Optimise Firefox for the Asus Eee PC

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Asus may have upped the screen resolution on the Eee PC 900, but 1024 x 600 can still be a little cramped for web browsing – and the 800 x 480 display on the Eee PC 701 is even worse.

If your Firefox installation shows more toolbar than web page, or you find you have to scroll through pages much more than you’d like, here are a few tricks that'll make small-screen browsing much more comfortable.

Step 1
The easiest way to get Firefox to make the most of a low resolution screen is to press [F11] to enter full-screen mode. This hides all of the browser’s screen furniture except the address bar, leaving the web page to fill the screen. This is great if you’re looking at one particular page, but it’s useless for day-to-day browsing, since there's no way to access the browser menus or bookmarks.

Step 2
A much better option is to browse with Firefox in standard mode, but with its window de-cluttered as much as possible. The first thing to do is hide the status bar – the strip that runs along the bottom of the window. Open the View menu and deselect the Status Bar option – you won’t miss it once it’s gone.

Step 3
Firefox’s menu bar takes up as much screen space as the status bar, hiding it isn’t really an option. A better option is to move its contents into a single button that can be tucked away on the Navigation toolbar. You can do this using the Personal Menu extension.

Step 4
Once you’ve installed Personal Menu and restarted Firefox, click OK on the dialog box that appears to add the Personal Menu button to the toolbar.

Step 5
The Customize Toolbar dialog box will appear – all you need to do here is tick the box for Use Small Icons to shrink the Navigation toolbar a little, though this is optional. The Personal Menu button appears at the right of the Navigation bar. With the Customize Toolbar dialog box open, you can drag the button to any position – we prefer the extreme left of the toolbar. Click Done to close the dialog box when you’re finished.

Step 6
To hide the Firefox menu bar, right-click it and deselect the Menus Toolbar option. A tip on how to bring the bar back with a keyboard shortcut will appear – click OK once you’ve read this.

Step 7
The Personal Menu button doesn’t do much at the moment – click it and choose Edit This Menu.

Step 8
We’re going to add all of the standard Firefox menus to the Personal Menu button, so select <File> in the left pane of the dialog box that appears, then click the + button to add it to the menu button. Repeat this for <Edit>, <View>, <Tools> and <Help>. Alternatively, just select the menus or menu options you want.

You can’t add <History> or <Bookmarks>, but you can open Firefox’s browser history with the [Ctrl] + [H] keyboard shortcut, and we’ll be using another trick for bookmarks a little later.

Step 9
There are many more useful options in Personal Menu, so it’s worth digging around to see what else it can do. We’re finished with it for now though, so click OK to close the dialog box. Click the Personal Menu button now and you’ll be able to access Firefox’s menus – the toolbar itself is hidden.

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