If you’re developing on a laptop with a smaller screen, you can use all the screen real estate that you can get. I have recently optimized my Firefox in order to maximize the amount of screen space available for web pages.

Hide the main menubar
As you can see above, I have hidden the “File, Edit, View, …” menu at the top, particularly because I rarely use my mouse to access the menu. I almost always use hotkeys (like CTRL-B to access my bookmarks) to access the menu. There is a Firefox extension, called Hide Menubar, that allows you to hide the menu unless it is in use. As you can see in the image below, you can enable or disable the main menu by right-clicking in the menu bar. Click here to download the Hide Menubar extension.

Use small icons for your theme
By right-clicking the main menu and clicking ‘Customize…’, you can reduce the size of your theme icons so that they are the same height as your URL textbox. Select the ‘Use Small Icons’ checkbox as shown below.

Total Space Saved
On my machine, by both hiding the menu bar and using small icons, I save about 30 pixels of screen space (about 4% of my total screen resolution). A 4% reduction in wasted space doesn’t seem like much, but it makes a significant visual difference while not diminishing the usability of Firefox.