Talkings of a Tyrant

Today’s extension is: Compact Menu - Firebird style.

In the true nature of open source, this extension is really built off of another extension, which is called just “Compact Menu.” Basically, the author of this took the original code, updated it for Firefox 1.5, and changed the logo as a tribute to Firebird.

Compact Menu takes all of the stuff on the navigation bar (such as “File” “Edit” “Go” etc.) and condenses it into one nice button. You click the button, and a drop-down menu appears with all of those this in it. Useful!

If you don’t already know, “Firebird” is the previous name for “Firefox.” If you want more information about why the names changed (it was “Phoenix” before it was “Firebird”, by the way) check out Wikipedia’s article about Firefox.

The new logo is the Firebird logo. However, it is bulky for me. That’s because I’m a minimalist (which is why this extension is a favorite) and I condensed Firefox’s navigation system to the menubar at the top. Technically you can resize it using the tips given at the extension’s download page, but that uses Firefox’s resizing engine (which sucks). It looks horrible if you do that.

Here’s an alternative.

Right click and save the image at the right to your profile_directory/chrome as “scaled_image1.0.png” (or something else, but why not make it simple on yourself?). In that folder there should be a “userContent-example.css” and a “userChrome-example.css” Ignore those files.

Create (or open) your userChrome.css file. Copy and paste the following text in:

/* Shrink icon in Compact Menu - Firebird - Tyrantmizar */
#menu-button .toolbar button-icon {
height: 22px !important;
width: 22px !important;
list-style-image: url(scaled_image1.0.png) !important;}

Restart Firefox, and the image should fit comfortably on your navigation bar.

This extension is awesome. I would highly recommend this to anyone who has tried to get rid or (or shorten) Firefox’s menubar. I would also recommend it to people who are minimalist viewers, and like it when they can view far more of the web page than the default settings.

• Conpact Menu - Firebird
• Get Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a free and fast browser that is different that is different from most current browsers. Most browsers (and software in general) simply give you one big program with several dozen features, only half of which you’ll use. Also, with all of the features, the software is bloated and slow. Firefox is different.

Firefox itself is a very small install and is relatively feature-free. Instead of having a few hundred different features, Firefox decides to instead let the users choose what features they want. It does this by way of extensions.

Extensions are very small (a few hundred Kbytes, at most) little programs that install to Firefox to add functionality. The new functionality could do several things. It might create passwords, block ads or speed up Firefox. It might add a toolbar with a bunch of useful features for web developers. It might even tell you whether Abe Vigoda is alive or dead.

If you are still using Internet Explorer (I’m looking at the ten percent of you who are) then switch to Firefox right now.

You won’t regret it.