How to Hide Grip Handles in SeaMonkey 2.53

Seamonkey is one of those browsers I have used for what seems an eternity. It is of course more than a browser, probably the last surviving full internet suite with mail and news and feed reader included, an address book, Chatzilla for IRC and even a web site builder that was later outsourced and became standalone Kompozer, just as the browser component became Firefox and the mail and news component was developed into Thunderbird. With Lightning you even get a calendaring application thrown in, the whole office hog.

Seamonkey can trace its origins back to the Netscape Communicator Suite that eventually morphed into the Mozilla suite, before Mozilla ditched it to focus on Firefox and Thunderbird which they had just split out from the code base. It's nice to see it has just released a new version that brings it more up to date with the times. I prefer Seamonkey as it is a lot faster than Thunderbird and more efficient with resources than running both Firefox and thunderbird at the same time. For this reason it is often included in distributions aimed at the lighter side of resource usage like Puppy Linux and LXLE. LXLE actually distributed their own profile for Seamonkey for a while, with recommended add-ons and privacy settings.

While the 2.49 series was still based on the now very outdated Firefox 52, the new release moves the suite to GTK3 and new Mozilla platform API changes.

SeaMonkey 2.53.1 uses the same backend as Firefox and contains the relevant Firefox 60.3 security fixes. 

SeaMonkey 2.53.1 shares most parts of the mail and news code with Thunderbird. Please read the Thunderbird 60.0 release notes for specific changes and security fixes in this release.

Backported were for example fixes from Thunderbird for the EFAIL security vulnerability.

Additional important security fixes up to Current Firefox 72 and a few enhancements have been backported. We will continue to enhance SeaMonkey security in subsequent 2.53 beta and release versions as fast as we are able to.

With the above changes the Seamonkey suite is now pretty much current and I believe the 2.57 development branch is targeting the engine changes in Firefox 68.

A lot of add-ons and themes for Firefox and Thunderbird will work in Seamonkey, but not all. This means it can look quite nice and modern, but something always felt like a leftover from the earlier days of personal computing in the 90s, the grip handles on the left of the toolbar that allows to hide sections of the toolbar like the menu bar or the search bar. While quite practical as it is quicker than going into the menu and deselecting it to hide the menu bar for example it always looked a bit off, certainly outdated.

As always, it pays to read release notes and documentation. 


Q: "Can I remove the tool- and menubar grippies?" Yes, we can.

Enter about:config in the address bar and click on Ok when reading the warning that this will void your warranty.

Enter  "browser.toolbars.grippyhidden" in the search box and double-click to set it to "true".

That's it. Restart the browser and the top bar should look cleaner.


There are also tips in the release notes how to re-enable add-ons that have disappeared during an upgrade if this happens - Lightning is notorious for this and often claims it is incompatible with the new Seamonkey release after a restart.

Download Seamonkey pre-configured with localisation for 20 languages, i.e. with the relevant language pack already installed.