This article therefore details how to customize Firefox in normal mode to save some screen estate for the web contents which is especially useful for users with small computer screens.

We start with a quick Firefox interface tour. The Firefox web browser by default displays six bars plus the actual website. Those are from top to bottom the title bar, menu bar, address bar, bookmarks bar, tabs and the status bar.

The Firefox web browser offers some customizations out of the box. It is for instance possible to hide some of the toolbars automatically. This can be configured in the View menu of the web browser. You can hide the menu bar, navigation bar and bookmarks bar here. Those toolbars are most of the time needed. A better solution would be to combine them into one or two bars to have all the functionality in reach.

A right-click on free space in one of the toolbars and the selection of Customize provides us with that option. This opens a new window called customize toolbar which contains some elements that can be placed in the toolbars. Even better however is the fact that some toolbars can be moved into other toolbars. It is for instance possible to move the Bookmarks toolbar into the address bar to combine those two. The bookmarks toolbar can then be hidden from the standard view in the View menu as it is no longer needed.

It is theoretically possible to join the menu bar, navigation bar and bookmarks bar into one bar so that two bars can be hidden in the browser which frees valuable screen estate.

To do that a small add-on called Tiny Menu is required to compress the menu into one link in the menu bar. This is necessary to have enough room for the navigational elements and bookmarks.

Install Tiny Menu and restart Firefox. You will notice that the menu bar will display on a Menu link and nothing else. The rest of the screen estate can now be filled with elements from the navigational and bookmarks bar.

Most users will probably move the address bar, bookmarks and some navigational elements like stop or reload in that new bar. The new Firefox interface can then look like this:

As you can see the menu bar, address bar and bookmarks bar are all displayed on the same toolbar.

Further Firefox optimizations:

Some users might not need the Firefox status bar or title bar. We like the status bar because it displays the destination of links when hovering the mouse over them. Many Firefox do add icons to the status bar as well which are obviously only useful if the bar is displayed. Users can hide the status bar from the View menu in the Firefox browser as well.

• Hide Titlebar – This add-on hides the Firefox titlebar just like it is done in the Google Chrome browser.
• Hide Gui bars – Can be used to hide individual toolbars like the status bar or tabbar.

Advanced users can also edit the userChrome.css file to change the fonts and other display settings of the toolbars in Firefox to gain even more screen estate in the web browser. How do you like your Firefox? Do you keep the toolbars separated? Do you hide any? Let us know in the comments.

Custom Menus is an experimental Firefox extension that can do that – and more. Besides being able to remove menu items in Firefox easily Custom Menus can also rename any Firefox menu instantly. This could be interesting to save some menu space in the toolbars or to make menu entries clearer. That’s a pretty handy thing for users who want to minimize the screen estate taken by menus and toolbars without losing any of the functionality they provide.

Interestingly enough the first level of bookmark folders and bookmarks can be changed and disabled with the Firefox extension as well. The Custom Menu options can be accessed from the Tools menu after installation or by opening the chrome://custommenus/content/editor.xul url in the address bar.

The Firefox extension provides access to three additional parameters that can be changed or added. The extension’s developer missed to provide information for them though which makes it hard to find out what they actually do. The first parameter is called attributes while the second is images. Images can be added by CTRL clicking on the image tab which will open a file browser to load an image.

The second parameter makes it possible to add attributes while the third accepts new styles. It is most likely making use of the default Firefox attribute and style parameters which can be looked up easily on the Mozilla website.

Update: The add-on has been discontinued. The closest alternative feature wise is the UI Tweaker extension.