After exhaustive research, I recently purchased my first netbook, a Toshiba mini NB205.  Look for a review soon on 40Tech.

As much as I'm really loving the netbook (when I can pry it away from my wife), I'm learning that netbooks require a change in user behavior, due in part to the small screen real estate.  Lifehacker to the rescue.  Gina Trapani has posted some code to modify Firefox's userChrome.css to maximize the usable screen space in Firefox, by rearranging or eliminating less useful space in the browser.  The image above shows the top of my browser before (top) and after (bottom) applying the code snippet.  Click the image to enlarge it.  The changes are subtle, and do the following to your browser:

- remove the new tab button
- remove the search box magnifying glass
- remove and combine disabled buttons, such as Back, Stop, Forward, and Reload

I'm also using the Tiny Menu Firefox plugin, which combines the File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools, and Help menu items from the toolbar into one dropdown menu.  These changes together combine to make Firefox a bit more usable.  But I have a dirty secret to tell - as much as I am a Firefox fan, Chrome runs better on my netbook.

You can check out the Lifehacker article, which contains the code, here.