June 23, 2021, – 100 days to offload countdown #86

While perusing mastodon for other #100DaysToOffload content, I read zstix post and subsequently the article about tab-usage in the generell populace compared to his own rather sparse tab usage. For the record, I tend to have 9 or less tabs open. I tend to switch between them with Meta+<NR>, and Meta+9 switches to the last tab, not the nineth.

In is article he linkes to the vertical tabs reloaded extension to firefox, that puts the tab list in the sidebar, accessible with a configurable shortcut. I changed the shortcut from Ctrl+Shift+V to Alt+F1 for easier typing on cramped notebook keyboards. That works great.

Now the tabbar is redundant, but there is no direct way not to display it. One has to jump through a few hoops to hide it. The first step is to put a bit of css in the userChrome.css file of the used profile.

  #tabbrowser-tabs { visibility: collapse !important; }

It is probably necessary to first create the chrome directory.

To reduce the startup time needed, firefox does no longer check for the existence of this css file, as most people won’t use it. To enable it’s usage, visit about:config and toggle the value of toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true. Restart firefox and enjoy the additional vertical space.