Organizing the icons in your Firefox status bar...

Posted by Dan on Jan 7, 2009 @ 10:03 AM

One thing that's always bothered me about Firefox, is the lack of the ability to customize the icons in the status bar. As you add various plug-ins, the order of icons in the status bar can change and isn't always ideal. Plus, when you have multiple installs of Firefox on multiple boxes, I find it disrupts my workflow when icons are in a different spot for each browser (even with the exact same plug-ins installed.) So, I decided I finally wanted to re-arrange the order of my icons and get things working in a fashion that suited me better.

There are two main ways to change the order: 1) via a manual editing or 2) via another add-on.

You can manually re-arrange the order of the icons by editing the extensions.ini file located in your personal profile directory in the folder C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\{profile}. What you need to do is change the order and position of the entries in the [ExtensionDirs] section of the INI file. While this works, it's a bit of a pain since the entries aren't easy to decipher (since values don't match up to a user friendly label.)

This led me to a find an add-on to simplify the task. The add-on I found was the Organize Status Bar v0.6.2 add-on. Using this plug-in gives you a very visual way of organizing your status bar. You can completely order things in any manor you want. Here's a screenshot of the add-on in action:

image

What I like about the add-on is that it highlights in yellow the currently selected icon and also has options to hide or show an icon if you don't want it to show up in the status bar. This add-on does exactly what I needed—I just wish the functionality was native to Firefox like the organizing toolbar feature.

Categories: Technology

7 Comments

  • Thanks for the heads up Dan. I've been have that trouble too. I think I'll go with the first option.
  • Waaaooooh.....Very useful addon,i love this..:)
  • Cheers! This is a really handy addon.
  • I tried to manually organize the icons by editing the extensions.ini file but somehow Firefox is either overwriting the changes or the entries just disappear and show up as disabled in the browser’s addon list. Is there any other place this has to be done? Has this changed in Firefox 4? Is it different on Mac?
  • @Stephan:

    FF4 drastically changed the status bar--they actually removed it and replaced it with the "Add-on bar" so it wouldn't surprise me that this plug-in no longer works.
  • Thanks for your reply, Dan. I don’t want to install an add-on anyway, I’m willing to dig around in the file system. It’s just that changing the extensions.ini doesn’t seem to do it. Is there any other place where the position of the icons might be stored? I’ve also tried to search through the SQLite files but without success so far.
  • @Stephan:

    I really have no idea--I haven't played around w/FF4's preferences.

    I'd head over to Mozilla forums and see if you can get an answer, or maybe even contact the author of Organize Status Bar to see if he's got a FF4 update coming. Honestly, Organize Status Bar was way easier to use than manually editing the preferences.

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