signal eleven

ok i can't find it now but i saw the other day where @atomicthumbs talked about getting a browser setup with tabs that would get super thin until it was just a blur of sliced favicon pixels, and i thought damn that sounds incredible

anyway i'm currently setting up firefox and damn. this really does suck! tabs won't shrink below 76 pixels, only configurable down to 50 in about:config (???). pathetic

anyway this annoyed me so much that i actually went looking for solutions and found out how to style the firefox ui with css straight up so that you can make tabs as thin as you want

• open top menu Help > More Troubleshooting Information > section: Application Basics > Profile Directory > Open Directory
• create folder "chrome"
• inside that folder create "userChrome.css" with the content:

.tabbrowser-tab:not([pinned="true"]) {
  min-width: 1px !important; /* This can be even thinner. This can be 0. Go For It */
}

:root {
  --tab-min-height: 32px !important; /* You can shrink this a lil but the horizontal matters more */
  --proton-tab-block-margin: 1px !important; /* Original: 4px */
  --tab-block-margin: 1px !important; /* New version of --proton-tab-block-margin */
  --inline-tab-padding: 0 !important; /* Original: 8px */
} 

• open a new tab with about:config and accept your fate
• search for "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" and toggle it on
• restart the browser

check this shit out:

i'm sure with some applied creativity and more knowledge of the layout of the ui it's possible to do this even better. i didn't even bother looking up what's in there i just cargo culted this until it looked good

bonus, !important

: this totoro theme, if you have the right number of pinned extensions and are signed into firefox, lets you stand next to totoro

post-edit: you can also get firefox installed in ubuntu via apt instead of as an accursed snap, like so! (remember not to trust me, if you don't want to re-type it copy this code into a trustworthy text editor first or at least use a shell that doesn't run as soon as you paste):

• run sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/ppa
• to prevent the proxy packages that just install the snap that are provided by canonical from being the always-preferred installation, you should (acting as root*) make a file called something like /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox with the contents

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 900

(... or an o=... corresponding to whatever it says for that repository when you run apt-cache policy | grep mozillateam)

• run an apt upgrade damn ok you have to actually sudo snap remove firefox; sudo apt remove firefox; sudo apt install firefox and that will work :)

*so, like, sudo nano /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox or something

update 2023-08-06: i had to add it to the Unattended-Upgrade:Package-Blacklist list in the apt configuration folder too because apparently unattended-upgrades ignores package pin priorities and will helpfully "upgrade" to the shitty snap version in the background 🙄

references:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/wiki/index/tutorials/#wiki_enable_userchrome_customization_in_about.3Aconfig
https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/p2pwuf/changing_tabs_padding/
https://cohost.org/