Some time ago I covered a trick which allows you to move tabs to the bottom in Mozilla Firefox. In that article, I used the awesome Classic Theme Restorer add-on. I was a fan of the classic Opera browser which had a fully customizable UI and I appreciate having the same ability in Firefox to be able to modify its look with the help of add-ons. One such addon is Bottom UI. It is a very interesting extension for Firefox. Let's take a look at what it offers to the end user.
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You can find Bottom UI in the Firefox add-ons gallery.
Press Ctrl + Shift + A to open the Add-ons Manager in a new tab in Firefox. You can also click "Add-ons" from the Tools menu instead to open it. In the search box, type Bottom UI and press Enter. Click the Install button. After the Bottom UI add-on is downloaded and installed, the effect is instant, without even having to restart Firefox. You will see that your tabs and the address bar have been moved to the bottom of the Firefox window:
The main benefit of this extension over the previously reviewed Classic Theme Restorer addon is the ability to drag and drop tabs between opened Firefox windows. With Classic Theme Restorer I was not able to do that, so my vote is to use Bottom UI.
The Bottom UI extension has only two simple options. The first one allows you to make the main menu always visible or turn it off completely. The default value is "Autohide", which matches the out-of-the-box browser behaviour, where you need to press the ALT key on the keyboard to show the menu.
The second option allows you to display additional minimize/maximize/close buttons in the tabs bar or directly in the browser's toolbar. I didn't find this useful, but here is how it looks:
Click here to visit the page for the Bottom UI extension in the Firefox add-ons gallery.
Verdict
While all mainstream browsers look mostly the same and frequently borrow each others' ideas, Firefox users are able to customize their browser in a very flexible way thanks to addons. The Bottom UI extension is good for people who are not happy with tabs at the top and feel more comfortable having them at the bottom.
You are welcome to leave your feedback about this add-on in the comments.
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Gracias.
Doesn‘t look too convienient, since the taskbar is on the bottom.
If you do not use Autohide for the taskbar, it is still pretty useful.
But with autohide enabled, it will appear when you hover the lower edge of tabs accidentally.
There is one benefit with this that helps when using TabMixPlus with the multi-row tabs option.
With normal “Tabs on top” and multi-row TabMixPlus, if the first row of tabs is full, then middle-clicking a link causes a new tab to open which opens a new row of tabs. When the new row of tabs is added, the whole webpage moves down by one row. If a second link is clicked quickly, the click won’t be in the right place because the whole webpage moved underneath the mouse. It happens to me about once or twice a day and is annoying.
Putting the tabs at the bottom keeps the webpage stable even when new tab rows are added. No more missed clicks due to the whole webpage shifting!
I’m going to use this from now on… Thanks Sergey!
Thank you for reading me ;-)
May, 2019 – I have not updated my Firefox from V. 56 to keep Classic Theme Restorer working. Today I found Firefox has disabled Classic Theme Restorereven without being updated. I can’t seem to find any add-on that will help me restore my tabs to the bottom above the web page. I found someone that refers to rewriting code, but that is beyond my abilities. Putting Bottom UI into the add-on search comes up with nothing, so I’m assuming tht has been disabled as well. Have you found another solution that I could use that Firefox hasn’t screwed up?