When it comes to paring a browser's UI down to the smallest possible size, the discussion always seems to focus on Firefox. Granted, Firefox is a very customizable browser, and with the right extensions cleverly applied, you can minimize its UI. But as John Holdun notes, often overlooked in this regard is the fact that Safari is very capable of being pared down to almost nothing, and you don't need any add-ons to do it.

In fact, if you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is learn a few key ones and you'll be able to minimize Safari to a Title bar and tab bar. One warning - I've only tried this using Safari 4.0 on a Mac; I don't have easy access to Safari running on Windows, but I imagine that there are equivalents for the keyboard shortcuts I'm about to discuss.

Firstly, let's get rid of the Toolbar -- that is, the bar with the back and forward buttons, address bar, and search field. To hide the toolbar, click View > Hide Toolbar from the menu, or simply press the Command-| shortcut key. Don't worry, if you need to enter a web address quickly, you can either show it again using the same shortcut key combination, or better yet press Command-l to have the cursor automatically placed in the address bar. Type something and press enter, or tab to the search field and type something and press enter, and your page will open, and the Toolbar will immediately hide again. Slick.

The other desktop real-estate offender is the status bar at the bottom. Hiding it is just as easy - the shortcut key combination is Command-/. Like John, I tend to like to use the status bar to snoop on the destination address of links by hovering over them. This takes an extra step now, but the extra room gained by not constantly showing the status bar is worth the occasional inconvenience for me.

Most users of Google Chrome enjoy its minimal interface. So why use a clunky toolbar to display your bookmarks full-time if you don't have to? Like many other excellent Chrome features, adding a miniscule bookmarks menu button is only a command line switch away!

Just right click your Chrome shortcut and choose properties. In the target box, add a space and --bookmark-menu after chrome.exe. the result should something look like this:

C:\Users\LeeM\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --bookmark-menu

This works on versions 2, 3, and 4 of Google Chrome, so it's a tweak anyone can use. That is, as long as you're running Windows - my Linux and Mac versions don't seem to be able to add the button yet.

Netbook users, enjoy your extra 28 vertical pixels!

Note: as mentioned in the comments, yes, you CAN add multiple switches - just put a space in between each one like so:

chrome.exe --enable-user-scripts --enable-sync --bookmark-menu

There are lots of great things about bookmarklets. They're lightweight, compatible with any browser, don't require installing or restarting any apps, and they're just a click away in your bookmarks toolbar. If you're looking for some good bookmarklets, you might want to check out Bookmarklet Directory. It's a large (and growing) collection in the same vein as the Firefox add-ons directory or userscripts.org.

You can browse the Bookmarklet Directory according to the newest, most popular, or highest rated entries. You can also search for bookmarklets, or add one that they don't have yet. If you're making a move to uninstall a few plugins and get bookmarklets instead, don't miss this site.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

It looks like Digg is working on a StumbleUpon-like toolbar that lets users digg, bury, or find related stories while surfing the web. Veronica Belmont first spotted a screenshot of the toolbar on Flickr, and it looks like the folks at TechCrunch managed to track down some additional information about it.

If that info is correct, here's how it works. Users will see a toolbar the toolbar pop up on their screens. The toolbar shows up in an i-frame, which means it's not browser specific and you can make it go away at any time just by hitting the X button.

When you visit pages that have already been submitted to Digg, you'll see the number of votes it has received. Or you can submit the page you're currently on. You can also bury stories or see related stories.

The toolbar will also create a shortened URL for any page you're visiting, beginning with digg.com... You can then share this shortened URL via email, Twitter, Facebook, or other services much the same way you would with TinyURL.

The Digg toolbar is not available to the general public at this point. And for all we know, the whole thing could just be a hoax. But it certainly seems like something Digg could and/or should offer in the future.

Thinking about switching from Firefox or Internet Explorer to the Opera web browser, but can't imagine life without the StumbleUpon toolbar? StumbleUpon has yet to release an official toolbar or plugin for Opera. And while there is certainly a way to rank web pages and discover new pages without a toolbar, it's rather inelegant.

Opera Stumbler is a third party plugin that gives you all the same features you'd expect from the toolbar, sans the toolbar. There are several different ways to use Opera Stumbler. You can install the menu button, which adds a StumbleUpon menu to Opera.

