Warning: I don’t open America with this topic and don’t invent a bicycle, but I simply share the experience I’ve gained, which I’ve already acquired a whole bunch of people a hundred times before. The purpose of such a note is banal to point out the existing opportunity to those who have not yet reached this point on their own. Thank you for understanding.

Since according to statistics, I spend 60% of the total time spent at the computer in the browser, both for work purposes (debugging web projects, tracking a corporate site, etc.), and for learning and entertainment (reading, watching TV shows, listening to music, games, communications), I constantly want to improve this process. So I’m trying to find new ways to simplify searching, navigating, storing settings and getting information. Fortunately, my beloved Firefox is equipped for this with the simplest means to use and configure - additions.

The last thought that came to my mind about the comfort of working on the web is the thought of how well my browser workspace is used when I visit various web services and is it possible to increase this space without reducing the convenience? It turned out that there are more than enough funds for this!
')
So, in order not to breed any more bazaar, I will describe the process of my struggle for pixels step by step.

1. Addons

As I mentioned above, Additions will be the main means of increasing the available working space. Here I could give direct links to each of the add-ons I used, but just yesterday I discovered an excellent feature of the Mozillov site with additions - Collections , which were also mentioned on Habré . That is why I formed a pick in which I placed all 6 plug-ins, which will be useful to us in achieving the set task: Smile @ rT MiniFox .

Hide Navigation Bar , Hide Menu Bar and Hide All Toolbars are designed to hide the panels. The only difference is that the first two add-ons, as their names imply, hide the navigation bar and browser menu respectively, and the last plugin is responsible for hiding all the panels at once that you have chosen in the settings. I preferred this option - to install all three plugins, for the simple reason that it is more flexible: I can display the menu and navigation separately and this will not apply to other panels, and other panels, like Web developer toolbar I can display in general The third button is independent of the first two. Each of the plug-ins, as you already understood, has its own hot keys. I personally set everything up like this: Hide Navigation Bar hides and opens by F2 by default, besides I set the auto-hide option, Hide Menu Bar conveniently pops up by pressing Alt, and Hide All Toolbars that I have been responsible for other panels switches to F4.

2. Bookmarks

Now, after rebooting the browser, we see that the vertical space has become noticeably larger, although there is nothing left except the bookmarks bar and tabs roots at the top of the browser window. To get to my bookmarks, I always used the menu. Now, each time pressing Alt to manage or use bookmarks is very inconvenient. On the one hand, it would be possible to open them in the sidebar, which would automatically hide when it is not used (there is such an addon), but the problem with the side panels is that with multi-level nesting of folders with bookmarks, there is a need for horizontal scrolling, which is not very usable. .

But the solution is very simple! Use the proper tabbed by definition tab. In the management of bookmarks (Ctrl + Shift + B) I deleted all unnecessary features for me, like the latest or popular bookmarks and tags, instead in the Bookmarks section I created a separate folder, which I simply called “Bookmarks”. Then I selected all the folders that were in my favorites and drag-drop (sorry for the mate) I moved them to these “Bookmarks” on the panel. In addition, in all the quick bookmarks that were on the Bookmarks panel, I removed the signatures, since I can also be guided by favicons. (Sorry for such a terrible mass of repetitions of the word ... kh ... I will keep quiet ... :)

Now, when I have all the panels hidden, there is only one bar at the top of the window, where there are quick bookmarks and a drop-down menu with a label from the very left edge:

3. Compactness

After all these manipulations, the space in the browser has become more, and the main reason for the frequent access to the menu, the bookmarks, were transferred to the appropriate panel. But despite this, the tabs remain the same, and there are still enough empty spaces on the panels. Is it possible to overcome this?

Not only possible, but necessary. This purpose is served by a topic that is easy to find in the above set under the name Stratini. This theme makes all the elements of the remaining panel, and the browser is generally much more compact, while replacing the navigation panel icons with slightly unusual, but very nice icons. In addition, there are of course other topics that are designed to minimize the inefficient use of space in the browser interface, for example, Classic Compact .

4. Navigation

To compensate for the shortcomings of the hidden navigation bar, just follow a couple of tips. First, learn the Firefox hotkeys . In addition, you can install the Mouse Gestures Redox plugin from my set to control navigation with mouse gestures.

When creating a new tab, the panel will open itself to offer you a search or enter an address. To open it manually for some other purposes, as mentioned above, you can press the F2 key. This may be necessary when you use some plug-ins that are embedded in the navigation bar. I have this Cooliris, Evernote, Read it later, UrlbarExt, etc.

5. Convenience

It remains to mention two more plug-ins from the set designed to minimize the discomfort that will arise at the beginning of using such a compact Firefox.

The first one is FaviconizeTab, which turns the tab into its small representation with the icon in the title alone, making it correspondingly more compact. Another nice use of this plugin is to block a tab from accidentally closing. Yes, yes, I know, there is an opportunity to block tabs without this plug-in, but usually those tabs that I need to block are planned to be used in such a background mode, such as Last.fm, and accordingly there is no need to occupy this tab so much space.

After all these gestures in the direction of ottyunivaniya browser, I could work and relax, while getting much more browsing space. There remained only one quotation, which every time stopped me for half a second - search. Since the search bar is part of the navigation bar, it disappears with it. And despite the fact that when creating a new tab, these panels pop up themselves, it would not be convenient to use such a search. So, I recalled that I already wrote about how to make the search convenient and accessible at all times, even on those sites where Opensearch is not provided. (This is achieved with the help of one of the commands of the Ubiquity plugin)

That seems to be all. Thus, by applying several really small and easy-to-configure plug-ins and one design theme, we get a perfectly working browser with just two compact panels at the top, where our bookmarks and tabs live and one panel at the bottom, where you can see the progress of page loading, speed, etc. and if you want to use Twitter, check email and catch bugs on your own sites.

On this, apparently, and true, all ... Enjoy all the browsing :)