I love my EeePC netbook, it’s my only laptop and I even do some XUL stuff with it, using Vim and a separate compact keyboard. However, the small screen can be frustrating with some apps… like Firefox.

Using Vimperator or the full-screen mode does already save a lot of space, but I’ve done a quick hack to save space on the tabbar too:

Small Tabs on Firefox3

I got used to it and now I even use it on my 23” desktop screen: the favicons are usually enough to recognize the pages — and if not, there’s still the tooltip and/or ctrl+tab on Firefox 3.1. The idea comes from the Ubuntu Netbook Remix desktop interface.

All you need is six lines of text:

  • three preferences (either in your %profile%/user.js file or with about:config):
pref("browser.tabs.tabMinWidth", 36);
pref("browser.tabs.tabMaxWidth", 52);
pref("browser.tabs.closeButtons", 0);
  • three style rules in your userChrome.css file:
.tabbrowser-tabs tab                  .tab-text { display: none; }
.tabbrowser-tabs tab[selected="true"] .tab-text { display: block; }
.tabbrowser-tabs tab[selected="true"]           { min-width: 250px; }

Restart Firefox 3, you’re done.

Update: if you’re really lazy, I’ve packed this as an extension.