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I am a nut for screen real-estate. I have my monitor settings set so high you almost need a magnifying glass to surf. Couple this with my wide-screen display and there is a ton of room. I absolutely love it. But, there are still some things I would like to do to make my browser more effective and usable. Enter Lifehacker. This is a great, great site, and they have some of the coolest hacks I have ever seen for firefox. Perhaps I have just been living in a bubble, but even with that said, I always knew I could hack Firefox, but having to learn how the chrome works, etc, etc, really prevented be from digging in. Well, lets just call it for what it is, LAZY!

What is really cool is that there are ways of getting rid of some of the little buttons and such that you never never use. Rather than re-printing the entire hack here, just click on the ‘Lifehacker’ logo above and follow the directions. Being that I am riding Linux, you will need to know a bit about how Linux arranges its file structure, which is the reason for my post now. One of the first questions you might ask is ‘Where is the Chrome?’, this was a bit weird for me at first also. Lifehacker kinda shows you where it is, but they do assume a small portion of knowledge about Linux on your part. In the article LH tells you how to edit the chrome with this;

Linux
~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/chrome/

Now, for some of our Linux gurus this may seem easy enough, but for the non-Linux person this might seem a bit cryptic. The ‘~/’ portion above is assuming you are in your home folder. Linux is a true multi-user operating system, and when it is installed it makes a home folder for you. Nice thing is that you can make users all with their own home folders without sharing those settings wit one another. Here let me explain, say you have one computer you share with your kids, by adding users say, you and your son Joe, you will have a home folder and Joe will have a home folder. This way when you log into the system and open your Firefox you will see the Firefox you tweaked, when Joe logs in, he will see the same old firefox he has always seen. Lets take a look.

Ok, now that we know where to find stuff, lets look for the chrome.

Now that we have located that silly Chrome file (be sure to use userChrome-example.css not the Content one.) We can start editing this thing. It is actually much easier than you think. In fact you can simply copy and paste the code from LH, however I would recommend to look around in here and see how stuff is put together.

Final Step: You will need to save the userChrome-example.css as something different. Here is what you should probably save it as, once you are done editing. userChrome.css You should be golden after that.

Finally, in addition to hacking your new Firefox interface there are some really nice hacks at LH for firefox that were published the day after Firefox 2 came out, and they are still really good hacks.