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How to hide the address/URL bar again ?

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Hello all,

I run a bunch of web applets locally on my computer for personal use only (http://localhost/...), and until recently I could successfully launch FF using window.open(...) with the new window NOT showing the address bar (because it takes space and looks ugly within the applet, so I want to avoid it at all cost).

I believe this changed with FF 76 (I now run v. 76.0.1 64-bit on a Windows10 based computer), anyway at this point it seems impossible to NOT have the address bar show up in a FF window. :-/

To be clear : I have searched for a solution in this forum and elsewhere, found the solution to another new problem with FF ("megabar"), also seen the trick to hide the url in the address bar - but this is not what I'm looking for : I just want to *get rid of the address bar*, period.

Thanxx in advance for any help with this issue (surprised noone else seems to complain about this). :)

Hello all, I run a bunch of web applets locally on my computer for personal use only (http://localhost/...), and until recently I could successfully launch FF using window.open(...) with the new window NOT showing the address bar (because it takes space and looks ugly within the applet, so I want to avoid it at all cost). I believe this changed with FF 76 (I now run v. 76.0.1 64-bit on a Windows10 based computer), anyway at this point it seems impossible to NOT have the address bar show up in a FF window. :-/ To be clear : I have searched for a solution in this forum and elsewhere, found the solution to another new problem with FF ("megabar"), also seen the trick to hide the url in the address bar - but this is not what I'm looking for : I just want to *get rid of the address bar*, period. Thanxx in advance for any help with this issue (surprised noone else seems to complain about this). :)

Chosen solution

Hi cfdhacker, your other option would be to dive into the world of userChrome.css, an optional file you can create to apply style rules that modify the UI. For example, this rule will hide the entire toolbar (including the location bar and menu button) when the rest of the toolbar is hidden:

#main-window[chromehidden*="toolbar"] #nav-bar {
  visibility: collapse;
}


But it's complicated to think about how you would pick out the particular windows where you definitely do not want a location bar and menu button, from other popups where you might want to have them. I don't know whether there is a way to signal the different cases in a way that CSS rules can know about.

In case you aren't familiar with userChrome.css files, I have a website about them here: https://www.userchrome.org/

Read this answer in context 👍 1

All Replies (10)

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You can no longer specify what to show/hide when you use window.open().

  • Bug 1507375 - Can we drop window.open's feature parameter which controls UI parts visibility?

(please do not comment in bug reports
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
)

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Hi cfdhacker,

You can try this add-on Fullscreen Plus .

Thanks !

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Bummer ! cor-el thanks a lot for you response, clearly not what I was hoping for, but seems to be the current (sad) state of affair. :/ One would think the dev team would have still allowed users to get rid of the address/url/location bar (many names for the same item !) at least via either an about:config entry or a userChrome.css file.

Because the location bar just look f*** UGLY in my applets, just can't deal with it ! And again I'm amazed to not see more complaints about this, aren't people bothered with this at all ? Maybe FF ain't used all that much for applets...?

So I guess I'll have to either revert to an older FF release (but then won't get the security updates, not good), or change browser altogether and give up with FF (I've tried Palemoon as an old version of FF and it seems to work fine but applets will need some rework).

Shashank Shekha, thank you as well but full screen ain't cut it, I have several applets working together with other windows opened as well.

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Chosen Solution

Hi cfdhacker, your other option would be to dive into the world of userChrome.css, an optional file you can create to apply style rules that modify the UI. For example, this rule will hide the entire toolbar (including the location bar and menu button) when the rest of the toolbar is hidden:

#main-window[chromehidden*="toolbar"] #nav-bar {
  visibility: collapse;
}


But it's complicated to think about how you would pick out the particular windows where you definitely do not want a location bar and menu button, from other popups where you might want to have them. I don't know whether there is a way to signal the different cases in a way that CSS rules can know about.

In case you aren't familiar with userChrome.css files, I have a website about them here: https://www.userchrome.org/

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Hey jscher2000, incidentally while searching for info on this issue I found your web site yesterday (actually still have the tab open ^^), nice to get your inputs, thanxx ! I did mention the userChrome.css file as a possibility in my prev message, in fact I do already have one and right now using it essentially to get the tabs below the other bars.

I'll obviously try your suggestion and see where it gets me (though I'm not quite sure what you mean by "when the rest of the toolbar is hidden"), indeed I want to get rid of ALL the U/I elements (matter of fact I also have an ahk script that allows me to even get rid of the titlebar -via a shortcut- for any window on my desktop, not just FF).

To answer your question (I think), at this point the _only_ FF windows for which I want zero U/I element to show up are the ones opened via a "window.open(...)" statement from a JS script here and there. Otherwise I have no reason to not want the standard U/I, esp. considering it's easy to hide the menubar or bookmarks bar etc...

I also doubt very much it would be possible to tell the userChrome.css file a directive to only hide the location bar for FF windows opened via JS (and not "manually" eg with a CTRL+N condition from within a FF window).

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SUCCESS !! :D

Just inserted your code at the top of my userChrome file, restarted FF and... works great ! Regular FF windows do show the location bar as expected (I was wrongly convinced your code would hide the location bar for all FF windows but no), while FF windows opened via window.open(...) do NOT show any U/I element at all, just as I wanted. Super !

I can't thank you enough for this snippet, I've spent hours since yesterday looking for a solution to no avail, MERCI beaucoup as we say here. (actually you might want to add this to your web site, I'm pretty sure others will make good use of it).

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Hi cfdhacker, thank you for reporting back. My concern was with popups from other sites. Without the location bar, it may be a mystery why you have that window. I mean, it could be a mystery anyway, but it might be even more of a mystery. Of course, Ctrl+i or right-click>View Page Info will always get you the address of the page in the popup, so perhaps that is enough.

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I see... well in general I don't get that many pop-ups anyway (using Adblock probably helps), just the (very) occasional here and there for which I know the origin, otherwise as you noted a quick CTRL+I would help - so shouldn't be an issue really, esp. considering the benefit this brings to me ! Thanxx a lot again, and have a good day.

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I'm trying to do this on FF portable 82.

I've created the css, enabled firefox to look for it.

I'm led to believe that all I need in this file is the code:

  1. main-window[chromehidden*="toolbar"] #nav-bar {
 visibility: collapse;

}

I edited the file with notepad, added the code, saved the file, exited and restarted firefox but I'm still seeing the navigation bar.

So it appears I need to be opening the page programmatically through a JS script......

So I'm not fully aware of how to do this.

I looked at JS script add-ons like greastmonkey but I'm way over my head with that, but maybe that's on the right track.

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Hi marinewonder, extensions cannot modify the toolbar area that way. Could you check the following:

(A) File location

[Portable Firefox folder]\Data\profile\chrome

Note: you usually need to create that chrome folder.

(B) File extension

By default, Windows hides the .css and .txt file extensions. You can turn on viewing of file extensions to make sure your file isn't named userChrome.css.txt (which Firefox won't see).

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/how-to-show-file-extensions-in-windows/