Ultra-minimalist "one line" Firefox
I mainly use my keyboard to navigate around in Firefox so decided to edit UserChrome.css to create a custom, ultra-minimalist "one line" UI for myself and also maximize my screen real-estate by removing the window Titlebar and Tab Bar (using Tree Tabs sidebar extension instead). I also dislike how cluttered the Firefox interface is with unneeded options scattered everywhere, and how much redundancy there is with many options showing up in multiple places for no good reason, so I removed most of that as well. Here is the results:
Main UI (Navigation and "Hamburger" toolbar buttons removed)
Tree Tabs sidebar & More Tools both open
"Find in page" moved to the top, with Menu bar also toggled on
New Tab Page (my Bookmark Toolbar auto-unhides itself only on this page)
My Home Page, set to the FF Library "popout" page (chrome://browser/content/places/places.xul)
Context Menus (with lots of redundant and unused options removed):
Address bar dropdown
Page context menu
Image context menu
Link context menu
If anyone is interested in trying it out themselves, here is the UserChrome.css (which needs to go in the /chrome directory of your Firefox profile).
And if enough people are interested in learning Firefox UserChrome.css customization using the Browser Toolbox with remote debugging, I can always write up a tutorial at some point. There are some decent resources already available over at userchrome.org and reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ too.
Are you using a vim-like addon? If not, you should probably try one, it makes using the keyboard for interface/browsing even easier. I've been using Tridactyl: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tridactyl-vim/
That looks really interesting and far more convenient than the standard shortcuts I have been using, so I will have to check it out. Thanks for the recommendation.
p.s. I also have i3wm installed on Arch now thanks to your recommendation as well. I am still really bad at it and there is still a lot I need to learn about the config files, but I can definitely see myself using it more and more as I get better at it. It really is so much faster than using a mouse and i3 is actually what prompted me to do this to my FF.
I've been using i3 for a while, and this thing you made looks really promising! Besides the fastness of screen shortcuts i've got reaaaally little screen real-estate to work with (thinkpad x250, so 12.5 inches). Thanks for sharing this!
I don't have that problem (there is a 37" TV off to my left as a 5th monitor too). :P But I still hate wasting space!
And no problem, let me know how the UserChrome.css works out for you and if you need any help with it.
Thank you! your links were very helpful, and it looks super good! I just casually skimmed parts of the userChrome.css, and you made some comments about possible future improvements, is there some way (rss?) to keep updated about new releases? I'm not very familiar with gitlab
Awesome! I'm glad it worked for you. I honestly didn't expect anyone else to be interested in my customization as anything more than a novelty.
I don't really plan on updating it too much more at the moment, other than some minor tweaks to the Tree Tabs context menu.... although now that I am playing around with Tridactyl (which Deimos suggested), I will probably have to change some stuff just to get my bookmark toolbar working again with its new tab page since it overrides the FF one. But even still, if you're interested in keeping up to date with any further development and have a gitlab account you can "Star" (favorite) the ultra-minimalist-firefox project and then in your Dashboard under Activity - Starred projects you can create and subscribe to a custom RSS feed there, e.g. for "push events" only. There is also an email notifications system in gitlab as well, which you can set up using the Bell icon on the project page and customize in your account settings - notifications.
And knowing other people are actually interested and watching the project for changes, I will make sure to branch my repo and work in there, instead of making millions of tiny commits/pushes directly to the master so I don't spam you with notifications for all my minor tweaks and typo fixes. ;)
I'm using i3 and vimium on firefox, and one tip I can give is to switch i3 to hjkl instead of jkl;. Its just too many keybindings to accustom yourself to, so I just make them all the same.
There's only 3 places to need to change it in the config (most likely ~/.config/i3/config):
Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't messed around with the configs yet too much, other than for adjusting window positions but I will definitely look in to changing the keybinds because the sheer amount of them to learn is rather overwhelming.
Talk about ultra-minimal! Nice rice mate - my one question is why no dark theme?
During the daytime I tend to use light themes and only switch to dark themes at night. It's really simple to switch to a dark theme using Firefox Themes and the new Test Pilot Color system though... e.g. Here it is in FF dark theme with Bauke's Dracula theme for Tildes.:
https://i.imgur.com/RGsnxcg.png
Tree Tabs also has a theme picker/switcher as well so you can easily swap to dark mode in the sidebar as well:
https://i.imgur.com/aqxwHzN.png
That theme is great. Why isn't it available as an official theme? It's far better than the current pitch-black Dark theme.
The current theme system is really limited and only supports changing background/text colors, with all the other colors staying the same across all the themes.
Bauke is looking into changing it to be more comprehensive, and then he should be able to port his Dracula theme (as well as others) to official ones: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/193
Thanks, that's good to know. I didn't mean to imply "why the hell don't we have every feature I want yet." I thought the fact that we had themes already meant anything else was easy. I should have made that clear.
Probably because AFAIK Deimos hasn't decided if he is going to accept user theme contributions yet. But if/when he does, then I suspect Bauke will port it (and his other ones) over. Until then you can just use Tildes Extended or Stylus to use those alternate themes on the site.
All of those look really nice, but I can't get any of them to work in Tildes Extended. I tried both methods explained in the wiki, but Tildes doesn't change even on a Ctrl+F5 refresh and browser re-start. Any idea why? I'm at a loss here. Are you supposed to see a new theme listed in Tildes settings? Or does it just override that? Sorry to seem clueless; I did follow the instructions clearly and repeated many times.Edit: Never mind all that. I installed it with Stylus. Thank you for the helpful links.
Firefox? Yeah, it's a known bug with the way it handles the Content Security Policy set by Tildes. You either have to use Stylus with FF or disable the CSP in FF about:config (which I wouldn't recommend).
Yes, Firefox. I figured Tildes Extended would know browser type and warn of things like that, but I get the "Success" message anyway. Not a big deal when Stylus works so well, and now I can have multiple themes installed and use whichever one I want depending on time of day. Thanks again.
No problem.
And I'm pretty sure Tildes Extended was pretty hastily thrown together by Crius and Bauke just to add some of the more glaring feature omissions to the site while it was still closed source. That particular issue is a Firefox specific bug with the way it handles Style changes with the CSP, and totally not their fault either, nor is there much they can do to deal with it other than have people disable CSP in about:config or wait for the FF team to fix it (which I wouldn't hold my breath on since the bug report is over 2 years old now with no progress). Plus, now that Tildes is open-source they both appear to be focusing on learning the dev environment here so they can contribute new features to the main site directly, rather than continuing to focus on developing their browser extension... so I can forgive them for not working out all the kinks with it yet. ;)
This is art
I wasn't aware of the Firefox Color test pilot, so thanks for that - instantly useful.