Allow sites to hide the navigation bar in Firefox 3

June 19th, 2008

By default, Firefox 3 now blocks Javascript code from hiding the browser navigation bar. The idea behind this is simply to stop malicious popups from emulating a native OS window.

But, for advances users well aware of what constitutes a malicious popup and what it looks like, the ever-present navigation bar can be distracting. Fortunately, you can disabled it by altering a setting in about:config.

  1. Type about:config into the navigation bar and press Enter (ignore the warning).
  2. Type dom.disable_window_open_feature.location into the filter textbox. A single entry should remain.
  3. Change the value field to false.

You can now close the about:config window; popups can now hide the navigation bar like in previous versions of Firefox. To restore the default setting, simply change the value back to true.