I’ve always looked for a fairly minimal browsing experience, so I couldn’t find any browser with a minimal interface that doesn’t sacrifice performance or extensibility. The best I could find was qtbrowser, which is fine in terms of performance, but lacks extensibility. I don’t use many browser extensions: an adblocker and a tracker blocker, a password manager, vim-like key bindings and a dark mode. I also have the “Return Youtube Dislikes” extension, but I don’t really need it.

So I asked myself if I could give any of the mainstream browsers (Firefox and Chromium-based) a fairly minimal user interface, and I can finally say that I have succeded.

Toolbar

Let’s be honest: most of the stuff that’s in the toolbar is useless.

Cleaning the toolbar up is really simple and rather intuitive: right-click on the toolbar and select Customize Toolbar.... From there drag everything you don’t want out of the toolbar: simple as that.

Config

Go to about:config and accept the warning.

Look for the preference and set its value like in the following table:

Note: the last three options are not necessary: toolkit.tabbox.switchByScrolling enables scrolling though tabs with the mouse wheel, browser.tabs.tabmanager.enabled hides the “List all tabs” arrow button. and browser.uidensity sets the size of the tabs (0 is default, 1 is the minimum).

The first one, though, is necessary to complete the following step.

Custom CSS

Go to about:support and find a Profile folder row near the top, it will show the location of your profile folder: navigate to that folder with your terminal or file manager. Make a folder named chrome containing the file userChrome.css:

cd <firefox profile folder>
mkdir chrome
cd chrome

I personally use a CSS config that hides the tabs unless I hover them with the cursor. To use it:

wget -cO - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/master/chrome/autohide_tabstoolbar.css > userChrome.css

If you want to use any other CSS config from this archive just create an empty file named userChrome.css and paste the content of the desired config.

Done! Restart Firefox and enjoy the experience.

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