453026 - Want to disable icons/buttons in Location and Search fields

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Toralf Lund]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1

I'd really like to have some way to disable the extra icons that appear in the Location field, the buttons for "Bookmark this page", "Subscribe to this page" and so on. These eat up valuable space that might otherwise be used for displaying the actual URL content, and having these getting in the way all the time when I don't need them is a too high price to pay for the convenience of getting slightly quicker access to the functionality when I do need it. After all, most of the time while browsing you will NOT be bookmarking the page you're at.

Similarly, I don't want the "Search" icon inside the search field, as I'm quite happy hitting "Enter" in order to activate the search functionality - and would prefer seeing some extra letters of the search string to having a "convenient" button in the field.

So, a option to hide these icons would be nice - although the functionality might really be removed completely for all I care.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Toralf Lund]

I think I have to add that this problem is made worse by the new "rounded" look of the fields, as this in practice means more unused space at each end. All in all, I think there would have been room for 8 more letters in a square location field with one internal icon less, which I see as a not entirely negligible loss of space. Remember that Real Estate Is Expensive!

Comment 2

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

What you ask (like other interface modifications) is already available using userChrome.css

For example (for star, go, rss icons in the location bar)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=685365

Comment 3

[Toralf Lund]

Fair enough.

I was thinking more in lines of a proper user interface for the control of this functionality, though. 

Also, it seems to me that issues like this ought to be registered in Bugzilla, and not just discussed on the discussion boards.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

userChrome.css or third-party theme is the way to go.

Comment 5

[Toralf Lund]

Hmmm... It seems to me that there has been a reasonable amount of negative reaction to the layout changes between Firefox 2 and 3. Surely this should mean the defaults ought to be reconsidered? The fact that you may use third-party themes to change the setup doesn't really help; the application ought to be as usable as possible for most people out-of-the box.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

If you think the RSS icon, Star, etc. shouldn't be there by default (rather than customizable, as requested in this bug), please file individual bugs on that.

Comment 7

[Toralf Lund]

Maybe I will. I have found that it's more of the general toolbar layout on the MacOS version I'm having problems with, though, so I've already filed a separate report on this - bug 453324. I mean, on the Linux version, these icons don't seem to get in the way to the same degree as there is more room to begin with, thanks to a tighter packing of other items.

Actually, I was a bit too quick when I submitted my last note here, as I thought it was the above mentioned bug that had been updated...