Although I've switched to Chrome for most of my web browsing, I sometimes still need to fire up Firefox. One of my frustrations with that is that that even when I maximize (i don't use full screen because of some annoyances) Firefox it still wastes a lot of screen real estate on my netbook screen.
I finally figured out a pretty nice way to reduce the screen waste in 3 steps.
- Install the Compact Menu 2 extension, which will get rid of the menu bar and places a single icon for all of the menus on the far left side where the location bar is.
- Install a smaller theme. I went with ACE Foxdie, which has a bunch of customization options.
- Lastly get rid of the window decorations when you maximize by adjusting the Compiz settings. For this you will need to install compizconfig-settings-manager package and run /usr/bin/ccsm. When the window comes up find the Effects section and click on Window Decoration. The second line from the bottom will have a text box for Decoration Windows. Simply put the
!state=maxvertinto that box and all windows which are vertically maximized will not have the window managers title bar.
That sure made Firefox much less screen hungry for me on a netbook.