Netbooks

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Revision as of 00:25, 18 February 2010 by Dmcritchie (talk | contribs) (Revisions after using userChrome.css instead of extension)
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Netbooks have a small screen size. Following are some tips to help with a smaller viewing area, and a little less mouse usage.

Full screen

Because of the small screen size, simply reducing the size and number of the toolbars and size of icons will not be sufficient.

Firefox uses "F11" to place the page into Full Screen mode hiding the title bar, all of the toolbars and the status bar . In Firefox 3.6 you can use "Shift+F11" leaving a window the same size with the title bar, but hiding the toolbars and the status bar. You can move the mouse through the top or bottom to see the toolbars or status bar.

The Auto Hide extension allows you to choose which toolbars will be displayed or hidden when in full screen mode, and if the status bar will be displayed, hidden, or displayed when busy.

A toolbar you might want to display all the time is the tabs bar. An alternative without using an extension such as "Auto Hide" is to use userChrome.css described later.

Since Auto Hide is not at addons there will be a yellow bar at top of webpage you will have to reply to "Allow" when you install it. [1] [2]

Scrolling

Change the vertical scrolling to scroll up or down a full screen at a time with a change to your about:config entries. Change the value to 1 for mousewheel.withnokey.action

You also have available the Space Bar, Page Up, Page Dn keys to scroll a page at a time. You can use the shift key with the Space Bar to scroll up a page at a time. Smaller scrolling can be done with the arrow keys, or using/modifying other mousewheel configuration settings.

The Home key will take you to the top of the page, and the End key will take you to the bottom of the page.

If scrolling with the keyboard is not working then make sure that you have not enabled caret browsing mode with the F7 toggle [3]. If you are typing numbers instead of some of the above then switch off NumLock key (should have an indicator light).

Placing the cursor above or below the scroller thumb will move up or down one page. Placing the cursor at a position on the scrollbar and holding the left mouse button will move the scroller thumb and the view to the indicated position.

You can test your scrolling by watching the line numbers on the right side of this test web page.

Keyboard Shortcuts and Keyword Shortcuts

With the toolbars hidden two very useful Keyboard Shortcuts are "Ctrl+L" to place you into the Location Bar, and "Ctrl+K" to get you into the Search Bar.

Bookmarking with Ctrl+D may save dragging items clear across the screen, or clicking on the bookmark star.

Use of the Tab key (and :Shift+Tab") to move mouse to a link or entry point such as within a Form may save some mouse activity.

The use of Keyword Shortcuts can be a big time saver by working from the location bar to do searching, and to invoke bookmarks and bookmarklets.

Font-size

To make temporary changes to the font-size for a domain during your session use Ctrl++ to increase size, Ctrl+- to decrease size, or Ctrl+0 to restore normal size. The use of the "Mouse Zoom" and "Image Zoom" extensions are also useful when using an external mouse.

To make permanent changes to your default font-size which will have no effect on pages where the web author chooses fonts and font-size for you is at Tools → Options → Content → (Fonts and Colors). You might also check Accessibility features of Firefox or of your operating system for additional changes.

Small icons

Use small icons on toolbars: View -> Toolbars -> Customize, then at the bottom choose small icons.

Styling

While full screen mode is probably your most useful method of viewing web pages on a netbook there are additional changes that you can make. Some styling suggestions: Eliminate the folder and file icons to fit more folders and bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar. Reduce the minimum width of the tabs to fit more tabs on the tabs bar. Reduce the height of toolbars and the spacing between toolbar buttons.

Adventurous users

Some Netbooks may be short of resources or intended for limited usage. You can make styling changes directly into userChrome.css and possibly avoid the need for some extensions such as "Auto Hide", "Stylish" and "Stylish Custom", but you would not be able to turn features on and off through an extension's options and would have to restart Firefox to test changes or to turn them on or off.

The following code can be can be implemented directly in userChrome.css to Always show the tabs bar even in Full Screen Mode (F11).

@namespace url(http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul);
/* Always show the tabs bar -- see http://userstyles.org/styles/25341 */
@-moz-document url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xul) {
#content > tabbox .tabbrowser-strip{visibility: visible !important; } }

See also