Five Tricks and Add-ons for Firefox Users to Maximize Screen Space

Firefox users: Do you ever wish you could get just a little more vertical space for browsing Web sites? Tired of buttons, menus and toolbars cluttering up the top of your window?

Here are five free, easy-to-use ways to use Firefox add-ons that will give you more viewing space with hardly any set-up work. These methods maximize your screen space without going overboard and throwing out all functionality. The add-ons may take some time to adjust to, but hopefully not much.

1. Shrink the icons. The easiest way to do this is right-click in the navigation toolbar and choose "Customize." Check the "Use small icons" box. That will give you somewhat smaller icons. However, to get even tinier, you can use a Firefox theme made for just such a purpose. Examples include Littlefox, MicroFox and Classic Compact. Like the names suggest, they're designed to maximize your screen space by minimizing your icon sizes.

2. Get rid of the menu bars and toolbars. To get rid of the menu bar, use an extension like Hide Menubar or Tiny Menu. Tiny Menu will take your main menu options and put them in a right-click menu. Hide Menu bar simply hides the menu bar, and you can bring it back by pressing the ALT key. This is similar to how Internet Explorer works.

3. Hide the status bar. "But," you wonder, "how will I know whether pages are loading?" Easy. Get Fission, an add-on that puts a progress bar for loading Web pages in your address bar. Those who have used the Safari browser on the Mac will recognize this.

4. Maybe the easiest of all ways - though not always the most practical - is to simply hit F11. This will put Firefox in full-screen mode, leaving you with just your address and navigation bars. Coupled with a theme like Littlefox, this will devote nearly all of your space to Firefox. However, it makes keeping track of what's going on in your computer's other windows trickier.

5. If you really want to get the most space you can, and you consider yourself somewhat of a keyboard ninja, you can hide the navigation bar by unchecking it in the View menu. Once you've done that, there are several ways to get around. CTRL-L will bring up a window to type a new address. Other keyboard shortcuts, like ALT-left arrow, ALT-right arrow and F5 will allow you to go back, forward and refresh a page, respectively. You can also use the right-click menu or mouse gestures. If you don't like it, you can get your navigation bar back by going to your View menu again (hit ALT if you can't see it) and checking View Navigation Toolbar.

If you hide your navigation toolbar (step #5) and switch to full-screen mode (#4) you will have nothing but tabs and window space.