Please download Firefox 4 to watch the WebM video.

Full-size video (0:52) download: webm (8mb) and ogv (5mb)

Transcript:

LessChrome HD follows AwesomeBar HD in taking ideas from Home Dash and packaging them into a focused experiment. The core feature here is to give as much space to the page and only showing the browser interface when needed.

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.

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.

Another idea from Home Dash is to show page context when switching tabs. So when I switch to another tab, I can see where I am as a reminder before interacting with the page. Similarly, when switching to a secure tab, I can quickly see that the identity of the page has been verified.

More chrome before. Less after.

Try out LessChrome HD on Firefox 4! You don’t even need to restart Firefox to begin playing around. The Prospector team is very interested in hearing back from you, so please install it for a bit, and let us know what you think:

• Does the interface appear and hide when you want?
• Do you like seeing the page context (url and identity) when switching tabs?

As usual, you can check out the code on GitHub and submit issues or suggestions if you have any!

– Ed Lee on behalf of the Prospector team
.aligncenter { margin: auto; }