Make Firefox better than Google Chrome - more screen space!!

I got some ideas from this post on LifeHacker. but didn't find it necessary to use everythng they did and went further to get more screen real estate.

What I like about Chrome is the fact that there's more space for you to see the web page. The excess "chrome" ironically has been removed. The Window's title bar is gone, the status bar is gone, and so that opens up a lot of space.

So all I wanted to do was get the same amount of real estate in Firefox, but I ended up with more!

How?

First, under the Firefox View menu, uncheck Status Bar. That gives you a bunch of extra space at the bottom of the window. And now you're getting close to emulating Chrome.

Of course you wont' see the status of the page as it loads, but that's the price you pay. BUT you can install Firebug, in which case you would have much better status information accessible anytime by pressing F12.

Second you need to install

Personal Menu by Merci Chao (Version 4.1pre)

What that does is allows you to hide the menu bar, which is what Chrome does, that gives a bunch of space at the top of the page. After installing Personal Menu make sure you go back into View and unselect Toolbars > Menu Toolbar

Now that hides the Menu bar, which you can still get to by pressing ALT.

Now you're almost there.

Next, you go back into View > Toolbars and unselect Navigation Toolbar.

Now, lo and behold you have more space in Firefox than you have in Chrome!!!

Isn't that awesome? Do you really need the navigation bar? No, because if you want to type something there, you press the CTRL-L shortcut anyway, and that continues to work.

You can also install this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8769

That will allow you to toggle the navigation bar using the F2 keyboard shortcut. Very handy!!

That's the one feature I wish Chrome would have-the ability to toggle the navigation bar. If Chrome did that, the amount of screen real estate would expand tremendously.


ps, You can use this theme if you want your Firefox to look more like Chrome:

Chromifox by Falconer (Version 1.0)

Labels: browsers, chrome, firefox

Nice personas / skins for Firefox

Simple & Clean - Grey Edition

Offical Cookie Fruits by chetaraparker

Blog Marcianos.com.mx by heryemmanuel

Labels: browsers, firefox

The fastest browser is Google Chrome

About the new Chrome 1.0, the first version of Google Chrome out of beta, PC Magazine says:

The retest shows a 24 percent speed improvement, bringing this released browser to the same level of performance as Firefox's second beta 3.1 version. The new numbers far outstrip what Microsoft's Internet Explorer was capable of, by a factor of nearly 100, and even bested the released version of Firefox 3.0's results more than threefold.

I'm generally pleased with Chrome but still have privacy concerns. I think Google needs to put in place an opt-out feature.

Labels: browsers, chrome, privacy

Google Chrome Privacy - Iron vs. Chromium

So Google as always is being very creepy with Google Chrome, which they use to collect a ton of information about you, like every site you visit and so on. So some people are like, well we like the browser but we don't like the company behind it or how they're collecting and using personal information. Google Chrome does assign a unique ID apparently to each browser, which makes everything you do trackable.

Enter the Germans. SRWare Iron came out with a stripped down version of Chrome which doesn't collect any data.

* unlike the current Chrome beta it uses the newest Webkit version of the current Chromium build

* it does not generate a unique ID of every client for use by Google

* no installation timestamp ill be generated for google

* no "suggest feature" that phones home to google (for help) what you type into the address bar

* will not phone home to google in case you mistyped a URL

* no phoning home for error reporting

* does not send RLZ tracking info to google, e.g. about when and where Chrome was downloaded

* NO frickin updater that installs itself as a startup app to run in the background

* does not load google homepage in background when the browser is loaded

But the question is does Iron actually do anything different from Chromium? Chromium is the open source project that is behind Google Chrome. Does Chromium do all this stuff for Google? Like sending your data to them, and so on?

I don't know. Does anybody know the answer to that question? Is it safe to use Chromium? Or do we have to go with Iron if we don't want Google tracking us?

Labels: browsers, chrome