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Last week I bought a Samsung NC10 netbook [Product page at Amazon.com] and of course one of the first things I did was to install a decent web browser. On a standard 1024×600 netbook screen, the default Windows XP and Firefox 3.0 setup leaves far too little screen real estate for the actual content. In this post I’ll describe the configuration I finally ended up with and some options for further tweaks you might want to use.

I was not a big fan of Firefox when Mozilla declared it its official browser and discontinued the old Mozilla suite (which then became the SeaMonkey community project). Up to the 2.x series, Firefox did not deliver on its promise to be a leaner and faster browser. Well, it was leaner in the features it supported (i.e. they ripped out everything I liked about the Mozilla suite), but that did not show in its memory consumption which was worse than SeaMonkey’s (and that is even without running Thunderbird in parallel, which you also need to fully replace SeaMonkey). Of course, that is all ancient history now since Firefox 3.0 was released. At last there was the faster and smaller browser for which I had waited, so I switched over from SeaMonkey when Firefox 3.0 was still in beta stage. I think the only extension I used initially was NoScript because that was also available for SeaMonkey and I had used it there. Now, only one year later, my main Firefox installation contains 31 extensions and I have tried and subsequently uninstalled numerous others. I am not using quite as many extensions on the netbook but there are some I wouldn’t want to miss.

This is what a maximized Firefox 3.0 window looks like in the default setup on my NC10:

I have already replaced the ugly Windows XP theme by Royale Remixed but the sizes should be the same. The title bar takes up 26 pixels, the Firefox toolbars need a whopping 111 pixels, plus another 22 for the status bar, and finally 30 pixels for the large taskbar. That leaves 411 pixels for the content, just over two thirds of the screen height.

Before we get to the Firefox extensions, let’s look at the Windows XP settings. Some 3rd-party themes for XP have a smaller taskbar or offer a choice between a regular-size and a compact one. If you find a theme that you like with this option, go for it. The taskbar is at the bottom of the screen, so when it comes to hitting it with the mouse pointer, it already has an infinite vertical size. There’s no need for it to take up so much screen real estate as well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a Royale theme with a compact taskbar and I didn’t want to compromise on the theme. No matter how tall the taskbar is, you can choose to keep it hidden, which is what I did. In order to do this, right-click on an empty area of the taskbar, select “Properties” and enable “Auto-hide the taskbar”. This keeps the taskbar hidden unless it has the keyboard focus or the mouse pointer is over it. Just move the pointer to the bottom border of the screen to show the taskbar.

The second important change you can make to Windows is to reduce the height of those enormous title bars (in modern XP themes; they are smaller in Windows Classic). Right click on the desktop, select “Properties”, then the “Appearance” tab and click on the “Advanced” button. Here you can change various sizes, colors and fonts. Select “Active Title Bar” and set the font to Arial 8 and the height to 18 to get the same settings that I used. Unless a window is maximized, a taller title bar is easier to hit with the mouse pointer, so you have to find a compromise between screen real estate and usability that works for you.

If you want to use Internet Explorer 8, you are almost finished. Just right-click on an empty area of its toolbar and deselect “Menu Bar” and “Favorites Bar” to get this:

Voilà, 490 rows for the content. That’s not bad but we can do better with Firefox 3.0 and some extensions. You can reduce the height of Firefox’s toolbars by combining the contents of several toolbars into one. There are two basic options: Keep the menubar and remove the navigation toolbar or keep the navigation toolbar and get rid of the menubar. You may need some different extensions and get slightly different results for each option. I decided to keep the menu bar. Right-click on an empty part of a toolbar or menu bar and select “Customize…”. Now drag all the buttons and other objects from the navigation bar that you want to keep to the menu bar. When you’re done, right-click on an empty toolbar area again and uncheck the navigation toolbar and bookmarks toolbar.

Now we’re left with only one toolbar (plus the tab bar) but the menu is taking up a lot of space on it. This can be remedied with the Personal Menu extension which allows you to hide the standard menus and gives you three buttons for a personal, bookmarks and history menu that you can drag to the toolbar. The personal menu is fully customizable. I put all the regular menus (except for bookmarks and history) on it, plus some additional buttons and the customization entries offered by Personal Menu.

We can save even more space by getting rid of the browser window’s title bar with the Hide Caption extension. It’s currently marked as experimental, so you need a mozilla.org account to download it but it’s well worth the effort. The minimize, maximize/restore and close buttons from the title bar are automatically moved to the menu bar and you can drag the window by the progress indicator to the left of them and by the status bar. And when the window is maximized (which it will usually be on a small screen) all buttons on the toolbar touch the top border of the screen (even the top-left border for the leftmost button), so they are much easier to hit with the mouse pointer (like the menu on a Mac). Now a maximized browser window looks like this:

That’s 522 rows for the content. If you want to read a longer text, it can be convenient to use full-screen mode instead, so you get the whole screen for the content. While Firefox 3 has a built-in full-screen mode, this doesn’t work very well if you’ve reconfigured the toolbars because there’s no way to select which toolbars should slide out from the top of the screen when needed. For this you need the Fullerscreen plugin which replaces the built-in fullscreen mode activated by pressing F11. Select only the menu bar in its preferences under “Fullscreen toolbars”.

Some more screen real estate can be saved by installing a more compact theme for Firefox but I have not yet found a pleasant one. I also tried the userChrome entries to reduce the height of the tab bar shown here but they interfere with the Fullerscreen extension.

I have added some more extensions which I like to have in any Firefox installation and some of which are especially useful on a netbook:

• NoScript turns off JavaScript, Flash and other active content by default and allows you to activate it only for specific websites. This is not only much safer but it also prevents scripts and Flash applets from consuming CPU time (and thus battery power) unnecessarily.
• I also use Adblock Plus for a similar purpose. I do not subscribe to any blocking lists but I use it to block specific Flash applets or other annoyances like animated GIF ads when I need to.
• No Squint enables you to perform both, text zoom (as in FF 2) and full page zoom (the default in FF 3), and it will remember zoom settings for individual sites.
• Image Zoom provides convenient zooming for individual images, especially useful on small or high-resolution screens.
• In order to get rid of Firefox’s annoying download window and replace it with a bar similar to the find bar which shows all your active downloads, install the Download Statusbar extension.
• I’ve been using FireGestures for a few weeks now on my desktop system and I find myself using more and more mouse gestures. I wouldn’t even miss the extra back and forward buttons on a five-button mouse because the functions are just as easy to perform with gestures. I am still undecided on how well it works with a touchpad but it’s worth a try.
• IE Tab allows you to switch to Internet Explorer’s rendering engine in a Firefox tab, in case you encounter a web site which only works with IE.
• Unsorted Bookmarks Folder Menu adds an entry to the bookmarks menu for your unsorted bookmarks which are otherwise only visible in the bookmarks sidebar and the bookmarks library window.

Finally, I installed the two-finger-scroll tool for the NC10’s touchpad (be sure to turn scrolling and pinching off in the Synaptics settings when you use it) to get two-finger vertical scrolling and three-finger tapping for the middle mouse button (for opening links in a new tab in Firefox).