members and I wish that were true, because the debate over what constitutes the best toolbar design turned out to be one of the most divisive and heated in our development history. This wasn't a question of code. It was a question of, quite frankly, what feels right. Of the thousands of possible toolbar arrangements, which one offers the best balance of ease-of-use and aesthetics? Which is spacious without stealing precious screen real estate from Web sites? Which will adequately distinguish Firefox from other browsers without being so inconsistent that it's impossible to figure out? To understand why the toolbar is such a big deal, consider how many times a day you click that Back button. Serious Internet surfers use the Firefox toolbars for hours at a time every day. An ugly, distracting, or nonintuitive toolbar design would be a deal-breaker for most people, even if they didn't consciously understand what it was that didn't feel right about Firefox. Even though we intended to offer customization tools, we knew that the overwhelming majority of our target audience would lack the time or technical literacy to fix our toolbar mistakes. And we couldn't just fix the toolbars in a subsequent release because that would be a jarring change to people who had grown accustomed to them. We had one shot at toolbar perfection. One of the major points of contention during what we now call the Toolbar Wars was whether Firefox should follow other browsers in giving the Location Bar its own toolbar or try something new by merging the navigation buttons and the Location Bar into a single toolbar. The first route was tried and true. Even if it wasn't the greatest design in the world, people expected it, which made it the safer route. Because it devoted an entire toolbar to buttons, the design would also allow us to include a variety of buttons to access features like Bookmarks and History, just as the popular Internet Explorer does. The second route was much riskier. No browser had ever done it before. And it had very little space for buttons beyond the core set (Back, Forward, Stop, Reload, and Home) because we needed to keep the Location Bar a reasonable size so you could read its contents. But as we talked with people, a funny thing happened: We realized that the "disadvantages" were actually benefits. People didn't want a toolbar that offered access to everything under the sun. They wanted to go back, forward, and home. They wanted to stop and reload a page. And that was it. When we gave them trial versions of the new design for testing, hardly anyone missed the Bookmarks or Print buttons-they lauded the simplicity. Firefox 1.0 launched with the new design and nearly all of its competitors have since changed their designs. Of course, this chapter tells you everything you need to know to revert to the old-style layout if you prefer it. REMEMBER The Firefox Location Bar is designed to be flexible in that it also stretches to fill unused space on whatever toolbar it resides on to give you plenty of space to view the current address. If you place a Flexible Space in the same toolbar as the Location Bar, the Location Bar wins out and takes up the unused space, and the Flexible Space is reduced to a thin black line (since, sadly, it has no space to take up). These special items are for cosmetic purposes only and don't do anything when you click them. REMEMBER Unlike the other items in the Customize Toolbar window, these special layout items don't disappear from that window after you drag them to a toolbar. You can drag as many Separators, Spaces, and Flexible Spaces onto the toolbars as you want. Using the special Bookmarks Toolbar Items item As I discuss in Chapter 5, Firefox allows you to add your most frequently accessed bookmarks to the Bookmarks Toolbar (the bottom toolbar) for quick access. The Bookmarks Toolbar Items item represents this set of bookmarks,