My Geekdom

I really like my screen real estate. Especially in my browser where I spend so much of my time. I never seem to have enough screen real estate in my browser. Furthermore, to complicate my life, I like to have only one browser window open and I hate full-screen windows. These are just my personal tastes and not a reflection on Firefox’s design or quality, but they do seem to present a bit of a problem. The strategy I’ve used is to utilize the extensive customization features built into Firefox which allows modifications to the presentation and functionality of the browser. I have spent and continue to spend considerable time on developing and improving this strategy (no, I don’t have anything better to do).

Before I talk about my changes, let me show you what Firefox looks like when you boot it immediately after a download. (Note: It is recommended that if you have images disabled that you enable them for this entry.)

Before diving in let me mention that the orange-brown coloring is from my Windows theme (I made it myself and, while never having asked for an opinion, my family have all said it is appalling). Using the default Windows theme produces coloring that is more typical of Windows.

Objections I Have With the Default Appearance of Firefox

• There is a lot of empty screen space. The menubar spans less than half of the space available to it. This is in a relatively small window that is only 838 pixels wide. My laptop is 1440 pixels wide so the browser window is only using ~60% of the screen’s width.

• The standard buttons are large and have lots of space between them. Great if you are 85 and have lost your glasses or have a hand with tremors. Otherwise I don’t much see the point.

• There is a search box on the line next to the URL location. The search box allows you to do quick searches. But, Firefox has a mechanism for searching from the location box. Why both are needed, I don’t know. I have read that a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b3/releasenotes/”>http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b3/releasenotes/, which has not yet been released, will be combining these two boxes so obviously I’m not the only one who questions this.

• To the right of the location box and search box are what’s called “Go” buttons. This is the green arrow and the magnifying glass. The usage of the location and search boxes is that you type or paste the text and then can hit the Go button to activate it. You can also type the enter key to activate it, unless you are a total mouse-devotee and never wish to use the keyboard, the “Go” buttons are just a waste of space.

• The bookmark toolbar initially begins with only two bookmarks but, it is intended to be customized so it can be filled to take the entire line. Still, you have both the web site’s icon and the page’s title. This means you can only have a few bookmarks before they get added to a dynamically created drop-down menu. You can squeeze more bookmarks in by renaming the page’s title in the bookmark to a shorter name or an abbreviation. But, once you’ve done this, if you forget what your abbreviation means, it gets complicated to see the original name. You can either open the page to see if you have the correct bookmark or right-click on the bookmark and view the URL in its properties window. Quite the hassle.

• The tabbar will resize the tabs smaller and eventually introduce horizontally scrolling if you get too many tabs. This is really not a bad setup but, unfortunately most new computers are “wide screen”. In my opinion they should be called “short screen”. For example, I used to have a Dell D610 which got replaced under warranty to a Dell D630 as the D610 is discontinued. There are several resolutions on the D610 and they all have a height of 75% of the width. The D630 also has screens with several resolutions but their height is only 62.5% of their width. There is no option to get the old 75% ratio. So, spending so many vertical pixels on the tabbar seems wasteful to me.

• The scrollbars, while standard size for Windows XP, are, IMO, fatter than they need to be.

• The statusbar wastes a lot of space. It is divided into two sections, a small visual display graphing the percentage of the page that has been loaded and a larger text display that tells you what the browser is currently doing and provides some feedback when you mouse over certain page elements. But, unless there are incredibly large status messages this small window has a lot of extra space.

In part 2 of this posting I’ll discuss the strategies I used to alter Firefox’s default appearance to better suit my needs. But, as a sneak peek, here is my (highly) customized browser displaying the same page as the default browser is displaying above.