Need more space in your Firefox toolbars and menus? If you want to eliminate some dead space in the browser, then you need the Tabs Always in Titlebar add-on for Firefox. This extension for Firefox will bump your tabs up a level – giving yourself a little more minimalistic view of your default Firefox GUI.

Once you install this restart-less add-on, it will bump your browser tabs up to the same level you see the Firefox button.  I have been looking for a simple way to do this since Firefox 4 came out – and now that we are already on Firefox 5 – I am happy to see somebody got around to creating an add-on to meet my needs.

If you are using a netbook, this is an excellent add-on to add because it gives you more room to check out the content you want to see.  You can pick up Tabs Always In Titlebar add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

First, you will want to right-click on the Navigation Toolbar.  Next, select or un-select the "Tabs on Top" option.  When you do so, the tabs will either switch back to the top of the website viewing area or to the top of the window. 

So no matter if you are more of a traditionalist (and enjoy your tabs in the old location) or you are ready for new and exciting things (and want to put your tabs on top) there is an option for both in Firefox 4.

Once installed, this add-on will put the Firefox button in your tab bar as a default.  However, you can still move it around by right-clicking on the menu toolbar, then going to "Customize".  After doing so, you can drag the Firefox button to any location you want in the browser. 

Want to restore it to the default location? Simply uninstall the Movable Firefox Button add-on.

This will hopefully give those who want a little more control in Firefox 4 when it comes to customization a early Monday morning present.  There are other add-ons out there that will let you do more all-in-one tweaking to the Firefox 4 toolbar layout, but if you simply need to move the Firefox button then the Movable Firefox Button add-on will do the job for you.

You can pick up this add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Want to export your bookmarks to a .html file?  You can in Firefox with just a few clicks of the mouse.  This can come in handy when it comes to syncing your bookmarks with another browser, backing up or moving from PC to PC.  Mozilla has made the import and backup options in Firefox brain dead simple.

First, you will want to go to Bookmarks and then Organize Bookmarks from within the Firefox Menu toolbar.  That will open up the Bookmark Library.  From within there, click on Import and Backup and then Export HTML…

When you do, you will get a kind of “save this file as…” screen pop-up where the default name of the exported file will be bookmarks.html.  Select the location you wish to save the file to, and then hit the Save button.

There you have it.  You now have a picture perfect backup of your Firefox bookmarks.  Hope this basic tutorial comes in handy – and if you have any other bookmark exporting tips you would like to share – be sure to do so in the comments.

Before the tweak (notice the close tab button is on the tab itself)

After the tweak (notice the close tab button has been moved to the far right)

Now what is the secret?  You just need to do a little editing in your about:config page.

1. Type in about:config in the Firefox address bar
2. Tell Firefox you’ll be careful, promise! (unless you already asked Firefox not to be warned about this anymore)
3. In the the filter box you see at the top, type in browser.tabs.closeButtons
4. Right-click it’s entry on the about:config page, and choose “Modify”
5. Change the value from 1 to 3 (you can switch it back the same way if you don’t like it)
6. You are done!  Enjoy your tab closing button in it’s new location!

Hope you enjoyed this quick customization tip, using the powers of the about:config settings and configurations.  If you enjoyed this one, be sure to check out the other about:config tweaks we have covered in the past too.

To use the add-on, just resize by right-clicking anywhere inside of the text area.  With this, dragging becomes an really easy task and the often sensible site layout remains untouched.  Here is more help on how to use this extension from the author.

Additionally you can move whole text areas to another place. Double click inside of an area and all areas will get unlocked and movable. The repositioned area will stay fixed on the place of your choice even if you are scrolling the page. Double click once more to lock the areas again. The extension’s options allow some manual adjustments (e.g. use context menu item instead of double click or additional key modifiers for mouse gesture users).

You can pickup Text Area Resizer & Mover at the Firefox Add-ons site or the extension’s official home page.

So all is going fine here, and if your not seeing this post now, you should within a couple of days.  Then again, if you can’t see this post how would you know your missing it?  Quantum theory aside, expect the same ol’ Firefox goodness, just at a new home.

What can you do to help?  Get your friends, family and even that creepy Internet Explorer loving neighbor of yours to come visit and also pass them our RSS subscription link too.  Did I also mention you can get e-mail updates too?

Stop Resizing and Moving My Firefox Browser

Want to stop the ability for web sites to resize your browser window or move it around? In Firefox go to Tools, then Options the the Content tab. Where you see the check mark box for “Enable JavaScript” hit the Advanced button next to it. Here you can enable or disable the ability for web sites to resize or move your existing window.

Turn Back on My Ability to Resize Any Popup Myself

Now the second situation you might find yourself in is when you want to resize the window but the designer locked it down so that you can’t. Thanks to gHacks.net though for finding this next tweak, you can override the “cannot resize popup” setting when you run into popups that can not be resized.

There is however a way in Firefox to override the “cannot resize popup” setting which in turn makes it possible to resize any popup that you might come across. To do so you need to type about:config in the address bar of Firefox and filter for the term dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable. Set the value of this setting to true to be able to resize all windows in Firefox.

Restart Firefox and you should be able to resize those popup windows on any web site.

Here is what you need to add to your UserChrome.css file to get this to work:

/* Display the tabbar at the bottom */
#content > tabbox { -moz-box-direction: reverse; }

You can also move the tab bar to your left or right too, just in case you want to really try something different.

From there everything is pretty easy to figure out. You can drag things into the box that pops up to remove them, and then click an drag things out of the box and into the menu to add them to the toolbar. On the bottom of that popup box you see a few other options as well.

The drop down box gives you the option to show just the icons, icons and text descriptions or just the text. If you don’t like the pretty icons, go hardcore and use the text only options. Personally I am an “icons only” kind of guy.

I don’t use the space and flexable space very much. They will help you push some of your icons around to the far left or far right if you need them to be there. The seperator will help you put little bars between your icons and toolbar spaces so things look nice and neat.

All the other icons you see there should be fairly familiar. If you have installed a few extensions, you might also see buttons for them there that you can drag over to your toolbar space.

Next thing you see if a check box option for using small icons. I have this one checked as well, because by doing so it shrinks my buttons down and gives me more toolbar space to work with. That’s more room for adding other neat buttons and options up there. It also helps to give you a little more viewing space where your Web sites are displayed too.

There is a button to add a new toolbar too. Use this if you need a new spot to expand all your buttons and options to. The last option you see here is for the folks that try to customize but end up messing things up and they don’t know how to go back.

Just hit the “Restore Default” button and everything will go back to the way it looked when you first installed Firefox (well, toolbar and icon positions anyways).