What Firefox UI customisations can be used to improve productivity?

Question

Most desk jobs these days involve the frequent use of a web browser. What Firefox UI customisations increase your productivity and make your working life easier?

Not necessarily add-ons (although no reason why not as long as they're UI-related), but I'm thinking more along the lines of toolbar removal/placement, icon/menu removal/placement, tweaks to userChrome.css etc. to make things more pleasant and optimal. Screenshots welcome.

I realise some people feel UI customisation makes switching between machines harder. Whilst I agree to some extent, if you mainly use one machine, and it helps your productivity - why not?

Answer 1

Tab Mix Plus is perhaps one of the most useful as it allows you to customize the tab behavior to suit your browsing style.

Colorful Tabs is useful in keeping open tabs differentiated visually from one another.

Another good UI enhancement is Resurrect Pages It allows you to pull up pages that are offline by searching the cache on different search engines.

Answer 2

Tiny Menu and Tree Style Tab.

I use Tiny menu for obvious reasons; to free up space at the top.

I have Tree Style Tab configured to slide open to the side with an auto-hide option. When viewing a page, the tabs are hidden and I see very few Firefox UI elements.

Sets of related tabs, with typically a Google search at the top level tab, are auto-rolled up. Opening a new tab underneath these tabs creates a 2nd level hierarchy and tells me at a glance where the tabs came from, even when I visit them after a month.

A lot of the tab groups remain undisturbed till I find time to deal with them. When I'm done with a set of tabs, I roll them up and close them all in one click.

These two plug-ins have really changed the way I browse, or use Firefox. However, I use this setup for non-regular sites; the most visited sites are typically set up in Prism webapps, callable via Gnome-Do.

Answer 3

I could not live without All-in-one Gestures, makes your navigation really faster, especially the "rocker back/forward navigation" (mostly backwards).

Answer 4

This bookmarklet

javascript:var%20url%20=%20new%20String(location.href);var%20re%20=%20new%20RegExp('https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]+)');var%20res%20=%20url.match(re);location.href=res[0];

sends you to the base URL of a site instead of messing about with cutting details in the location bar.

Answer 5

As a web developer one cannot live without Firebug, JSView, Surf Canyon, IE Tab and YSlow.

Along with these All-in-one Sidebar, Tab Mix Plus and Google Toolbar are a must.

Answer 6

AutoPager joins pages with next links into one big scrolling page so you can just keep scrolling down without having to click "next".

Leechblock blocks time wasting sites.

LocationBar^2 turns the address bar url into clickable sections a bit like Windows Explorer does in Vista.

Answer 7

I found that using the extensions FireGestures and Grab and Drag greatly increased my efficiency of navigating my browser.

The former is a very neat gesture addon, which draws a trace of your mouse gesture and uses only four directions (up, down, left, right) so it is much easier to perform a given gesture compared with systems using eight directions because the 4-way system is more robust, so a slight change in the direction of the gesture will not close your tab instead of opening a new one. You can be sloppy with your gestures thus you can perform them very fast.

The latter extension is inspired by Acrobat Reader and lets you drag the webpages with your mouse or touchpad. Especially useful for longer pages because it doesn't cramp your middle finger as scrolling with the wheel would do. You can use flicker gestures (a short flick of a mouse movement instead of a pgup/pgdn button) and momentum scrolling (start to pull the page, then let it go and watch the page as it keeps scrolling).

These extensions are very useful IMHO because using a browser is mouse-oriented (efficiently navigating a webpage with keyboard is greatly inefficient), so why don't give more power to your mouse? The only downside is that you'll start to use it in other programs as well even, if it clearly doesn't work. And in Flash animations neither the grabbing nor the gestures work, of course.

PS. as these addons might not provide visible improvement to the UI, they really increase your productivity and do not forget that the navigation is part of the UI.

PS2. You can install these add-ons anywhere as they mostly go unnoticed until accidental but pleasant discovery by the owner ;-) (compare e.g. NoScript, which wreaks havoc in Firefox.)

Answer 8

Tabkit - I was very surprised at just how useful having the tabs down the side (with indentation) has actually turned out to be. Alternate option is Tree Style Tab (sorry, SU doesn't let me post more than one link at a time ;-(.

Answer 9

Tree style Tab.

Changed my way of browsing. It's the most efficient tool to perform long research on internet. The typical use is having a google search as a father, and all sites as leaf nodes. Works very well for wikipedia.

Answer 10

Not strictly UI-related, but creating keyword searches for things like Google (g), Wikipedia (wp), Stack Overflow (so), etc. speeds things up immensely.

If you're doing web development or repetitive data entry, I find it useful to use Bookmarklets and/or Greasemonkey to pre-enter form fields or focus specific fields.

And for my money, the Mouseless Browser extension is a major productivity boost.

Answer 11

Tiny Menu - Reduce clutter by replacing the standard menu bar with a tiny menu popup.

Answer 12

There are some very useful userChrome.css tweaks in the following article - Tweak Your Firefox with the userChrome.css File including:

/* Remove Home button (never use it) */
#home-button { display: none; }

/* Remove Go button from address bar */
#go-button-stack, .search-go-button-stack { display: none !important; }

/* Eliminate the throbber and its annoying movement: */
#throbber-box { display: none !important; }

/* Remove the Bookmark star, I use Ctrl-D instead */
#star-button { display: none !important; }

EDIT: Here's a LifeHacker article to help maximise page viewing area in Firefox 3.5.

Answer 13

I personally need this XMarks add-on since I access sites from both home and work, and I need the bookmarks to be in sync. Works under both Windows and Linux. I also really like any add-on that will help in managing tabs, whether this is for the colors of the tabs, or to put them on multiple lines. When reading the news, I have over 20 tabs, and there is no way that they can fit on a single line.

Answer 14

Here's a link of Firefox Tips. Most of these tips are performance improvements either while browsing or on start-up by editing your about:config.

Answer 15

FAYT - Find as you type, aka. type-ahead find. (Wikipedia-article)

Type something, and the browser starts searching for it on the page. Don't have to use the cursor to click text links. Tip: Use Tab and Shift+Tab to select next/previous links.

How-to:

• Firefox: Settings -> Advanced -> General -> "Search for text when I start typing"
• Opera: Press . (full stop), and start typing. If you press , (comma) you'll search for links only
• Chrome: (was requested, seemed to get a wontfix), use chrome-type-ahead
• Safari: fiwt
• Internet Explorer: n/a

Answer 16

Mouseover/hover to switch to tab

A little weird at first, but now I've gotten used to it: indispenisble. Also complies with Fitt's Law.

• Firefox: I use Tabfocus and set the wait time to 0ms. I've heard Tab Mix Plus can do this as well, but I don't need its other functions.
• Opera: n/a
• Chrome: n/a (but a number of people want it)
• Safari: n/a
• Internet Explorer: n/a