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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

My personal biggest problem with FF is that it uses too much screen real estate compared to Chrome. For example, the tabs are really fat, and the address bar is much thicker, leaving less space for actual content.

Perhaps FF should include a "look-like-chromium" option to win over users (since chromium is open-source, I guess they will not run into copyright issues there).

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Personally - and this isn't for everyone - I use vimperator, which allows me to just hide the url bar and do everything from the keyboard. I end up feeling the opposite; that the viewport is small whenever I have to test in Chrome.

This... :set gui=none

you can use this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/thintabs/ or even better tab bar on the left with this https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center.

Personally, I can't do without Tree Style Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I prefer FireGestures. I can right click and scroll anywhere on a page to switch tabs. I then organize these tabs via Tab Groups (Ctrl+Shift+E, I believe removed in FF42 or FF44 but has an add-on to restore its functionality).

The gesture, I believe, is under 'Advanced Gestures' and is called `[Popup] List All Tabs`. Honestly I wish this was a standalone add-on because it is bloody amazing and I don't really use anything else from FireGestures.

It gives me a context menu with all of my tabs. No need to move my mouse to some "tab area". Although it appears this functionality is broken in modern versions of FF, as it only lists the active tab instead of all tabs. :(

I mean, there's plenty of add-ons to make Firefox's UI slimmer. Including a setting won't do much else than that.

I also switched from Chrome to Firefox about a year ago and the fat tabs are the only thing that I don't like. The removal of `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` is very annoying (now you need to create a new CSS file in your profile directory, but there is hardly any documentation for that). Also, 15px of the total tab width are taken by ellipses when the tab title is truncated.

There are add-ons which claim to fix that, but they always change other stuff as well. I just want to get rid of the ellipses and make the tabs take up at most 50-60px. The current 100px-wide tabs have roughly 8px of horizontal padding, 16px favicon, another 8px of whitespace, 40px title, 15px ellipses, and then even more whitespace on the right.

Ellipsis will take up less space from Firefox 53 onwards: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/12/20/these-weeks-in-f...

As for the CSS-file, you have to create a folder called "chrome" in your profile folder and then in that folder create a file "userChrome.css".

In that file, you have to have the following line at the top of everything else: "@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...");"

From that point onwards, I'd just search on userstyles.org. In the advanced search, select "App" from the first dropdown, then it'll show you pretty much only Firefox-styles.

If you found something that suites your taste, you can click the "Show CSS"-link and copy-paste that into userChrome.css. Just make sure that you don't have the @namespace-line twice.

This for example sets the minimal tab-width rather low: https://userstyles.org/styles/53019/firefox-5-minimal-browse...

You can also find userstyles that for example hide the close-button until you hover over the tab or merge the close-button with the favicon.

That's good news, I've missed that.

Does userChrome.css work with e10s? I remember that there were some issues with that in the past.

The difference is 5px [1] on my system (osx, 1080p), it also does look a lot like Chrome.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/h4acDaK.png

On Linux the difference is 10px (FF versus Chromium), [1].

[1] http://imgur.com/a/TX7Qm

You could try the developer edition, the default theme is more compact, even smaller than chrome on osx. (you can choose a dark and light theme in the developer tools)

http://i.imgur.com/jsvfSvU.png

There is an addon that does just that[0]. That being said, it unfortunately breaks from time to time, and it's not e10 compatible.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fxchrome/

The only thing that makes Firefox take up more than Chrome for me is the Web Developer toolbar. Aside from that, I use the bookmark bar on both, and they are exactly the same height.

* Disclaimer: I use Cinnamon Desktop on Ubuntu with the Numix theme. Other themes/Window Managers might be different.

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