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Comment by alexis-d | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure we really need all those bars. I mean I use this http://i.imgur.com/0U1yW.png everyday and it's perfectly fine/usable (ok we may need to add an url/toolbar for most people, but at least it merge the tab bar and the title bar).

Edit: It also merges the file/tools/help bar in the left button.

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How do you get the Firefox icon instead of the word "Firefox" in the orange drop-down button?

There are probably several addons and themes to that end, here's one that seems reasonably popular:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/movable-firef...

It looks like it's Pentadactyl (an addon to use Fx with Vim-like key bindings) which provides this behaviour.

Firefox on Windows tends to be more space-efficient than Firefox on Linux or OSX. I don't know why Firefox doesn't draw tabs in the title bar area in Linux (Chrome does), but I heard that it might have to do with some opendesktop standards.

If you want any chance of a Linux app looking at all "native" to the user's currently selected theme, your best bet is to let the window manager draw the window frame, which includes the title bar and minimize/close buttons. Chrome specifically doesn't try to look native in its default state, but also gives the user the option to let the window manager draw the window frame, to fit in at the expense of using more space overall. This is a side effect of X11 and window manager APIs, as well as the proliferation of competing window managers and widget toolkits like Qt, Gtk, etc.

I have Firefox and Chrome on Fedora/KDE, and they actually take up exactly (well, within 5 pixels or so) the same amount of space on top.

Screenshot: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/browsers.png

Interesting. But Firefox still looks more cluttered.

I think the only reason it looks more cluttered is the google search bar, which I never use anyhow. If I get rid of it (I should have done that earlier) and move the buttons around, they start looking really similar[1]. (I also got rid of the home and bookmark buttons which I don't use either.)

[1]: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~tikhon/browsers1.png

On the other hand, Firefox looks more native--for example, it has the same reload button (but not the forward/backwards buttons, for some reason) as KDE programs.

Also, unlike Chrome, it is pretty trivial to turn off the url bar, saving even more space.

However, my real point is that getting a fairly minimal firefox/chrome (although not as minimal as the example alexis-d gives) on Linux is easy and can, in fact, be done even without any extensions. You could even use KDE's tabbed windows and eschew Firefox-specific tabs entirely, but turning the tabs off in Firefox may require an extension.

Of course, a meta-point is that tinkering around with my window manager is fun :)

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