Chromeless browser 2

My second day in a chromeless browser taught me i visually depend on more UI elements that i was aware of.

For instance the throbber. Because there is no statusbar or a locationbar that shows the page loading progress the throbber becomes a crucial element. Lucky for me vimperator gives a messaget when a background tab is opened. This gave me the idea to have a two tone throbber. The darker colour throbber would appear when the current tab loads and the lighter colour throbber would appear when a background tab is loading.

The throbber should be clickable. In the current tab it should stop the page loading. With background tabs it should do the same if only one background tab is loading and open a list of loading background tabs if there are more. There has to be an option to exclude often refreshing pages like passpack.com with one click on.

Another UI element is the download progress of files. I'm using the download statusbar add-on for a long while now and i find i come to depend on it. The add-on has an option to keep downloading in the download manager after the browser is closed but you can't see when a download is finished during the browser session.

The thing i miss the most is the tab overview the tabsbar gives me. So i installed the ctrl-tab add-on which gives an overview of the tabs using the shortcut ctrl-shift-A.

As a power user i want to have access to the url. I could make a ubiquity command for this but i don't know how to put the fetched url in the commandline.

Chromeless browser

After seeing the video of Aza and Alex about designing a chromeless browser I was wondering how to get my browser chromeless to feel what it's like.

The first thing i did was hiding the statusbar. Next on the list is the tabsbar, as i already was using the tree style tab add-on i only needed to set the autohide options.
Then i needed to remove all toolbars, for that i installed the vimperator add-on.

I'm planning to use the Ubiquity add-on as my main chrome replacement. It's more user-friendly than the vimperator commands and it can be extended very easy.

For instance i want the awesombar functionality and i found the go 3.0 command, now i have the awsomebar and a screenshot preview as a bonus.

The first thing i noticed changing to the chromeless browser is how much i return to the tabsbar to select the tabs. Using the tab command to search for the tab with a certain name is useful when you have an overview of the tabs.

This will be an experiment as long as i can stand it so this could turn into a series.