Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ comes out in just seven days. As it ships (at least, as the beta ships), it comes with Firefox 3.5 – which, for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (the ‘UNR’ version), isn’t quite optimised for a small screen, such as on my Acer Aspire One. Here’s how I make the screen space rather bigger.

1. Right-click the three preset bookmarks on the Bookmark Toolbar and delete them. (Firefox checks your Live Bookmarks, which two of these presets are, every hour for updates. That’s additional bandwidth use you probably don’t want, particularly if you’re on a metered connection.)
2. Under the ‘View’ menu, select ‘Toolbars’, and deselect ‘bookmarks’.
3. Install Tiny Menu. This replaces your menu bar with just one entry. We’ll configure it better in a tick.
4. Also, install autoHideStatusbar. This is an ‘experimental’ add-on, but has worked well for me.
5. You might also want to uninstall the ‘webfav’ add-on, while you’re here: there’s a good reason why coming in just a minute.
6. Restart Firefox.
7. Oooh, look, the menu bar has been replaced with something saying ‘Menu’. Click ‘Menu’, ‘View’, ‘Toolbars’ then ‘Customise’.
8. Click ‘use small icons’ in the customise window that appears. Keep the customise window open, but pull it to one side: then drag the buttons on the main navigation toolbar up to be next to ‘Menu’ in the menu bar, as in the screenshot. Do this one by one, starting on the left.
9. Now – if you didn’t uninstall ‘webfav’ in point 5, you’ll still have a silly heart logo here. The problem is that this is made badly, and will make your menu bar taller than it needs to be. I also, frankly, found it pointless. We can hide it by leaving it in the Navigation Toolbar for now.
10. Finally, click ‘done’ in the customise window, followed by ‘Menu’ ‘View’ ‘Toolbars’ and deselect the ‘Navigation Toolbar’.
11. (later) Oh, and there’s one more thing to change… ‘Menu’ ‘Edit’ ‘Preferences’… go to the ‘tabs’ pane… and uncheck ‘Always show the tab bar’. If you’ve only one tab open, it’ll not even bother with the tab bar.

You’ll note that you have a much larger screen to play with as a result (up to six or seven extra lines of text); that everything works as expected, and that you still have a completely unhobbled version of Firefox to play with.

As a matter of interest: everything works on Ubuntu 9.10 on the Acer Aspire One straight from installation; even the little wifi light comes on. Oooh.

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