Mozilla Labs' LessChrome HD Does Away with the Firefox Address Bar Area

Mozilla Labs' Prospector project, aka Mozilla developer Edward Lee, has been churning out experimental features and additions for quite some time now, challenging the way a browser should look and feel like. The latest experiment is a deceptively simple one, but one that's implemented in a very good way.

Dubbed LessChrome HD, the new extension auto-hides the address and search bar area, leaving only the tabs and creating more room for the content. That's it, really, it just hides the toolbar and brings it back when needed, but it makes a lot of sense in practice.

"The default browsing behavior now is to only show tabs at the top of the window, and pointing there will reveal the rest of the browser. Moving the mouse cursor back down makes it go away," Ed Lee writes.

"We learned from Home Dash that people are excited about having an on-demand interface that shows navigation controls only when browsing to a new page. But users also wanted to see their tabs at any time to quickly pick one, so that’s why everything except tabs are hidden for now," he explained.

When browsing, the information in the toolbar isn't something you couldn't do without. You don't need to see the navigational buttons or the search box all of the time.

The address bar is, arguably, more needed, since users may want to see where exactly they're at on a site, but it's still not crucial information.

When opening a new tab or switching over to an existing one, the toolbar is displayed, so you can see, for example, if you're on a secure website or to start a new search.

It's interesting that LessChrome HD comes exactly at a time when Google is experimenting with a compact navigation layout that is similar, in essence. Google took a different approach to it, but the goal is the same, to leave more room for the content.

While Mozilla is switching over to a new development schedule and rapid release cycle, it's nice to see that Mozilla Labs are still tinkering away at more advanced and experimental features which may or may not end up in Firefox, but which keep the creative juices flowing at the organization.