Feature request: Ability to remove tab bar and disable address bar search

Firefox Development
#1

Hoping this is the place to post this.

I am seamonkey user primarily, I prefer the old internet suite format.
Has a much more friendly Win2K, XP, or win classic feel where things have edges, shadows, and other visual cues of area and function, instead of the current trend toward looking like a box of sun faded spilt melted crayons.
It would be nice to have that simplicity in Firefox, unlikely I know, but I am hoping.

Sadly, some sites require bleeding edge cruff in order to work, and SM is only up to FF60 backend, and FF63 seems to be hte minumum now…

So I grabbed FF92, which is less cluttered than it has been for a long time.
Managed to recreate most of what I want, would like the rest, still have to kill context menu new tabs like I do in SM though.

Since I do not use tabs, I would like to remove them in order to reclaim the space lost to them, this is easy to do in seamonkey.
I prefer to use one window per website, it is easier for me to keep track of.

I would also like to remove | disable search from the address bar, preferably the entire built in search engine functionality.
Lacking the ability to remove that however, how do I turn it off so random pasting issues or mystypes do not become searches.
I prefer to visit the search site I am using, it is easier for me.

While I am at it, I would also like stand alone file download windows like seamonkey has available, I find the unified one in FF awkward.

Not wanting to whine, just hoping some what I want is out there, but I couldn’t find it.

#2

In Firefox, this would require using custom style rules in a userChrome.css file.

For the address bar, toggle keyword.enabled to false in about:config to prevent anything entered thee from being sent to search – unless you intentionally trigger search using a search engine keyword.

What if you open a new window and navigate it to about:downloads – is that what you had in mind?

#3

@jscher2000
Thank you for your reply.

If you know of coherent directions with an explanation on creating | modifying userchrome.css, I would appreciate knowing.

Nice to know on the address bar, and done now.

The about:downloads gives the same summary available on the browser bar.
What I am after is an independent task bar window for each file in the process of being downloaded.
The summary is fine for later, but even the symbol on the browser bar showing green doesn’t tell me what is still downloading, only that something still is.
The location on the task bar informs me without having to check in detail.
When I see the symbol go away, the file is downloaded.

If it matters, I am running classic shell with classic theme, all grouping turned off, with some other mods to recreate as much of the Win2k style desktop as possible.

Firefox has been following chrome down the appliance rabbit hole where everything is tablet, and that is what I want away from while still being able to browse the web.
Two dozens windows is easy for me to keep track of, but two dozen tabs is nigh unto impossible.

I suppose what I really want to the browser portion of the old netscape | mozilla suite back since it just works, and still be able to browse the web.
Win9x era programs did a massively better job of plain usability.

#4

I have a website dedicated to the topic (https://www.userchrome.org/), but haven’t kept up in what rules to use to hide the tab bar. If I recall correctly, something still needs to occupy that top area, such as the menu bar (on Windows) or the title bar. Maybe:

Maybe possibly an add-on could do that, but there are so many download-related add-ons, I lost patience searching through them…