This is an open letter to all designers of Firefox toolbars. It’s awesome that lots of companies like Yahoo!, A9 and Google (whoops, why is there no ‘official’ Google Toolbar for Firefox?) are supporting Firefox with their toolbar efforts. However, I won’t use any of them, thank you.

Why not? Because I value my vertical space. You see, as in print/web media, space “above the fold” (as in the fold in a newspaper or on a web page anything you can see without having to scroll) is WAY more valuable than space below the fold. And obviously, space at the top of the page is THE most valuable (why do you think they put banner ads at the top of the page?). That is why I have reduced the top chrome in my Firefox setup to just one line of UI; Because I want to maximize the amount of vertical space for the content. Adding a toolbar uses up one line of the most valuable UI space. No thank you.

However, there is a solution. Companies, please feel free to design toolbars, because there are plenty of folks that don’t mind giving up even three or four lines of UI to toolbars. Rock on. However, please also “part out” your toolbar by designing separate buttons for all of the elements on your toolbar (buttons are things like Firefox’s default ‘back, ‘forward,’ ‘reload,’ etc.). That way I can choose the functionality I want (as in, I really don’t need a ‘highlight’ button, since Firefox’s Find function already does that) while not using up vertical UI space.

One company that gets this is Furl. They don’t even offer a traditional toolbar, just custom buttons that you can add to your existing UI.

OK, so Yahoo!, A9 and others — gimme some buttons, and I’ll add them to my UI. Until then, your toolbars will go unchecked.