The wide-screen 16×9 format and resolution is clearly the defacto standard across televisions and computer monitors – you’d be hard pressed to purchase a 4×3 setup nowadays. While the format aligns well with television and movies, for me it really isn’t ideal in the field of computers. If you think about it, how often are you scrolling within an application window horizontally? Almost never right? Instead, almost all scrolling on a computer screen involves the vertical component – something that is a premium on the wide-screen layout.
Consequently, saving any amount of pixels in the vertical resolution is quite advantageous, especially when web browsing. If you are a Firefox user are familiar with the status bar across the bottom of the browser window – it contains feedback centering around the web page loading process. To reclaim some screen real estate you are probably already aware of how to disable the status bar from View->Status Bar.
However doing such, you now miss out on some valuable feed back as you browse around the Internet; such as whether the site you are reading is fully downloaded and displayed for example.
Leveraging the Firefox extension Fission, it’s quite trivial to consolidate the progress bar functionality found in the lower status bar with the address bar found at the top of the browser. Once installed, Fission will paint a user specific color across the address bar window in increments respective of the actual web site loading process.
Browsers such as Safari and Chrome have addressed the vertical real estate problem using similar solutions but until Fission, Firefox lagged behind. The UI tweak is minimalistic but the functionality is actually quite helpful for all users, not just those that wish to utilize every last pixel.
