Customizing Mozilla Firefox

Toolbars

This will tell you how to rearrange, hide, add, and remove toolbars in Firefox. For those who are unfamiliar with the terminology, a toolbar is the (usually gray) box above the area that the web site is displayed.

• Menu Bar: This is the toolbar that contains the browser menus (File, Edit, Help, etc.).

• Navigation Bar: This is the toolbar that contains the Location Bar and the buttons used to navigate web sites.

• Bookmarks Toolbar: This is the toolbar that contains your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder bookmarks.

There are two basic methods of customizing the toolbars in Firefox:

* Rearranging Toolbar Items

* Hiding, Adding, and Removing Toolbars

Rearranging Toolbar Items

To rearrange the items (icons, buttons, text boxes, etc.) on your toolbar, right-click on any part of the toolbar that is not a text box and select Customize.... This will bring up the toolbar customization dialog.

Drag and drop any items you want to and from the toolbars (excluding the menu items). You can also rearrange icons already on the toolbars by dragging and dropping them wherever you wish. When the toolbars and items are arranged the way you want them, click Done.

Special Toolbar Items

There are a few special items that are available to you when customizing the toolbar. They are as follows:

• Separators: These allow you to separate items on the toolbars with a small vertical line.

• Spacers: These allow you to separate items on the toolbars with a fixed-size space, usually around 20 pixels on most themes.

• Flexible spacers: Spacers allow you to separate items on the toolbars with a space. These spacers automatically resize to fill all of the empty space on the toolbar. These are good for positioning items on the right of a toolbar.

Hiding, Adding, and Removing Toolbars

You can hide the Navigation Toolbar and the Bookmarks Toolbar if you do not wish to keep them on your screen. You cannot hide the Menu Bar because you cannot move the menu items (File, Edit, Help, etc.) to a different toolbar, and they must stay on the screen at all times.

To show or hide a toolbar, select View > Toolbars and click the name of the toolbar you want to show or hide.

To add a custom toolbar, select View > Toolbars > Customize. Click on Add New Toolbar (in the bottom of the dialog). This will give you a dialog to enter a name. If you enter a name and click OK, your new toolbar appears. Now you can drag and drop items to it. To remove a custom toolbar, drag and drop all the items from it, and click Done. You can also hide a custom toolbar as described in the previous paragraph.