I’ve been blogging a bit lately about how we have this unneeded fascination with the size of our technology devices. I’ve argued that for my personal preference having the smallest version of something doesn’t really matter to me, in my daily work, portable is more helpful than completely mobile.
I’m going to contradict myself a bit now with that argument. When it comes to screen real-estate, I want an effective use of space. This argument may be less of a rant on size though and more of a rant on flexibility and personal preference.
This was recently made clear to me as I was trying to customize the display and organization of my toolbars in Mozilla Firefox.
If we take a look at the graphic above, there’s an illustration of what I’m talking about here. Layered towards the back of the graphic is how my collection of toolbars currently display in Mozilla Firefox 3.5.1. Taking up quite a bit of screen space.
My preference, after manually editing how I’d like things to be organized in a graphics program, is the way the color graphic is displayed. It’s a little hard to tell perhaps, but my Firefox related toolbars are stacked horizontally at the top, with the bookmarks bar below, then followed by my Google Toolbar and StumbleUpon toolbar’s stacked horizontally at the bottom. Three lines of toolbars instead of the previous five lines of toolbars.
From what I can tell, in Firefox, toolbars are locked and cannot be stacked horizontally to save space. Am I missing something that will allow me to do that?