Annoying Title Bar

Support & Help Requests
#1

I have been annoyed in every Gnome 3 desktop I've used because the tabs of my maximized browser plus the title of my browser plus the panel at the top take up a full fifteen to twenty percent of my small laptop screen. I admit that the MATE version of this that I see right now is way way better, but it still sucks. I mean, I maximized the browser for a reason.

I'm a little too used to windows 7 perhaps because I use it at work. There the tops of the tabs touch the top of the screen. I've never liked apple desktops for the same reason, the top of the screen, where I look most often is too cluttered. I get that this is how MATE is set up, and I appreciate how thin the top panel is. I want to get rid of that title bar though.

Is there a way to get rid of the Mozilla Firefox bar between the tabs and the top panel?

With Gnome 3, there are various extensions that can sort of get around this, but they don't really work and they make everything buggy. Is there a way to fix this space wasting design at the distro level so I can stop being bothered by it?

Here's a low-quality jpeg showing what I mean. Why do we need that extra line with the firefox logo? Why can't that move down to the line that has the tabs?

Annoying Title Bar Firefox Fix
#2

This isn’t a GNOME 3 thing, this is just the way Linux window managers decorate the windows. Ubuntu’s Unity is the only stacking window manager I know of that handles titlebars nicely out of the box. Chromium/Chrome uses its own engine to get rid of the extra titlebar, but then you lose system-wide composited shadows around the window. One thing you could do to alleviate this problem in Ubuntu MATE is to install the mate-netbook package and add the “Window Picker” applet to the top panel. This will undecorate the windows when maximized and gives you a different window menu and titlebar in the top panel. Otherwise there is a way to do it with Compiz but that way can cause other confusions.

Edit: This drives me nuts too, but I’ve kinda just gotten used to it over the last couple of years.

1 Like
#3

I hop distros constantly, but only because I’m always breaking them. Compiz is an easy way for me to mess up a desktop, so I try not to use it. I know there are a lot of ways to deal with this through extensions, tweaks, and tools, but if Ubuntu fixes it in Unity, why can’t we lift some of that code and commit it to MATE? Depending on how complex that is. Obviously I’m not volunteering as I have no idea where to begin.

I’ll check out the mate-netbook package as you suggested. Will it break anything else if I install it?

#4

well I moved the top panel to the bottom so that’s more comfortable at least.

#5

@letter_weaver You can have a look at the video that Martin uploaded recently - User Interface Switcher
The single panel layout, which is similar to the panel on Windows 7, should make things better.
Alternatively, you can probably browse in full screen mode in Firefox by pressing the F11 key.

1 Like
#6

If you wan’t you can install mate-netbook package and set option in dconf editor s that maximezed windows are undecorated . This will save you screen space . then you can delete bottom panel and add the taskbar to the top panel and bring it to bottom .

#7

This bugs me too, especially as a long time Mac user. Luckily, I’ve had good luck with the HTitle extension to hide Firefox’s titlebar.

It’s designed to work with Gnome Shell, and I’ve had trouble with non-mutter-based window managers, such is Xfce’s wm, but it seems to work fine with Mate. (Maybe because of the shared ancestry of Mate’s wm and mutter?).

(I also use a vertical panel to save more vertical screen real estate – in fact, this option is one reason I first started using Mate – but that’s another topic.)

1 Like
#8

Wow, there’s a Firefox extension for that! Brilliant. I will try these things out later when I get back to my laptop.

#9

Just be sure and enable “legacy mode” in Htitles preferences. That will get rid of the double window controls when not maximized.

#10

Works perfectly. Thanks guys. I use firefox more than anything else so the browser extension is an easy fix. I can do that easily in other distros too.

Not that you asked, but I’ll suggest a browser extension in turn. I use firefox because I’m obsessed with the Wappalyzer extension, which doesn’t display as well in chromium based browsers. Wappalyzer does its best to figure out what kind of stack and what applications frameworks are at play in each website I visit. It tells me that this forum runs on rails and makes use of a silly amount of javascript. Ember and Rails together? Really? It also shows CloudFlare instead of the server stack, which is interesting.

#12

For Gnome there was this excelent option that we cant install on MATE

they havent update the MATE version!

Can anyone help?

#13

for MATE this option can help:

#14

Another thing you can do is simply delete the top panel, and add all the applets you need to the bottom panel. I do this to achieve a more Windows-like desktop. Of course, this doesn’t help with the window titlebar, but it’s at least a partial solution.

Adam

#15

IvCHo: Where can I find that option in the dconf Editor? Thanks!

#16

undecorate

undecorate.png802Ă—553 53.6 KB

1 Like
#17

That’s much better! Thanks v3xx!

#18

Is it possible displaying the window buttons in the panel? Close, Minimize and Maximize.

#19

I am working on a applet that does that . See the thread : Developing a Window Buttons Applet for Mate

2 Likes
#20

More than anything I’d be interested in in integrating the menu bar and the title bar in the respective program windows.

Displaying the buttons in the menu bar would be one possible way to go, I guess, but the actual title bar is good to have when dragging unmaximized windows around. The other way would be having the window decorator displaying the program menus instead of the window title - next to the close, minimize and maximize buttons.

Would this be possible?

#21

Unity (7) can do that, and it uses Compiz, so it is possible. Unity uses its own Compiz decorations (I think that’s ghr term), and how easy it would be to do the same in MATE I don’t know.