If you'd rather have toolbar buttons, you can install a series of buttons for common tasks like giving a page a thumbs up or thumbs down. These buttons can be dragged and dropped onto any Opera toolbar. You can also add a Stumble option to your Opera Speed Dial bookmarks.

[via Life Rocks 2.0]

With Firefox 3's Download Day upon us, a lot of folks are getting their first peek at the newest version of the popular browser. One of the first things you'll notice is the "Awesome Bar," a new feature that drops down a list of sites from your history and bookmarks as you type. For example, you could type "d," and your bookmark for Download Squad would pop up, along with downforeveryoneorjustme.com, if you've recently visited it.

For some people, this is going to be handy, but others are going to hate it. We have mixed opinions about the Awesome Bar here at Download Squad, so we're going to show you how to turn it off. First, go to your Firefox settings by putting "about:config" into the location bar. Click past the warning message, and scroll down to browser.urlbar.maxRichResults. This sets how many recommendations the Awesome Bar will display -- it's 12 by default, but you want to change it to 0.

Now your location bar should act more the one you're used to from Firefox 2. It'll still autocomplete addresses of sites you've been to, but the behavior that's been annoying some people so much will be gone. Alternately, an extension called Oldbar will give you back Firefox 2's dropdown behavior.

[via Josh at Webware]

iBreadcrumbs is a browser toolbar you can use to record the websites you visit while you're working on a particular project, so you can find your research again or share your sources with someone else. Sure, you could do this manually, by posting your finds to del.icio.us or a similar bookmarking service, and giving them all the same tag, but iBreadcrumbs makes that look like way too much work. All you have to do is click start, and everything gets saved automatically.

Your sessions (Breadcrumbs) each get saved to their own dedicated page, where you can organize them and add additional notes. You can combine a new Breadcrumb with an existing one, which makes the service useful for longer research projects. There's also a social aspect to the site: you can add friends for easy collaboration. iBreadcrumbs is flexible enough that we're sure it can be applied to all sorts of non-research functions. Don't be put off by the "University" field in the sign-up process - this service isn't just for academics.

Web telephony service Jaduka has launched a bunch of new tools that make it easy to initiate telephone to telephone calls over the web. The most basic service is called dukaDIAL, and it allows you to enter any two phone numbers to initiative a phone call. DukaDIAL will call one number and then the other and initiate a connection. No computer headset or microphone required. Jaduka doesn't charge anything for these calls, but your telephone provider might.

Jaduka offers several other services that use the same basic technology. For example, dukaBAR is a browser toolbar for Firefox or Internet Explorer. Once it's installed you can click a button and automatically detect any phone number on any web page. A telephone icon will show up next to those phone numbers, and if you click on that icon, Jaduka will initiate a phone call between your number and the number on the page. Skype offers a similar browser plugin, but with Skype you're making a PC to phone call, while Jaduka initiates phone to phone calls.

There's also a dukaBuzz widget which you can install on any web page to allow visitors to leave listen to voice comments, and a dukaLINK tool for creating clickable links that will initiate phone calls.

Microsoft has just released a new beta of its MSN Toolbar. Wait, wasn't it the Windows Live Toolbar in the last release? It's starting to look like Microsoft might have an identity crisis...

The new MSN Toolbar beta is now powered by Silverlight, Microsoft's own cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering interactive applications on the Web, which has just recently reached version 1.0.

The Toolbar itself is what you've come to expect from Toolbars: a search pane with lots of extra links to content and sites run by the Toolbar's publisher. The MSN Toolbar uses Windows Live Search and includes customizable at-your-fingertips MSN content.

We wish we could tell you that downloading and installing the Toolbar was a snap. Well, it wasn't. Continuing Microsoft's maddening tradition of making its software nigh impossible to download, with the requisite WGA checks, and Live ID passports, etc...downloading the MSN Toolbar was anything but simple.

StumbleUpon is a web discovery service that makes it easy to find cool and interesting web sites. All you have to do is install a browser toolbar and start hitting the "stumble" button whenever you're bored. The service also begins to get a sense of your tastes as you give various pages a thumbs up or down.

But there's at least one problem with StumbleUpon: There're no toolbar for Opera, Safari, or any web browsers besides Internet Explorer and Firefox. So what's a bored Opera users to do? Well, fortunately StumbleUpon has a nifty demo feature that lets you stumble pages using a virtual toolbar. All you have to do is enter http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/#url= into your browser's URL window, and then add the site that you want to start at. For example, http://www.stumbleupon.com/demo/#url=http://www.downloadsquad.com/.

