How to compact your firefox bookmarks tab

The length of the bookmarks tab in firefox has been bothering me for a while. It is equal to the length of the largest entry which could mean that it could quickly clutter your interface when you have some sort of subfolder system that I use. One method to overcome this would be to strip every bookmark so that it would never use more than 20 chars, everything else would be cut off. I did that for some time but discovered a way that makes everything so much easier.

You need to access the userchrome.css file of your firefox installation, for windows xp it is located in C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\chrome - take a look at the official firefox support page if you want to located this file on different systems. If you never edited this file you will find a file called userChrome-example.css instead of userChrome.css. Rename this file by removing -example and you are ready to edit it.

Open userChrome.css in a text editor, scroll to the bottom and add the following line:

menu.bookmark-item,menuitem.bookmark-item {max-width:20em !important;}

Your bookmarks will now have a maximum width of 20em no matter how large the entry actually is, if it is larger it will be cut off with ..

You may need to play around with the 20 a little bit, some prefer even smaller values, some want to see more. If you reduce the value you will see less chars but have more space while a larger number displays more text of the bookmark.