Some Firefox extensions can take this further. For instance, the stop and reload buttons can be merged. The menus can be merged into a single menu or even a small button. If you do this, you'll want a bookmarks button. A slider can be added to shrink/grow the search bar, allowing you to see more of a long url. And finally, fullscreen mode can be tweaked to show only the menubar (and tab and status bars as well if you like).

FYI I have a 14" screen that only goes to 800x600.

You can get rid of the google search bar. Web shortcuts in konq make the google bar redundant.

Complexity seems to be a natural tendency in computers.

In a GUI, if you implement a feature, then you'll create graphical ways to access it. As more features you have, more powerful your program might be, but more bloated it becames. As I read recently in a a blog of a kde developer, that once you add a feature, you cannot get rid of it easily, because there's always someone fan of it...

SO the real problem is, most features migh be needed (by someone at least), but not by the same person, and certainly features' need vary from user to user.

I belive that the real solution to feeling of BLOAT is :
1) Have sane defaults, as you're suggesting.
2) But much more needed is a slick, automatized way of dealing with unused "entries". I.e. if you have used some toolbar icons less than a xx % of times trough X time, that
icons should be hidden by default.

You could then click in an icon ">>" to show all the other entries. And of course this way of simplifying the life to user could be always deactivated.

Same with menu entries and what not! For example, in menu entries, when you clicked in ">>" (that would be for example the last menu entry) then the menu would show all the entries, differenciating for you the entries that were hidden before with a different background color so that you only look for an entry you didn't see before amnog that ones, etc...

I sent some months ago a bug report about this: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81637 . I'm feeling like I should create an entry here about it so that people rate the idea and discuss about it, but it's a bit late, so that will be tomorrow at best ;-).

Cheers,
Edulix.

you can remove the menubar from the application(s) and let it reside in the kicker...
desktopsettings> behaviour> menubar> macosstyle.

then add a menubarapplet to kicker, wherever you want.

ah com'on people do you have 12 inch monitor or what?

It's very simple to adjust Konqueror's toolbars. For example remove the location widget from the adress bar, place it into the main toolbar and disable the adress bar.

Then remove those silly "copy", "paste" icons (you do have a three-button-mouse, don't you?) and Konqueror looks quite nice.

A bookmark toolbar gives you direct access to many bookmarks without having first to click into the menu bar.

See http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=8999 for an example.

Yeah... the same happens here even when I'm at 1200 x 1024. I would like a more big area to browser and less to the other things that I use less.