Useful Netbook Firefox Add-ons

This post was written 2 years 10 months 15 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

With their smaller display it’s important to get as much information on screen as possible when using a Netbook. Therefore a lot of the toolbars and status bars can get a little in the way.

You can, of course, use F11 to view full screen in Firefox but this isn’t always the most convenient option. What if you still had everything to hand but could reduce some of the screen real-estate not used for browsing?

All of the add-ons below can be downloaded as a special collection from Firefox.

Smart Stop/Reload
This replaces the separate Stop and Reload icons with a single icon – after all you can’t do both, so the use of this will change depending on the current page state. If loading, it will be a stop button, otherwise it will be a reload button. Simple.

autoHideStatusbar
This will hide the status bar at the bottom of Firefox when not needed. About the only thing of use regularly is displaying the page load status, but that’s covered by the next add-on…

Fission
Fission combines address bar and progress bar¹. In a nutshell the page load progress is shown by a coloured bar in the background of the address bar.

Hide MenuBar
As the name suggests, this hides the main menu bar at the top. Pressing the ALT bar re-displays it.

Personal Menu
This replaces the various main menu bar options with toolbar alternatives.

Tiny Menu
This replace the standard menu bar with a tiny menu popup.

Menu Editor
Rearrange or remove menu items from the main context menu (right-click menu) and main menubar (File, Edit, View, etc).

1. like Safari already does [↩]