A while back I posted a couple of my favorite Firefox extensions. While everything I said there is certainly still valid, I’ve got some updates for the list.

Today we’re going to focus primarily on look and feel. I’m a browser minimalist, so I like to keep my windows clean and light. Here are a few extensions that help with that:

If you take a look at my Firefox toolbar, you’ll see that it’s pretty simple.

The first button won’t be familiar to anyone, because it’s homemade. That is a button I made for an extension called tiny menu. tiny menu replaces the menu bar at the top of the window with a single menu button… Each of the original menus is nested inside. The developer even used an icon that I made for the default button :)

The next item of interest is my stop/refresh button. There’s a Firefox extension for that, but I use a great little chunk of CSS that combines the stop and refresh buttons instead… Either way you choose to do it, it’s a huge win on the visual simplicity front. Do you ever actually need to see both at the same time? I submit that you do not. If the page is loading, hit stop. If it’s done, hit refresh. It’s amazing that it has taken most browsers so long to figure that out. You know you want to try it :)

Which brings up the next extension. Editing userChrome can be a pain. ChromEdit Plus makes it easy… Nothing more to say here.

The only stock menu that I missed was the bookmarks menu. The new location just wasn’t as handy as it should have been. So I set out to make a bookmark menu button to match my minimalist toolbar… But it turns out that someone beat me to it. Bookmarks Menu Button provides more options for customizing your bookmarks and history than you can shake a stick at.

Finally, I have a tweaked version of the Del.icio.us extension. I combined the functionality the two default Del.icio.us buttons, so that a left click now tags a page, and a middle click opens my Del.icio.us bookmarks.