Make better use of Firefox's Title Bar with Personal Titlebar
The only element that is currently displayed in Firefox's Title Bar is the one-button menu. While it won't be there for much longer, I always felt that displaying only the menu button there was a colossal waste of space.
If you have used Firefox for a while you do know that it is possible to customize what appears on various toolbars, but the title bar is exempt from that cool feature.
Personal Titlebar changes that. Once installed in the browser, you will immediately notice that it adds the menubar, that is the menu that is displayed when you hit the Alt-key, to it so that you get direct access to the items here. This in itself can be useful as the single menu button does not list all the items that the menu bar lists.
What is probably more interesting than that is the ability to add icons and other elements of the browser to that bar so that they appear in the title bar of the browser.
Doing so may be useful for a number of reasons:
- You can move all icons from the browser's add-on bar to the title bar and hide the add-on bar afterwards.
- You can move elements to it that you prefer to access and see on the top of the browser.
- You can use the space to add items that you would not add to the browser UI otherwise.
To customize the selection select View > Toolbars > Customize from the menu. A menu appears on the screen displaying icons and elements that are not used currently in the browser. You can drag and drop any element from the menu and most elements that are already displayed in the browser UI to the menu bar so that it is displayed there from that moment on.
The extension makes available additional features that you may like:
- You can use the F10 key to toggle the menu on and off
- You can add the new "titlebar text" element to the titlebar so that the title of the active page is always shown in the browser (it is by default only shown in the tab, and often cut because of limited space).
The default text style makes the menu items hard to read. To change that do the following:
- Type about:config into the browser's address bar and hit enter.
- Search for personaltitle and hit enter.
- Double-click the preference extensions.personaltitlebar.textcolor to set it to false. This removes the style effect from the text and displays it the same way as you see on the screenshot above.
- The extensions.personaltitlebar.titletext.align defines the position of text on the bar. The default value 0 aligns it to the left, 1 to the center, and 2 to the right of the bar.
Personal Titlebar is a useful add-on for the Firefox web browser even if you only want to add icons to the titlebar and hide the menu all the time.
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For some time I am using the Firefox add-on New Old Menu (there using right now version 1.0.0.4) ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-old-menu/?src=api )
This add-on does about the same. Martin when you comparing they two add-one’s which one do you prefer?
That depends. If you like the additional functionality that Personal Titlebar makes available, then you may want to install this extension instead.
Will Australis block this extension in the near future?
could not agree more re the colossal waste of space. I use Hide Caption extension for this very reason
It is likely that it won’t work right after it has been released unless the author modifies it beforehand.
But by default the tabs are on top in Firefox (Actually it’s not only default, but the only way to move tabs out of the title bar is by “about:config”, and most users don’t know about that, or even care to move the tabs from the top.), so if you have multiple tabs open there is no room for anything else in the tile bar since the Firefox menu button, and all the tabs takes up all the room.
Here is Firefox with just four tabs open: http://i572.photobucket.com/albums/ss161/BobbyPhoenix/Firefoxtitlebar.jpg There is no room for the menu bar.
That actually isn’t bad line-up for a limited screen like a netbook. What worries me is if feels like Firefox is headed to be a mobile OS browser not a workstation browser where you actually have more space to add stuff.
Martin, F10 and SHIFT + F10 are general keyboard shortcuts in Windows, activating the menu bar and opening the contextual menu, respectively.
Interesting, thanks.
I’ve got my tabs on the title bar and thus save a lot of space.
I’ve been using Layout Plan (Menu on Titlebar) which is decent, but it leaves the Firefox button in place so I had to write a userstyle to hide it and it doesn’t have the extra features.
I’ll definitely check out this add-on and if I use it, I’ll keep an eye on how it’ll work (if at all) with Australis as I’ll be doing with some other add-ons.
Thanks Martin.
If you want to just move the Firefox button use this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/movable-firefox-button/?src=ss
The “Nav Bar on Title Bar” add-on moves the navigation bar into the title bar, leaving the menu under the Firefox button and saving a lot of screen real estate.