I used to be a total toolbar nutcase. I would have three or four installed then wonder why it took forever for my browser to load.
These days I only have two toolbars (Google and Stumbleupon) and after a bit of tweaking, they are now both sharing the same bar on my Firefox browser. I only have what I need and the newly modified toolbar takes up very little space.
It’s very easy to combine your toolbars but I will say right off that this won’t work for the Yahoo toolbar (Grrr Yahoo!). Their toolbar buttons are totally immovable which is partly why I hate Yahoo. If everyone else can play ball with their products, why not Yahoo? But if you have toolbars such as Google or Stumbleupon then it works perfectly.
You have two options - you can either move your toolbars onto one existing toolbar or you can move your toolbar buttons onto the Firefox browser bar itself. I chose the latter.
First of all, remove from the toolbars the features you don’t need as space will be at a premium. You can do this by going into the toolbar options. Only keep what you actually use and need. Hack away the rest. Be honest, do you really need the “I feel lucky!” Google button?
When you have got the toolbars down to the features you need, right-click on the top Firefox bar and a little menu should then come up showing your toolbars and the word “customize”. I am translating all this from the German Firefox so the wording may vary depending on what version of Firefox you have.
Click on “customize”. A box will then pop up with Firefox features that you are not using and your toolbars will start moving about a bit. Don’t worry about that.
What to do now is decide where you want your new toolbar to be. Do you want your toolbar buttons sitting on the top Firefox bar (next to the navigation arrows and homepage button)? Or do you want to put the Google buttons on the Stumble bar? Or vice-versa?
When you have decided which buttons are being moved, click once on each button and then drag it to wherever you want it to go. When the button moves to wherever you want it, release the click and let it go. Repeat until you get the buttons moved to where you want them to go.
You can now use the click and drag method to re-arrange the buttons in whatever order you like. So you can have the most-used buttons on the left hand side for example and perhaps move the search box to a different place.
Using this method, you can have several toolbars in your Firefox browser without them taking up an inordinate amount of space. Oh and if anyone at Yahoo happens to be reading this - get your toolbar fixed!
Filed Under: Browser ¦ Cool Websites ¦ How-To
Tags: browser tips, firefox tips, How-To, minimalist, toolbar
[...] If you want to get even more creative, try moving your toolbars around and going even more minimalist with a tiny menu. now try a random post in rob’s [...]
More ideas.
Why even use the Google Toolbar in FF?
Save space with “TinyMenu”
Resize the searchbar with “searchbar autosizer”
Remove “Go” button
Remove Search Box “Magnifying Glass”
Remove unneeded icons (especially the throbber) using “customize”
Now you can use “customize” to move everything off the navigation toolbar to the topmost bar. Then in “view” you can hide the Navigation toolbar.
Here is a shot of my setup (before I got rid of the magnifying glass)
Totis
Cedric
I think you forgot to include the link
“Here is a shot of my setup (before I got rid of the magnifying glass)”
Aibek wrote:
I think you forgot to include the link
“Here is a shot of my setup (before I got rid of the magnifying glass)”
Yes, I did forget. Sorry. Here it is:
picasaweb.google.com/ken.kennedy.groups/PrintScreenFiles
I did include links for the extensions, and for how to remove the go button, etc., but they never showed up in my comment. (Is HTML not allowed in comments?). If you want to get the extension or tip instructions, just google ‘em.
You will notice that I left off the “htt*:// in the address above, in case HTML is stripped out.
kk
kk
Thanks for the link.
As about HTML in comments, yes it’s allowed :-). I am not really sure why it didn’t work in your case. ??? There is a slight chance that our spam filtering plugin had filtered them out. Sorry, abt that
I’ve just discovered that this also works with the Facebook toolbar also - its icons can be dragged and dropped.
[...] MUO, we’ve already discussed merging buttons on your Firefox toolbar. Check out the article here. I’m sure you can implement this easily and eliminate unwanted buttons that clutter the [...]