One nice feature of this add-on is that it will automatically hide – so you are not wasting any extra screen real estate. It is small and for the most part, unobtrusive.  You can easily drag and drop new buttons to the vertical menu just like you do with your regular Firefox toolbars too. For people who don’t like all the bells and whistles the All-in-One Sidebar add-on brings when you install it – the Vertical Toolbar add-on should be absolutely perfect.

Want to give the add-on a shot? You can download the Vertical Toolbar add-on for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Once FlexBar has been installed, you can very easily configure the visibility of all your menu bars, sidebars, and information bars in Firefox.  You can choose to always show, never show or just hide any toolbar in the Firefox interface too.

Now sure, a lot of what you can do with this extension, you could do by hand – fumbling through the Firefox settings.  The thing FlexBar tries to do right, is it gives you a single location to minimize the Firefox interface.

Here is a little more about the FlexBar add-on, from the developer:

Optionally you can display additional small buttons on left side of the Tab Bar. The navigation buttons offer an identical functionality to the buttons in the Navigation Toolbar. This way a quick page navigation is possible, even when the Navigation Toolbar is hidden. Additionally, there are buttons for quick access to the menu bar and the bookmarks toolbar. This way, even without auto-hide active you can save space by hiding the menu bar and the bookmarks toolbar.

Overall, I like this add-on for Firefox.  Anything that gives me more room to browse and customizes the Firefox interface for me is definitely a good thing.  You can pick up FlexBar on the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Browsing space is important; especially for smaller netbook PCs out there.  So, why have the menu bar, bookmark bar and navigation bar shown if you don’t need them?  The Hide GUI bars extension for Firefox will let you hide all three, or bring them back with one single keyboard combination.

Once the Hide GUI bars add-on is installed, customizing it to fit your needs is pretty self explanatory.  In the options you can choose which toolbars get hidden:

• Menu Bar
• Navigation Bar
• Tab Bar
• Bookmarks Bar
• Status Bar

Next, you just choose the keyboard combination you wish to use to hide or show all the Firefox toolbars.

How to Hide Toolbars Manually in Firefox

Can you do this without the use of the Hide GUI bars add-on? Yes, but it is a little more complicated.  One of the new features in Firefox 3.6 is the ability to hide the menu bar.  The navigation bar and bookmarks bar were already hide-able before this most recent release. To hide them, just right-click one of the toolbars, and uncheck the one you wish to hide:

You can pick up the Hide GUI bars add-on for Firefox on the Firefox add-ons web site.

Having seen the phase of toolbar upon toolbar come our way in this browsing generation, many have been labeled as evil space wasters that must be done away with.  However, I do have to say not ever toolbar out there is evil.  Now I don’t think you should ever become this crazy, but used in the right way they can be handy. 

Look at these handy toolbars you can add to Firefox:

• Forecastfox – Get international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and display it in any toolbar or statusbar with this highly customizable and unobtrusive extension.
• Google Toolbar – Ok, I haven’t really used the Google Toolbar in half a decade, however it does still have a few handy things about it.
• Fire.fm – It gives you access to the extensive music library on Last.fm. Last.fm gives free radio to the US, UK, and Germany, plus subscriber-based service to the rest of the world. Listen to your favorite music and discover new artists in the process.
• Web Developer Toolbar – The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

So see – not every toolbar is bad.  Are there any more toolbars you really enjoy?  Don’t be afraid, share with the rest of us in the comments.

Once installed, the options here are simple.  You can enable or disable the multiple bookmark rows, and you can also set the max number rows to display.  If it doesn’t exactly match up with your current theme or you want to tweak it some, check out this post from the mozillazine.org forums. 

If you need more bookmark room in the browser, this add-on will do the trick.  You can pick it up on the Firefox Add-ons site.

There are a few requirements, such as getting your own unique UUID, giving TwisterMc some credit, and coming up with something original – but those are easily done in exchange for the knowledge you will be receiving.

Some of the tutorials covered are:

- Packaging Firefox Themes
- Creating Your Themes’ Identity & Install Files
- Graphics Editing for Firefox Themes
- Custom Firefox Toolbar Buttons
- Customizing Toolbar Backgrounds
- Submitting Your Theme to Mozilla
- Customize Firefox’s Scrollbar
- Changing Fonts & Colors in Firefox Themes
- User Generated Q&A

Check it all out here:

• iPox Remix – Create Your Own Firefox Theme

Big thanks to TwisterMc for updating this for all of us to enjoy. Know of anymore theme resources or tutorials out there?

Here are the best of the bunch!  Thanks to everybody who submitted!

via Twister MC

via Kaitlin

via Eren

via Coffee Cup

via David

via Philipp

via Pecet

via Skech

via Joe

via Brian

via Stephan

via Ellie

via Bo

via Klaus

via Gavin

via Robert

via Christopher

via Khalil

via Lee

via Rodney

What have you done to make Firefox better for your own needs?  If you have any customization tips to share, we would all love to hear them.

One of the best things about Firefox is that we can customize it to no end, and thus far – no other browser on the market has been able to stack up with that fact.  So I am curious, how have you customized Firefox to fit your needs?  How have you organized your toolbars and icons?

I’ll start things off by showing you my current browser setup:

As you can see I like to keep it pretty simple, and I am rocking the Chromiefox theme right now.  Send me your Firefox screenshots (to mitch@mitchkeeler.com), or post a link here in the comments to them.  If anything else, we might pick up a few customization tips from one another.  I’ll save the best for a round up for a later date and time.

CHECK OUT THE GALLERY!

To remove these two, you will need to edit your UserChrome.css file and add these entries to the bottom.

Remove the Go Button:

#go-button-stack, .search-go-button-stack {
display: none !important;
}

Remove the “Search” Button:

/*Remove magnifying glass button from search box*/
.search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

Now when your done, restart Firefox and you now have a little more room freed up where those buttons used to be.

This is a classic Firefox 2 tip that makes me wonder if it will still exist with Firefox 3 looming around the corner?

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).