Until fairly recently my browser experience was made up of back, forward, reload, new tab, the location bar and the page itself. I considered anything else on the page to be a distraction and unneeded. Although I haven't quite become a button bar slob yet, I've come to realize the power in other elements of the browser window that I'd ignored for one reason or another.

I think my first step towards this transformation was the google search box that safari and firefox have. It's not all that helpful on its own, honestly enough, but it's Just One Tab away from the location bar and that makes the feature. My only current lazyweb request about the search box is that it retain the most recent search on a tab-by-tab rather than window-by-window basis. Amazingly, before four or five months ago I was doing web design without the aid of the web developer toolbar for firefox. This is an *incredibly* amazing tool for creating complex css-based layouts and actually being able to see how the browser is rendering your divs and such. Even though it's a firefox extension, seeing your layout in a different browser still helps when trying to debug IE issues. And it's huge! It takes up an entire bar all by itself. Yes, you can use it from the right-click menu but you have no idea how many times I've misclicked the view source item on that menu. I'd rather not add more cascading levels. After I had included that monstrosity I knew it was only a matter of time until I would be reducing my rendering space even more. Somewhere in there I ended up adding the PubSub subscription button between the location bar and the google search box. It doesn't take up all that much room and I barely use it now since I get feeds of all my PubSubscriptions. Finally, I ended up returning to the button bar (my nemesis for so long!) for the Ruler tool, posting to del.icio.us and I've even started keeping items that aren't permanent enough to stick in the bookmarks menu in there. My button bar gets quite a bit of action nowadays.