IrresistibleMT

I love almost everything about Google’s Chrome browser: the start-up speed, the clean and simple interface, the general snappiness of the browsing experience, the extensions, and the fact that when a website crashes a tab it doesn’t bring the whole browser down with it. Prior to making the changes listed below, whenever I used Mozilla Firefox after a Chrome browsing session it felt clunky, bloated and old.

Despite my general preference for the Chrome feature set and user interface, what I really hate about Chrome is its lack of a built-in master password mechanism for hiding and protecting all of my most sensitive site credentials. A quick visit to “Options > Personal Stuff > Show saved passwords” and you will see all the typical passwords I use at my favorite sites. Not good, Google. Not good at all.

To remedy this fundamental Google security oversight, I use the LastPass extension. However, my Firefox experience tells me that relying on extensions to provide required core functionality can result in significant frustration when you update your browser. Inevitably, your most important extensions will no longer work with the updated browser just as you are facing a big deadline.

Granted, I am using a bunch of Firefox extensions to mimic Chrome, but these are just for cosmetic changes. If any of them go at my next browser update, it’s not the end of my browsing world.

So, until Chrome has a master password, I will use these Firefox extensions to customized it to adopt the best features of the Chrome user interface:

1. Search for and install the “Chromifox Basic” theme for Firefox from the Mozilla Add-On site
   
   2. Search for and install the “Omnibar” extension
   
   3. Search for and install the “Tiny Menu” extension
   
   4. Search for and install the “Toolbar Buttons” extension
   
   5. Restart Firefox
   
   6. Right click on your Firefox menu bar and click “customize”. Move the newly minimized menu to the far right, add toolbar buttons for “Toggle the Bookmark Toolbar” | “Open Add-ons Manager” | “Print this page” and move the new “omnibar” to the right of the forward/back/reload buttons
   
   7. Optionally, remove the excessive location bar icons (the RSS and bookmark star) by creating a “userChrome.css” file (located here in my Windows 7 install: C:/Users/Mitch/AppData/Roaming/Mozilla/FirefoxProfiles/vggf8vt5.default/chrome) and adding the following lines:
   

/* Remove the Bookmark star from the location bar */

#star-button { display: none !important; }

/* Remove the feed button from the location bar */

#feed-button { display: none !important; }

8. Restart Firefox again and voilà! Many of the UI benefits of Chrome, packaged with the more secure and feature-rich (i.e. master password containing) Firefox

Happy (and safe) browsing!

Source by Mitch Fournier