How do I open a new Firefox window without toolbars, tabs, addins etc.? (shortcut rather than JavaScript)

Question

I'm currently awaiting the arrival of a new pc and in the meantime am having to work on a small laptop screen.

I need to have two browser windows open at the same time, tiled horizontally. Is there a shortcut to open a new window without all the usual fluff that you get?

Answer 1

When you say no JavaScript I assume you mean you're asking from a Firefox user perspective, not as a coder? If you're not opposed to JavaScript in principle you could always type this into your address bar:

javascript:window.open("http://www.google.com", "_blank", "resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,status=no,toolbar=no,menubar=no")

This will open a URL in a new window, without toolbars. You will have to uncheck Block popup windows in menu Tools → Options → Content for this to work though. Also, Firefox from version 3 forces the address and status bars to be shown on all windows. You can disable this in about:config (more information).

Answer 2

You can turn some of them off in the 'view' menu under 'toolbars'.

Answer 3

I have a partial solution. It requires Stylish and some knowledge of XUL styling and the browser inspector.

First, you make a new style for the web browser:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); @-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul") { ... { display: none; visibility: hidden; } }

Save it and disable it before editing again. Then, you use the browser inspector to identify each of the elements you want to hide (e.g. #urlbar). Add each ID or class to the selectors left of the style that hides them. The most aggressive method would be to identify the content frame and disable anything that isn't that frame or its descendants!

If you want to test it, try replacing the applied style to something like 'opacity: 0.2' before enabling. When you're ready, change the applied style back, and enable it.

You can still switch to the editor tab, or the addons page, if you haven't closed them, but otherwise you'll need to open the addons page with Ctrl+Shift+A and disable the style from there. It would be much easier to bind a key to toggle this specific style, but I haven't looked into it - I didn't use this approach to remove toolbars, so it was enough to have a Stylish extension toolbar button to toggle scripts there. You could always use an @import statement to load a stylesheet on your local computer in case your browser becomes truly unusable, or use a separate profile with this style as their userStyle.css, so you can edit externally.

For the options above, I recommend shrinking the toolbars until mouse over, so they're there in an emergency.

If this sounds too complicated, look into 'Hide Caption Titlebar Plus' (great but some bugs/side effects) and 'Tab Tweaks' (change fonts, width, height, etc.) to squeeze more real estate out of your browser. Some of the toolbars can be hidden by default and appear on mouse-over or toggled by key combinations. (You can map a single key combination to several from an external application.)

As for tiling, this is a separate issue; I use 'Tile Tabs', which is very easy to use and highly configurable.