Tweak Firefox to Make the Most of Your Netbook's Screen

Filed under: Mozilla, Browser Tips, How-Tos, Browsers

Tweak Firefox to Make the Most of Your Netbook's Screen

by Lee Mathews Aug 4th 2008

First Asus released the EEE (you know, that tiny little Linux laptop), now netbooks are flooding the marketplace as other makers trip over themselves to compete. I love my new MSI Wind, but let's face it: 1024x600 doesn't give you a surplus of screen real estate. Here's what I've done to maximize my viewable area in Firefox without sacrificing much needed functionality.

Step one is to reduce what you can using the options Firefox provides out-of-the-box.

First to go: the status bar. While I know there are reasons to leave it visible, it's not really necessary for the bulk of the web browsing most of us do, and those are valuable pixels we can save. Next, head over to the toolbar menu click on customize. Switching from the default large to small icons will provide another small gain.

Now let's get rid of the bookmarks toolbar.

If you're not using an online bookmarking service yet, owning a netbook is a good reason to start. By using Google bookmarks and installing the GMarks addon, you're able to sneak all your favorites into the top main navigation toolbar. After you've installed GMarks, go back to toolbar customization and drag the GMarks Toolbar star onto the bar wherever you prefer it.

Next, grab the Hide Menubar addon. One of the very, very few things I like better about IE is how the menu bar isn't shown by default. With Hide Menubar, Firefox can do it too, saving you even more space at the top of your screen.

Last but not least, if you roll that way, don't forget about the old F11 key. Though I haven't used it much in the past, I've got a feeling that I'll be using it more and more since I don't like autohiding the task bar and there's really no point in showing the title bar in Firefox. I know what page I'm looking at, you don't need to tell me.

With only two addons (and small ones, at that) I've trimmed down from 108 pixels to 29 without even using fullscreen mode - meaning I've gained back just over 13% of my screen. Know another pixel-pinching tip? Share it with us by leaving a comment!

Tags: eee, firefox, minimalism, msi wind, MsiWind, netbook, umpc

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Theo said 3:35PM on 8-04-2008

My Eee PC 1000 screen is more than wide enough, but even with a F11 is still, for me vertically challenged. So I have unlocked the task bar, and dragged it over to the left side of the screen.

F said 3:35PM on 8-04-2008

Also, you can edit the Chrome to show Stop and Reload buttons in the same place (when you need one, you don't nee dthe other). Just write:

/* Show Stop and Reload buttons smartly*/
#stop-button[disabled] { display: none;}
#stop-button:not([disabled]) + #reload-button {
display: none; }

Insomnic said 4:02PM on 8-04-2008

I was going to mention what F mentioned except I use the "Stop or Reload Button" add-on to do it (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/313).
"Menu Editor" add-on is good too for cleaning up the menu bar and the context menu (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/710).

Mohit said 4:17PM on 8-04-2008

- If you want easy access to menus without keeping the Menu toolbar, try the "Personal Menu" extension. It creates one button on the menu bar, which you can click for a drop-down menu of the menu toolbar.

- While Delicious and Gmarks are nice, you can simply just drag the bookmarks toolbar items to the menu bar and then get rid of the bookmarks toolbar. Same purpose, one less toolbar.

- Since you got rid of the statusbar (good call), use the "Fission" extension to see page load status in the location bar.

- Get rid of the search box and just use Firefox search keywords. Just right click on any search box, and click "Add a keyword for this search" and assign it a letter. For example, I assigned "s" to Google search. Now, I can just type is "s download squad" in the location bar to search for "download squad".

rushangshah said 6:11PM on 8-04-2008

You can use the Tiny Menu add-on also:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1455

Overlord said 1:10PM on 8-05-2008

Just use easyGestures plugin for FF and be happy!

It's a pie menu with all you need!

Stuart Halliday said 1:19PM on 8-05-2008

Foxmarks is my bookmark organiser of choice.

http://www.foxmarks.com/

kojo87 said 1:11PM on 8-05-2008

i will second the awesomeness of Foxmarks. i use it on 3 computers and it works flawlessly.

doesn't F11 in Firefox 3 give you the max screen real estate possible?

Dustin Sabecky said 9:17PM on 8-06-2008

You can do the same thing in Opera, aswell as Maxthon. So if you use either of those browsers, don't feel out of the loop.

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