Wednesday, March 7, 2007

Shiny Colourful Buttons

Here's a trick I've seen mentioned in other geeky blogs that deserves to be more well-known and widespread: only have page icons (favicons) on the Firefox bookmarks toolbar. Simply delete the names in bookmark properties. Or try the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension. Note separators can be inserted to help organize the icons.

Not only is it stylish, but it frees up precious toolbar real estate for more bookmarks. Also I find myself drawn to the pretty little pictures. I visit those enticing links more often nowadays.

One might worry about forgetting which icon does what, but presumably the links on one's toolbar are frequently used, making this unlikely. Anyway, to find out where they go, just click on them! (i.e. the standard action following the thought: "I wonder what this button does...")

The sole drawback is that some webpages don't have icons, or have one that looks identical to another, or looks horrible. To solve this, use the Favicon Picker 2 extension to assign a good icon to that bookmark.

A related idea is to hide text on certain tabs, which can be achieved using the FaviconizeTab extension.

By the way, googling for "favicon picker" finds many of the aforementioned blog posts [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], some containing great screenshots. Not everyone is enthralled by the idea however, and some even want the opposite.

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