Techie Buzz. Know Your Technology Head On.

Firefox is a great browser, the ability to extend and customize the browser is one of the many features I love. Firefox allows you to extend your browser using different extensions. If you have a lot of extensions installed then you will be aware that many of them have their own toolbars. Toolbars let you quickly navigate the extension features and are a great addition to the extension.

Even though the extension may be useful to you, you may still not want to use all the features it provides. If you display the toolbars for all the extensions installed it will eat up on your precious screen space making the viewing area smaller. Having many toolbars can easily confuse you too.

If you disable viewing these toolbars you lose out on a way to easily access the features. If you still want to use the features provided by the extension then there are two easy ways you can do that through;

1. Remember all the keyboard shortcuts.
2. Create your own customized toolbar.

If you decide to remember all the keyboard shortcuts it’s well and good, but not all toolbars have keyboard shortcuts so it will not be easy to do it this way.

Firefox has a nice little feature which allows you to create your own toolbars using simple drag and drop. Creating your own customized toolbar allows you to choose which options you want to see for various extensions and create your own personalized toolbar. To save space and clutter you can then disable the rest of the toolbars and used the customized toolbar you created.

To give you more insight here is the famous before and after comparison.

Before customizing the toolbar

After customizing the toolbar

Here is a step by step guide on how you can add a customized toolbar to your Firefox browser.

To start with the guide you will need to first click on a empty space in the menu area and select the customize option.

Once you have selected the option a new window will open up. In the customization window click on the Add New Toolbar button.

Clicking on the button will add a empty toolbar to Firefox. You will not see any icons or buttons on it as yet. See the screen shot below which shows where the new toolbar has been added.

Once the toolbar has been added, you have the option to add in different buttons to it. These buttons can be seen in the button viewer of the customization window and most extensions buttons are available here.

To add a button to the toolbar you will have to drag and drop the required buttons to the newly created toolbar. If you want to remove the button simply reverse the process, just drag the button from the toolbar and drop it in the customization window.

You can add as many buttons as you like. You can also divide the buttons into groups by adding dividers. Once you have finished adding all the buttons and dividers you will have a new toolbar ready.

You can further customize the toolbar by choosing different options available. You can choose different views like icons and text, icons only, text only with a additional option to choose smaller icons. You can also select if you want to see this toolbar in full screen mode along with specifying which area in Firefox it should appear.

To see these additional options, right click on the created toolbar and navigate to the toolbar properties.

That’s all you need to do to create a customized toolbar which will save you space and the clutter. If you want to create your own toolbar you know how to now so go ahead and add your own toolbars.

Do you use many toolbars with Firefox? If yes will you choose to customize your toolbar to free up screen space? Do let me know through your valuable comments. You can as always ask me your doubts using the contact form and I will always try to help wherever I can.