Do you think the new Firefox is ugly and busy? I find the tabs and bookmark icons too colorful and distracting along with the bookmark star and Google search icon. Today we'll remove all that so our eyes can focus on what it's supposed to. The content!
The first thing we need to do is add a Safari-like theme. I'll assume your're familair with adding Firefox themes so we won't get into that. We'll use the new CrApple them found here: CrApple
Here it is after adding our new theme. You'll see the news Apple-like buttons have been added and the favicon images have been removed from the tabs and bookmarks:
Next thing we need to do is get rid of the ugly upside tabs. From the pull-down menu, click on "Toolbars" and uncheck "Tabs on Top."
You browser window should now look like this:
We're not done yet. Next thing we need to do is remove the bookmark star in the URL section. I don't think it needs to be there since we can just bookmark our pages from the pull-down menu. On your hard drive, locate a file named userChrome.css in the following directory user / Library / Application Support / Firefox / Profiles / default / chrome /. Open userChrome.css in your favorite text editor or HTML editor and add the following line to the bottom: "#star-button { display: none !important; }". Save. You'll need to quit and restart Firefox to see the change.
Now just a couple more behavioral items to fix. As a web developer, I don't like how the new Firefox hides "http." If I'm coping and pasting URLs, I need to know if it's being copied with it. To add this back, type "about:config" in the URL and hit return. You'll be presented with large list of options to turn off and on.
We are looking for "browser.urlbar.trimURLs" & "browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled." Find each one and double click on them to turn the value to "false."
BAM! It's back!
One last thing. I want to punch myself in the face every time I click in the URL field and Firefox highlights the entire URL. As a web developer I find myself manually typing directories to the URL that's currently displayed. To stop firefox from automatically selecting the entire URL when clicking on it, go back to the "about:config" page and double click on "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll" to change the value to "false."
That's it! Now Firefox will look and act like a well behaved browser.
