The Add-on Bar was introduced in FireFox 4 and replaced the Status bar.
The Add-on Bar is a toolbar at the bottom of your screen that keeps all of your add-on shortcuts, thus giving you a quick access to their features.
The status bar was primarily removed to make the most of the browser real estate- which makes many of us wonder why the newly introduced Add-on bar is absolutely un-optimized in terms of saving the browser screen space.
The following three addons attempt to fix that bug:
1. Move Addons Bar Into the Address Bar
URL Addon Bar is a little experimental FireFox add-on that requires no re-start.
It re-locates all your buttons from the Add-ons Bar to the URL bar (right inside the bar where you normally see the page URL and the star to bookmark the current page).
You are always able to hide the add-ons bar by clicking its X sign right inside your address bar:
Drawbacks:
- If you have too many add-ons, the buttons will fill up your whole URL bar (which happened to one of my FireFox profiles). This makes the add-on completely impossible to use.
- For small screens or long URLs, you might be unable to see the whole URL in the address bar, but that’s not a big deal as most screen resolutions will allow for an adequate URL bar width.
2. Transform Add-on Bar into a Set of Buttons
Barlesque is an easy-to-use add-on that collapses the wide gray add-on bar into a neat set of add-on buttons. What this basically means is that upon installation, your add-ons bar won’t be a solid horizontal band across the bottom of your browser window. Instead, there will be buttons that cover no more space than they need.
Before:
(Provided you have the add-on bar switched on: “View” menu -> “Toolbars” -> check the “Add-on Bar”)
After you install the add-on:
The add-on options let you:
- Toggle the “collapsed” mode using the little add-on icon within the address bar (as well as use the customized keyboard shortcut for that);
- Align the buttons to the right or to the left;
- Switch on the auto-collapse timer, that automatically collapses the add-on bar after the set number of seconds.
3. Set the Minimum Width of the Add-on Bar
Here’s another FireFox add-on that lets you minimize your add-on bar and save on screen real estate. Basically the add-on lets you set the width, height and color of the add-on bar.
You are most likely to be surprised after having it installed because:
- The default width seems to be set to 0, so you won’t see your add-on bar at all;
- All the buttons you used to have in your address bar will be removed. You’ll need to right click the add-on bar and choose “Customize” to again add your add-on buttons to the new bar.
After having everything set up, you are likely to love using it though!
Any other space-saving tips for FireFox add-on bar? Please share them in the comments!
Here are a couple of more space-saving tips for FireFox users:
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