Why can't I make Firefox look the way I want it to look?

June 11, 2007 11:11 AM

In Firefox 1.5.0.12, I want my Bookmarks Toolbar in a very specific place in my window, displayed in a very specific way. Is there a way to move the toolbar to the lower right corner, have the favicons stack up in columns, and have it share/truncate the space of my tab column?

I used an extension called "Tab Mix Plus" to move my tabs to a column that runs vertically in a 150px wide area down the width of my screen. Lots of grey area below the tabs, was hoping I could stack 30 or 40 favicons in (say) rows of three across in the grey area below the tabs.

I'm not interested in alternate solutions (e.g., put them in folders, have them share space on the menu bar / make better use of ctrl+b). If I can't do this, I'll stick with what I'm doing now, but I'd upgrade Firefox to 2.0 if I had to in order to implement the solution.

Is this redesign possible? I spent hours on Sunday searching for a solution. Am I out of luck?

posted by peacecorn to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Not a solution, but you should upgrade to firefox 2.0 anyway, for the security patches and other features that come with it. IIRC Tabmix works with the new firefox.
posted by chrisamiller at 11:30 AM on June 11, 2007

Okay - I just upgraded to 2.0.
posted by peacecorn at 11:44 AM on June 11, 2007

I wanted something similar -- a bookmarks hud, actually -- but programming Firefox's interface turned out to be horrible, horrible, horrible, so I gave up.
posted by bonaldi at 1:02 PM on June 11, 2007

You don't have to do any programming, I don't think. Check userstyles.org App styles section for examples of moving parts of the interface around with css. They probably don't have exactly what you're looking for, but there are certainly examples that you might be able to tweak to your needs. Install the stylish extension to make use of the styles.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 1:49 PM on June 11, 2007

This is most definitely not exactly what you are looking for, but by studying it, you might get to where you're looking to get: Widefox.
posted by WCityMike at 2:54 PM on June 11, 2007

If you use the All-in-One Sidebar extension you can add tool bar items to the tab bar. It may break with a vertical tab bar, but it's certainly worth a try.

(To enable toolbar in the tab bar, open the AIOS options dialog from the extensions window. In the lower left, there is a Settings button, from that select "Advanced Mode". Then pick the "General" button at the top left and the "Special II" tab. Check box should be checked.

After you have enabled that, you can edit your tool bars as normal and drag and drop things in to the tab bar.)

Do let me know how it goes, I haven't tested this with a vertical tab bar.
posted by anaelith at 9:37 AM on June 12, 2007

No dice - gave that a try and it didn't work. Couldn't get anything to drop into the Tab Mix vertical bar, and the Bookmarks Toolbar icons can't be dropped into a vertical bar, because they still display horizontally. Thanks for the suggestion though.
posted by peacecorn at 3:32 PM on June 12, 2007