I have also tried to do this with as few plugins as possible, since many times they can use up too much memory and clog up your system. I will reduce everything to just one toolbar at the top, and I will use only one plugin to enable all the functions I take away. As you can see at the top, my toolbar just has the menu entries and the url bar, which is simple, effective, space saving and productive. Have a read of the article to find out how I use my Firefox.
You can see that most noticeably navigation items are missing. No home page button, no forward and back, no reload and so on. I don’t really need to have these on screen, since I would actually never click on them. Personally I never use the home button (although it can simply be dropped between the menu items and the url bar), I press F5 to refresh a page, and I use a plugin to go backwards and forward between webpages (plus much more).
The plugin is named Mouse Gestures, and it allows you to navigate Firefox using your mouse. For example, just press and hold the right button and swipe to the left to go back, swipe to the right to go forward. The other really useful function is if you hold down the button and cross a link by swiping it down to up it opens in a new tab. Furthermore, if you cross more than one link in any way, then swipe right, up then left it will open all links crossed in new tabs. This is very easy and makes Firefox that bit more usable. The addon is also very customizable, you can even open bookmarks with it using custom actions.
There we go, I just got rid of four buttons already, and I simply moved the url bar to the top to get rid of the whole navigation toolbar. As you can see there’s also no Google toolbar. I substituted that by creating search bookmarks. If you go to Google.com, right click on the search field and click “add a keyword for this search”, you can set up firefox to search google when you type into the url bar with that keyword as a prefix. I set up this keyword to be “g”, so if I want to search Google for productivity I just write this into the URL bar: “g productivity”. This can be done with all search fields, so you can easily access any of them right there from the URL bar.
I also don’t have any bookmark toolbars since Firefox 3 has a much better system for tracking everything (database based). If you type the name of url of the bookmark it will give you the option to choose it from the list, so you don’t really need to store them on a separate bar.
I do use one more toolbar not shown, which is the Stumble toolbar. However I don’t use this often, so I just hide it whenever I don’t need it, luckily it has a built in key command for this, which is Ctr+F11. All in all, using this method I managed to reduce my Firefox to one toolbar, which is much more compact and much more comfortable actually. If you do need some more buttons you can still add it before the URL bar, there’s loads of space left up there.