Recently Google Chrome has been pretty popular with web folks and Google fans. It's fast and has only a little "chrome" or window trimmings which makes the overall screen bigger when viewing webpages. However it lacks a lot of features that are present in Firefox that I pretty much can't do without so today I set about making Firefox have all the small interface improvements that make Chrome so nice. Fortunately you can do this with existing plugins.

The first thing I did was try to reduce Firefox's "chrome" by tightening up the menus. I right clicked on the menu's in the top and hit "Customize" which lets me customize the menu bars. I put the navigation buttons (back, forward, stop, etc.), bookmark buttons, home, toolbar bookmarks, navigation bar and search bar all in the same toolbar. I hid all other toolbars. I hid the status bar by selecting the checkbox under View->Show statusbar.

I then realized that I almost never use the menubar (File, Edit etc.) and I could hide this. Unfortunately you can't get rid of the menubar in the default Firefox. This is where the Hide Menubar Addon comes in. This plugin is very simple as it simply allows you to hide he menu bar like any other toolbar. You can show it again temporarily by hitting alt. Very useful.

Hide Menubar

Next I went about adding a start page. I came across this blog post which suggested using the New Tab Jumpstart which is the most like Google Chrome's start page but the one I settled with was the Fast Dial which is more like Opera's speed dial.

Fast Dial

Chrome has dynamic context menus that change based on what yau have selected, what you are clicking on etc. This functionality was implemented in the FFChrome addon.

FFChrome

Chrome's omnibox is pretty cool. You can get similar functionality but not quite a good from the Omnibox Firefox addon. Firefox's omnibox ties into the registered search engines in firefox and requires that you type an @youtube or the like for search engines other than the default.

Omnibox

You can hide window trimmings to maximize window space a bit more by using the Hide Titlebar addon. This didn't work well for me in Linux however so I don't use it there.

For those that want to really make it look like chrome you can install the Chrome theme which is actually pretty darn good and beats the bulky, tall, tabs in the default theme.

Chromifox

When you put that all together it looks something like this:

Now I have a much more usable and productive browser and still have access to all the nice Firefox plugins that I use regularly Firebug and Delicious bookmarks.