By default big chunk of Firefox view port in taken by unnecessary horizontal toolbars. It is not crucial for 4:3 screen users, but it matters for 16:9 users. This small note describes how to free browsing space and make Firefox more convenient for laptop and netbook users.
 Firefox with default viewport |
 Firefox wit extended viewport |
To free extra space we need to remove unnecessary toolbars. For example, bookmarks and navigation toolbars are useless. There is no need in them. I’m using <alt>+<right> and <alt>+<left> to navigate backward and forward. To refresh the page I’m pressing <F5> or <CTRL>+<F5>. To stop loading page I’m pressing <ESC>. I haven’t use my home page for years – Firefox is kindly loading my last session. Do I need all those buttons then? I do not. They have to be removed. After you removed all buttons, you have only address bar and search bar left. Why keep them so wide in current panel? Let’s move both of them to main toolbar. Now we have navigation navigation toolbar empty and can be removed.
I can’t even imagine anything worse than a bookmarks panel. It forces me to see my bookmarks always. Just think about it. Your browser forces you to watch your bookmarks. I believe, it is much more convenient if you are accessing your favorite links on your demand instead of been forced to press a link after hours watching it. Even if it’s not forcing you to do weird things, what’s the point to see it always? Bookmarks toolbar should be removed. You still can access your toolbars pressing <CTRL>+<B>. Your live will be even easier if you’ll use Delicious bookmarks extension, but default bookmarks subsitem is good enough to be used.
Default Firefox as it shipped is useless to me – it makes competitive difference with other browsers only with MY OWN set of updates installed. Every time I am moving to the new machine, i have to go through hell in order to set up proper browsing environment, suitable for my needs. Enough!
I made two collections of my must have addons, separating them into two logical subsets: surfing and web development. The separation might help other users to achieve latter goals, if they appreciate speed, simplicity and efficiency.
Here we go:
Best lightest web development collection for Firefox
Best usable quick starter’s collection for firefox.
Comments and updates are appreciated.
PS: I regret so much that I can not transfer configuration of my addons to some place online. Mozilla should develop some way of sharing whole browser configuration including look and each addon’s configuration in one package.
Since I moved to Fedora 10, I noticed Firefox became noticeably slower than before. Start-up was taking about 30 seconds. Even right click menu appearance had noticeable delay. I suspected plug-ins. I minimized amount of my plug-ins twice. It didn’t help.
After I suspected history and private data database. I tried to clean up history manually, but it did not decrease its size. Deleted entries were just marked as deleted, but kept remain in database. There was the last hope – trying to delete places.sqlite file manually. I had a hope that Firefox checks existence of database and recreates it in case of absence. And yes – it does it! It increased starting speed for about 5 seconds.
To eliminate large-history-problem in the future, I set a limit on it. You just need to go to about:config page and set a search filter to browser.history. Th following values need to be changed:
browser.history_expire_days;
browser.history_expire_days_min;
browser.history_expire_sites;
Personally, I set them to 30, 15 and 5000 accordingly. You may choose another values.
My last concern was language packs. There are all possible language packs installed and enabled by default in fedora’s Firefox. I disabled them all (a lot of clicking), except Russian and English ones. Miracle! Firefox starts up several times faster! Now it takes about 7 seconds only!
