I like the Firefox browser (only as a friend) but I hate its search bar. By default it gets installed right next to the URL address bar on the Navigation toolbar and it's shrunken down to a miniscule, ridiculous size and it doesn't support History. Needless to say I had to tweak it.
What I wanted to do was make the behavior like the Google toolbar on Internet Explorer where the search bar is on its own toolbar and has a history pull-down.
Firefox has some nice toolbar customization but it doesn't allow you to easily change the behavior of the searchbar, you have to go digging through their .jar files and play with some .xul, .xml and .css files. Mozilla is aware of this bug/enhancement request but so far we haven't seen a nice fix.
So, I wrote up detailed instructions on how to do this for Firefox 1.0 over here at the LateNightPC forums. If you have the 0.9 version of Firefox, this tip is slightly easier and I had written it up last year at this older LateNightPC forum thread.
One thing I should note: I never played with my profile files to see if I could just override the default settings. I went right for Firefox’s actual browser.jar and classic.jar. If someone can explain how they work (i.e. what files to put in C:\Profiles\Jeff\Application Data\Mozilla\ such that the behavior is the same), I would really appreciate it as I’m sure this is the preferred way of doing things (rather than editing files that ship with Firefox).
Looks useful but I have to upgrade to 1.0 before I can try it out.
Do you have 0.9? I also left a tip for that last year. Not only that, you have zero excuse because I also put the .jar files available for easy download…