Saturday Geekpost--Fun with Firefox

If you're using Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, or Safari for your Internet browser, then you've probably been using tabbed browsing for some time. IE users recently received this functionality from the new search toolbar; IE-7 will have it built in, as the other browsers have had for years. Tabbed browsing is one of those things, like a microwave, that you don't know you need until you've had one for a while. It allows you to simply middle-click links in a story you're reading (on Instapundit, say) without having to leave the page, thereby causing the other pages to load in the background without being lost. You can then tab back and forth to get infomation at one site while typing a post on another. Like I'm doing right now.

One little thing that has always annoyed me about the behavior of tabs in Firefox is the way they come in at the top and push the page down. Now that little annoyance can be fixed. Life just gets better every day. You can reconfigure Firefox to display the tabs at the bottom, or on the right or left sides if you are so inclined. I've pushed them to the bottom where they won't bother anybody.

Here's how it works. You find your "default" directory, which on my system is under ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/, where "*" is some code name (7q6hp3gj on my system), and inside there you find the file userChrome-example.css. Copy this to "userChrome.css" in the same directory, then insert the line
#content > tabbox { -moz-box-direction: reverse; }
into this file. Similar directions for putting it on the right and left can be found here. There are more tweaks available for the intrepid.

If you want to be a geek you must feel the urge to tweak.