Neat Firefox Bookmark Trick
December 31st, 2005I am probably way behind the times or something… but I thought I would share this little Firefox bookmark trick in case someone else had not figured it out yet.
Very simple: In your bookmark toolbar, remove all the text associated with a particular bookmark, and use the favicon instead. This will make it feel like another custom toolbar button, except for a bookmark of your choice. Something like this (thanks MetaChat):
-
Right click on the bookmark in the toolbar
Select “properties”
Where it says “name”, delete that text
Save changes
I always use the home button for the bookmark I use the most… so this trick is like giving me unlimited home buttons! It also wastes very little bookmark toolbar real estate.
December 31st, 2005 at 12:22 am
Nice tip, Alex! Just in case you guys are wondering what window manager that is, it’s Ion — see http://modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~tuomov/ion/
December 31st, 2005 at 1:57 am
Great!
December 31st, 2005 at 2:03 am
You’re only allowed to delete the bookmark’s text afterwards, see:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304740
December 31st, 2005 at 4:08 am
Actually, it would be even better if you didn’t have to kill the text at all and still be able to not show it, so that
- the text is still in the bookmarks file, with all advantages it can have
- the text could be shown when you hover the icon. as for titles on images in a web page.
December 31st, 2005 at 4:12 am
Does not work in Mac OS X Firefox 1.5.
December 31st, 2005 at 6:06 am
Speaking of real estate, everybody forgets this one….
user_pref(“browser.throbber.url”, “http://bingo.com”);
December 31st, 2005 at 7:32 am
Hmm, i want this. But i use only text on all toolbars now. But those anyone now how to enable text only for the bookmarks toolbar? And using icons besides that. And is there a way to drag the favicon between the search bars??
December 31st, 2005 at 8:53 am
I didn’t realise you could remove all the text. Thanks for helping me to tidy up my toolbar!
December 31st, 2005 at 11:15 am
That’s an extremely terrible idea that I’ve seen several times. Why not just add a bit of CSS to userChrome.css to hide the text?
.bookmark-item > .toolbarbutton-text {
display: none !important;
}
This way you don’t have to go through each bookmark removing the name. Plus, when you hover over the icon, you get a tooltip with the name of the bookmark instead of just a URL.
Hasn’t CSS taught us anything? Don’t change the content just to change the presentation.
December 31st, 2005 at 11:49 am
HeroreV, Cool idea… any ideas how to make it work for only particular bookmarks?
December 31st, 2005 at 4:23 pm
“any ideas how to make it work for only particular bookmarks?”
Of course, though it’s a bit messy.
Each toolbar bookmark item has an attribute named “statustext” that has a value of the URL of that bookmark. So, for example, to not hide the text of a bookmark for “http://alex.polvi.net/”, you could overide the other rule by adding this one:
.bookmark-item[statustext="http://alex.polvi.net/"] > .toolbarbutton-text {
display: -moz-box !important;
}
You can also use the label attribute. To display the label for a bookmark named “mozillaZine”, you could use:
.bookmark-item[label="mozillaZine"] > .toolbarbutton-text {
display: -moz-box !important;
}
Alternatively, instead of overiding the original rule with other rules, you could use the :not() psuedo class on the original rule:
.bookmark-item:not([statustext="http://alex.polvi.net/"]):not([label="mozillaZine"]) > .toolbarbutton-text {
display: none !important;
}
December 31st, 2005 at 6:49 pm
Or.. you could just delete the text. :)
Might have a hard time explaining that solution to my mom.
December 31st, 2005 at 8:00 pm
eh, maybe a bit to sleepy since it is 5 in the morning here. But to clarify; i want to hide the bookmarks toolbar folder icons and keep the rest of the icons. How do i do that?? Any suggestions?
December 31st, 2005 at 9:59 pm
I figured that one out on my own. I just descovered the use of tabs, and use Tabx, and del.cio.us extensions. Firefox is great. Also just discovered Netvibe
January 1st, 2006 at 7:06 am
This “trick” is seemingly for six-year olds, not neat. userchrome.css is for this.
“i want to hide the bookmarks toolbar folder icons and keep the rest of the icons”
This one hides only the folder icons:
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item[container] > .toolbarbutton-icon {
display: none !important;
}
This one hides only the individual bookmarks text:
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item:not([container]) > .toolbarbutton-text {
display: none !important;
}
January 1st, 2006 at 10:59 am
Sebhelyesfarku, userChrome is cool and all, but keep in mind that some people do not know css… or what userChrome is… or that it even exists for that matter.
However, most people know how to right click and select “properties”.
January 1st, 2006 at 1:58 pm
The userChrome hack isn’t cool at all due to some sites’ lack of an own icon.
January 1st, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Sebhelyesfark thanks a lot for your help…….was a bit below power this morning..everything is like i want it to be now, thanks….a million,
regards,
Peaks
January 3rd, 2006 at 7:15 am
Something I really wish Firefox would do is allow a user-specified icon to replace the site-icon-text form now. I loved that about Galeon. You can see the way I had it set up here: http://galeon.sourceforge.net/graphics/shots/fonts.png One bar was all icons, and the second bar was actually my entire bookmarks folder because my wife liked it that way. But the icons being user-setable made them far more intuitive for me.
January 4th, 2006 at 11:11 am
I know HTML. Does that mean I code my web site by hand? No – I wrote my own CMS instead, to make my life easier in the long run.
I know CSS. Does that mean I want to customise Firefox in this way when there is a simpler way that doesn’t get lost when I export my bookmarks to a file? Hardly…
Sebhelyesfarku – don’t belittle those of us who choose to take the easy route with this. How people organise their bookmarks is up to them.
January 22nd, 2006 at 5:47 pm
I am totally hook on digg.com! I know this is not exactly connected to the bookmark trick, but it is in your screen shot. Anyway, just wanted to thank you for such a cool site!
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:56 pm
OF course, this discussion is now obsolete with this plug in:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4072