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 [↩]

Yesterday I downloaded two software releases. And was left underwhelmed.

First up was the official launch of Internet Explorer 8. Nothing much appears to have changed since the Beta versions and I continue to be left disappointed.

People are turning towards Firefox, not because it shows web pages better, but because it’s more customisable – plugins, themes, etc. Microsoft has never really got this. Yes, Windows has themes and IE has addons, but there are few available and they’re hard to develop and implement. Instead we have Web Slices and Accelerators, requiring web developers to change their code and are deeply, deeply dull.

Next up, the people behind Xandros Linux launched Presto, which is intended to be used as a fast startup alternative to Windows. I’ve tried it on both my home PC and my Netbook and, yes, it works. It installs easily and configures Windows automatically to dual boot. Unfortunately, on both PCs I had different BIOS errors during the Presto boot and, yes, it’s still in Beta but it’s only a few weeks before the final version is released. Yet it lacks the basic ability to change languages and keyboards. So I’m stuck with a US keyboard layout.

By default it books with Firefox, Pidgin and Skype and you can add (some free, some you must pay for) extra applications via their website.

The final version is going to cost about $20, but that’s as much as they’re giving away right now. Personally, I’m going to wait for the final version as, at the moment, it’s seriously lacking that “oomph” that would get me excited.

The Release Candidate of IE 8 has been released and, naturally, I have it downloaded and installed. Not had the chance to play with it much though, although I’m curious to see if it still breaks the menu on the BMTG website¹. If it does, I’ll be reporting it to Microsoft (which I should have done earlier, if only there’d been a clear way of doing this – I’ve only come across the link more recently).

What I do know is that, as an “average” Joe, I’m not impressed. Microsoft have said…

We have made IE 8 the best browser for the way people really do use the web

Really? It looks pretty much like IE7. There’s a lot of tinkering “under the hood” but as an average customer, what does that mean to me? WebSlices and Accelerators? I think not and I’ll bet money now that most people won’t use these facilities. In fact, I’ll quietly bet now that Microsoft end up retiring these features in later versions.

It is apparently quicker. But, looking at the last beta release, it would appear that it’s still not caught Firefox or Chrome. Quicker but not quickest.

It is apparently more secure – it has a privacy feature that already exists in Chrome and is likely to be in the next version of Firefox.

I’ve only downloaded IE8 for the purpose of website testing. Can anybody give me a single good reason why I should move back to IE from Firefox? Can anybody give me a good reason why IE users won’t continue to move to alternative browsers? I suspect not. As Microsoft so often does, it throws features at a product that people don’t really want. If IE8 was secure, extremely fast and had the kind of plugins that Firefox uses then THAT would be a good product.

It’s a shame, because they seem to have done such a good job with Windows 7.

Update: The BMTG site DOES work with the new version of IE8. Hurrah. That’s another bug fixed. However, I still took the opportunity to install their plugin for reporting broken web pages. Ironically it’s not working right now – their server is too busy. So much for this being past beta stage.

Update #2: Test of new IE here. Conclusions – slow, renders badly and still has problems. Don’t agree with a lot of their “positives” though.

1. don’t try it… I have the Meta tag in place at the moment that runs it in IE7 compatibility mode [↩]