Hide Navigation Bar 1.0

09/04/2008 03:18 PM - Permalink

So after spending some time surfing the Internets, google-ing for the perfect way to hide the Mozilla Firefox navigation bar, I finally broke down and made my own extension.  I had at one point found a userscript for Stylish/Greasemonkey, but they had a serious focus flaw.  What I mean is, they used CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to do their hiding and displaying of the navigation bar, which to be honest is fairly resource light and probably the mose sensibly easy way of accomplishing an auto-hide functionality for the toolbar.  There was just one trouble:  you had to stay hovering to see it.

This means very simply that when you want to type something in the address (awesome for Firefox 2) field, you have to remain hoving the field.  Well what do you mean?  In expected functionality, you would be able to go hover the navigation bar (to display it) with your mouse and click in the address field.  Then, regardless of where you hover with the mouse, it should keep showing b/c a child object (the address bar) of the navigation bar has focus (the cursor is blinking in it waiting for user input).  In the above methods -- it didn't.  CSS can't check for focus... only hover.... so if the mouse moved away, you could continue to type the location you want -- and even be able to use allthe awesomeness of the awesome bar.... but you couldn't see what you're typing, because the navigation bar went away.

So I got rather sick of that, turned the script off and made my own Firefox Extension to get the job done.  Based off of some code from the maker of Hide Menu Bar, enter Hide Navigation Bar 1.0.

I ultimately want a full-fleged auto-hide, and I won't be satisfied until I get one.  I know how to do it code wise, it's just a matter of getting it done.  But this version doesn't at the moment have auto-hide capabilities.  In saying that, I have programmed a listener key which will allow you to toggle the navigation bar.  By default, the key is F2, but you can easily change it by going to the extension options. 

Currently, Hide Navigation Bar is in the experimental state of the Mozilla addon's site, which means I need user reviews in order to nominate it for the public side of the world.  If you don't mind, head on over to the Mozilla addon's site, register for an account, and write a review of the extension -- you know, after you've tried it out for a few moments.  Please also feel free to post any bugs you encounter in the comments section of this post, or any other post about Hide Navigation Bar.

Click here to go to the Mozilla Addon's Page for Hide Navigation Bar

A note for the brave users or users of legacy Firefox versions:  in my initial release, I only programmed compatibility for Firefox 3.0 and 3.0.*.  If you can get it to work on Firefox 1 or 2, let me know, and I'll lift my restrictions.