Tweaking Your Display | Firefox and Thunderbird Garage

Because you've seen all sorts of ways to tweak your Firefox interface in this chapter and with themes in the previous chapter, it's only fair that there should be a brief discussion of a few things you can do with the actual display.

Chapter 1, "Getting Started," showed you how to set options for displaying the website fonts and colors. This is wonderful, but you should also know how to change the size of the text in the display. When you have a web page open, go to View | Font Size and select either Increase or Decrease. (You can also press Ctrl++ or Ctrl+- to do the same thing.) This cranks the text display up (or down) two sizes. Do this a time or two more and the text will either be very large or very small. Pressing Ctrl+0 (on the keyboard, not the number pad) resets the text to the default size. If your mouse has a mouse wheel, pressing Ctrl while you move the mouse wheel does the same thing. Resizing doesn't work with graphics, but Firefox can resize text even if the size is hard-coded in pixelsanother advantage over IE.

Earlier in this chapter, you learned how to get rid of a toolbar to save some screen space. Go to View | Full Screen (or press F11) to hide most of the toolbars and menus to get the absolute most web page on the screen you possibly can. The only toolbar that's left is the Navigation toolbar. Pressing F11 or clicking the restore icon in the upper-right corner brings the screen back to normal. Maximizing the screen works very well in conjunction with a customized Navigation toolbar, so all the buttons you're likely to need are right there.

If you're on a Windows or Linux computer (sorryMac users don't have this capability), you can right-click any image you see on a web page and select Set As Wallpaper. The Set Wallpaper screen (shown in Figure 8-19) appears.

Figure 8-19. The Set Wallpaper screen.

You can center, stretch, or tile the picture and also tweak the background color. When you are satisfied with the way the picture and background look, click Set Wallpaper to change to this.

FAQ: Where do people go to look for cool pix?

The web is swarming with wonderful pictures and art that make lovely wallpaper. Try Googling any of the following search categories with the Google Images option (use Google's SafeSearch Filtering option to ensure that anything you download is reasonably office-safe):

Mucha
Crystals
Pre-Raphaelite
Film noir
Roman fresco
Conure
Illuminated manuscript
Landscape painting
Gaudi
Mola art
Sunset
Haida
Georgian architecture
Antique map
Classic rock posters
Rodin
Fractals
Chinese coin
Still life
Calligraphy
Fern
Crown jewels
Sister Wendy
Commemorative stamp
Wildlife
Celtic knotwork
Kandinsky
The Hudson River school
Hubble Space Telescope
image
Museum of Bad Art
Joan Miro
67 Mustang
Semiprecious stones
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
Swords
Tropical fish
Wooden toys
Iridescence

If all else fails, you can always display M.C. Escher, Sandra Boynton, or Mary Engelbreit drawings.

***

This chapter concludes the Firefox half of the book. You've seen all the basics: how to install and configure Firefox; how to use the built-in search features, the Bookmarks Manager, and tabbed browsing; how to augment Firefox with extensions and themes; and how to download and print information. There's still more you can learn, such as how to tweak your user files and ways to use digital certificates (both topics are covered in the appendices), but most people probably won't be interested in that level of technical detail. At this point, you have enough information to use Firefox efficiently and enjoyably.

The next part of this book focuses on Mozilla Thunderbird, the powerful open source email program. Thunderbird gives you a way to send and receive email securely, to stop junk mail, and to follow RSS feeds and access newsgroups. So even if you've been reading this book to learn about Firefox, keep reading: you'll love the features and options available to you in Thunderbird.