You should now see a virtual toolbar with all the features of the regular StumbleUpon toolbar. But since this is just a demo, you can't actually vote on sites or submit new sites. And there's no way to enter your account information. But you can hit the stumble button as many times as you like.

[via Digital Inspiration]

When you're using a Google service like Gmail or Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you'll notice a little menu bar at the top of your screen with links to other Google services. This is kind of handy if you can't remember the URLs for each service, but otherwise it's not particularly useful.

iGoogleBar is a Firefox add-on that adds a little oomph to that menu bar by showing previews for each Google app. For example, if you're using Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can tell at a glance how many unread items you have in Google Reader or Gmail. Or you can click on the icons for a preview of your latest messages.

The toolbar only shows up when you're visiting a Google page, and it doesn't work with all Google services. For example, while you can preview your Google Notebook contents, when you're actually on the Google Notebook page the toolbar doesn't show up. It also takes a moment for the toolbar to load, so you might not notice it at first.

[via Googlified

Web design has come a long way in the last ten years. But some people still just don't seem to understand that there are a handful of mistakes that will make a web page pretty much unreadable.

1. While dark gray may be your favorite color, setting your page background to that color and then leaving the text black is just going to make your web page unreadable.
2. Fine print may be fun if you're trying to trick readers into signing away their firstborn child when they register for a service, but that's about all small fonts are good for.
3. Pages with textured backgrounds.
   

IE Surfgear provides solutions to each of these problems. The application adds three icons to your Internet Explorer toolbar. One will automatically resize any text in a tiny font to a readable font size while leaving other text on the page untouched. The next will remove background colors from any text. And the third removes textured page backgrounds.

IE Surfgear is freeware, but if you'd like to see how it works before downloading it, check out the demo on the product home page.

[via gHacks]

Are you the sort of person who likes to bookmark interesting web pages on del.icio.us, submit important or odd articles to digg, share rumors with Truemors, and send funny pictures of cats to your Twitter followers? Then have we got a Firefox add-on for you.

Sharealic is a Firefox add-on that works with Firefox 2, 3, and Flock and Songbird. It adds a handy menu to Firefox that lets you submit any web page to a ton of social bookmarking sites or similar services with just a few clicks. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to share items with your friends, but if you like to spread your love across multiple services, Shareaholic can save you a lot of time.

Shareaholic also lets you know at a glance how many times a page has been dugg or submitted to del.icio.us. Of course, if you'd rather submit a site to multiple services all at once, you might want to check out the Mahalo multi-submit toolbar. Shareaholic requires you to submit your links to one service at a time.

[via Mashable]

Google Toolbar version 5 for Internet Explorer has just been made available as a public beta. Does the beta tag scare you? Not to worry; Google's beta tag has traditionally meant something a little more polished than most beta software (for example, Gmail is still in beta, as is Picasa).

Version 5 introduces a number of new features, including access to your Toolbar settings from any computer that you log into with your Google Account, improved suggestions for broken links, and new keyboard navigation and access.

The keyboard navigation is simple and sweet. From inside a browser with Toolbar installed, the global shortcut Alt+G places your cursor in the Google Toolbar search box. Pressing the Tab key brings keyboard focus to the button placed immediately after the search box, and right and left arrow keys move focus between buttons.

The ability to access your Toolbar settings after signing into your Google account fits into Google's focus for giving unity to your browsing experience, whether you be on your home, work, or laptop computer. Google already has other tools to help accomplish this (e.g. Google Browser Sync, though that is only available as a plugin for Firefox), and Toolbar access is a nice addition.

You'll need Internet Explorer 6.0 or later in order to install Google Toolbar version 5.

[Via the Google blog]

Have your ever been randomly searching for something online, only to realize you closed a window and cannot for the life of you remember what website you were on? You might be able to check your browser history or use a bookmarking tool. But what if you want to share your browsing records and let other users see where you've been?

Hooeey lets you record eveyr site you visit. You need a hooey account and a browser toolbar in order for hooey to do its thing. The toolbar then tracks the sites you have visited in online folders allowing you to check out analytical reports and share links.

So if you are up for letting friends know where you have been, hooeey will gladly share your browsing patterns with them.