Junk Coder

Optimizing Firefox for small screens

I recently bought myself a nice little netbook to get some work done while I’m on the road. I’ve always wanted one of these little computers, but I always felt that the performance didn’t justify the expense. I don’t need that much power on the road but when I get less CPU power than with a “normal” notebook, I’d at least expect a decent battery life. I took some time, but finally the battery life of (some) netbooks is long enough to justify the lack of speed.

I went for a 10″ Asus Eee PC, which boasts a battery life of 9.5 hours. While it’s screen is one of the larger ones found in netbooks, it’s still way smaller than my 24″ screen at home. I do most of my work in a terminal window where small resolution doesn’t matter that much, but while it might be possible to use Lynx for browsing the web, I still prefer a browser with a little bit more Web 2.0 feeling

My browser of choice is Firefox. Not only is it highly configurable with extensions, it’s also available for all platforms I’m regularly working on (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows). Unfortunately, the default configuration for Firefox wastes a lot of pixels for stuff like menus, the location bar, bookmarks and more. But since Firefox can be customized quite easily, it’s not that hard to make some extra room for the websites you want to see.

1. Hide bookmarks. The first step is to disable the bookmarks toolbar. Under “View” -> “Toolbars” you can deselect the “Bookmarks Toolbar”. Once you get used to the Awesome Bar of Firefox you won’t use it anyway, so why waste those precious pixels?

2. Hide the status bar. The next step is to hide the status bar. Simply uncheck “Status Bar” in the “View” menu, and it will go away. Some people like to keep the status bar so that they can see the URL of a link before clicking on it. If you don’t want to hide your status bar permanently, you might want to check out the autoHideStatusbar addon for Firefox. It promises to show the status bar whenever you are hovering over a “sensitive zone”, though I have not tested this extension yet.

3. Use small images. Every pixel counts, so you might also want to use small icons in your location bar. Right click on the toolbar -> “Customize” -> “Use small icons” will exactly do that.

4. Hide menu. The Hide menubar addon will hide the menubar. When you need it, you simple press the “Alt” key and it appears on the screen again.

5. Use fullscreen mode. That’s the most obvious tip. Hit “F11″ to bring Firefox into fullscreen mode.