Before
Here is our test browser with all of the usual toolbars displaying. Depending on your personal needs this could be taking up a lot of screen real-estate. Notice that the background wallpaper in the new tab completely fills the blank area…
Hide GUI Bars in Action
As soon as you have installed the extension and restarted Firefox things are going to look a LOT differently than before. Your “Extensions Management Window” should also be visible too.
Here is what the main window looks like right after the restart. Just for a moment you may be tempted to panic wondering how you will access anything…but relax. All that you need to do is use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl + Shift + A” to reactivate part of the GUI…
Just for comparison notice how much white space is visible beneath the background wallpaper in the new tab…that is quite a difference.
Once you use the “Ctrl + Shift + A” keyboard shortcut these parts of the GUI will be reactivated. No “Bookmarks Toolbar or Tab Bar” are visible at the moment…
Note: You can quickly make the “Bookmarks Toolbar” visible again in the “View Menu”.
In order for the “Tab Bar” to become visible you will need at least two tabs open…use of the “Ctrl + T” keyboard shortcut or the “File Menu” will do the trick nicely.
Options & Access
Now for the options…there are two “tab areas” for you to look through. In the first one you can deselect any of the GUI Bars that you would like to have visible full-time and change the keyboard shortcut if desired.
The second tab area focuses on just the “Status Bar”. Make any desired changes to best suit your personal needs.
If you happen to prefer menu access for using the extension then you will find an entry in the “Tools Menu” near the bottom.
Conclusion
If you have been needing a higher degree of control for the parts of the GUI that will be visible when using your netbook then this will definitely make a nice addition to your browser.
Links
Download the Hide GUI Bars extension (Mozilla Add-ons)
