I am a big supporter of Firefox add-ons, not only because they make the browser look all nice and pretty, but it helps the overall experience when browsing the web.

I can show you how to get from this:

Standard Look

To this:

Simple and Clean!

You can obviously see that I’ve modeled it to Apple’s Safari Browser and since I need Firefox for my everyday use and all, I thought I’d duplicate it.

So let’s start by hiding the unecessary toolbars that’s eating up the nice real estate.  This can be done by disabling all Toolbars, (ie. Bookmarks, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google, Yahoo, etc.) as they take up majority of the space.  Disable the Status Bar at the bottom as well, unless you have add-ons that need the toolbar.  This can be all done by navigating to the View menu.

Next, you can start by downloading the following add-ons and I’ve included a short description of how each one works.

Fission
Embeds the progress bar into the Address Bar, a-la Safari style.

Stop-or-Reload Button
Merges the the Stop and Reload button into one useful button!

Hide Menubar
One of my favorites, it hides the Menubar! Press Alt to reveal it.

And one more tip…

Remember how Firefox 2’s address bar turns yellow when accessing an ‘https://’ site? If you haven’t noticed by now you’ll see that they removed that feature and put the tiny lock into the Status Bar instead.  Since I don’t use the Status Bar, why not return the ol’ yellow bar back?  I thought I’d link back to the this tip from Lifehacker.com. Click the link below for the directions.

http://lifehacker.com/396582/turn-firefox-3s-location-bar-yellow-at-https-urls

That’s pretty much it for cleaning up the browser.

In the next part, I’ll include the tools that I use to help me with productivity.

Happy Friday! PEACE!