Optimise Firefox for the Asus Eee PC

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.

Step 10
You can access your bookmarks with the [Ctrl] + [B] keyboard shortcut – it brings up a separate pane in the browser window. There is a better way of working with bookmarks in Firefox though, via the Bookmarks Toolbar.

The Bookmarks toolbar runs beneath the Navigation toolbar – it just contains a couple of bookmarks by default. With the bookmarks pane open ([Ctrl] + [B]), click the + sign next to Bookmarks Toolbar Folder and you can drag the bookmarks you use regularly into it.

Step 11
With a little organisational effort, you can use the Bookmarks toolbar for all your bookmarks, with folders and subfolders to keep everything tidy. Here’s a screenshot of my bookmarks toolbar.

Step 12
You’ll notice that my Bookmarks toolbar has names for folders, but only shows easily recognised favicons for individual bookmarks. This is done with another extension – Smart Bookmarks Bar.

Step 13
Install the extension and restart Firefox, then go to Tools > Addons (via the Personal Menu button, remember) to configure it. Find the extension in the list, select it and click Options.

Step 14
The screenshot shows my preferred settings – I hide bookmark names completely and rely on their favicons to identify them (more on this later), but keep folder names visible. I also enable the Auto-hide bookmarks bar option so that it’s hidden until I need it. Click OK and restart Firefox when you’re done to see the changes.

Step 15
If you can’t see the favicon for a site, open from the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder and Firefox should pick it up. If you have lots of bookmarks in a folder on the toolbar, select the Open All in Tabs option and wait patiently while Firefox opens each page and assigns the favicons.

Step 16
That’s all there is to optimising Firefox to make the most of the low resolution screen of the Asus Eee PC 900 or 701 – or any other laptop, for that matter – but here’s on final tip (did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments). Eee PC 701 users with limited disk space would do well to adjust Firefox’s cache size. Go to Tools > Options > Advanced and click the Network tab. Firefox uses a 50Mb cache by default, but you can drop this to something like 10Mb if you’re running short of disk space.

Firefox 3 

These steps were all carried out using Firefox 2, but both Personal Menu and Smart Bookmarks bar will work with Firefox 3 ( Firefox 3 RC1, at the time of writing).

Personal Menu only supports Firefox 2 so far, but if you open the download page in Internet Explorer, you can download the personal_menu-3.0.9-fx.xpi file to the Desktop (this won’t work in Firefox 3 – it detects the incompatible extension and won't download it).

You’ll then need to install the Nightly Tester Tools extension for Firefox 3 – this adds an Override all compatibility button to the Extensions dialog box that will fix most compatibility issues. Just drag the downloaded personal_menu-3.0.9-fx.xpi file onto the Extensions window, then you can install the extension.