enter.
3.The Main Menu
Ok, this one might be a bit over the top for some people, but as I really never use the main menu why not hide it? Hide Menubar does exactly that! If you need the main menu sometime you can press the ALT Key to show it temporarily.
4.Final Tweaks
As I say before, I never use the navigation buttons on the left side of the url bar, so I removed the as well. To do this, go to View->Toolbars->Customize.. and drag all the buttons from your browser window to the customize window that just opened to remove them.
The last Add-on I want to mention is Tab Mix Plus. This Add-on allows you to customize the “look and feel” of Firefox’s tabs and the tab bar. It has way to many options to list here, so just get it and play with it – you will love this Add-on. 
5.The result
So, here is my minimized Firefox (click image to enlarge).
Credit where credit is due: Idea to minimize Firefox’s viewport was by my co-worker Benjamin Cremer – thanks!
If you liked this article you might also be interested in my other Firefox related article 8 Firefox Add-ons every Web Developer should know about!
One Response to: Minimalist’s Firefox – GUI Tweaks
Hey taht is a lot of extensions….check my minimalist firefox with only 5 and none of them is for GUI customización