Just a brief comparison between what Firefox looks like by default and its actual useful graphical elements (by useful I mean "useful to me", not to the rest of the world).
- The menu bar isn’t usually needed; it could be hidden and shown temporarily by means of a keypress.
- Forward and Back buttons are useful, but it’s much faster to just use a shortcut key. Hide them. Ditto Refresh.
- Stop and Home are so rarely used that they don’t deserve space. Hide them, use shortcut key if necessary.
- Even more so for the Go button—I don’t recall ever using it, since it’s so much easier to hit Enter (you have, after all, just been typing the address in anyway).
- The Search bar would be useful, but its functionality is duplicated by the Address bar, since if you type in something not recognised as a URL, Firefox passes it to Google.
- The Bookmark Bar is a waste of space; if I want bookmarks I’ll use the Bookmark menu.
That leaves us with the Status Bar and the Address Bar. Why not combine them to save space (the Status Bar is rarely used, even less so whilst the Address Bar is being used); click on the Status Bar to enter a URL, or use a keyboard shortcut.
If you’re a VI user, you may be interested in Vimperator; dirty Emacs users may likewise be interested in Conkeror. Both hide all the unecessary GUI crap and leave you with more space for actual content, and add sensible (Vimperator) or insane (Conkeror) keybindings. Then if you get a decent window manager, you don’t have to have any of the silly clicky crap there either.
(Photos hosted by Flickr.)
P.S.: No, it’s not fullscreen mode; it’s Vimperator, which both hides everything and adds keybindings for basically everything I’m likely to need, as well as a command-line interface similar to what you get in VI when you press :.