Remove icons from the Firefox bookmarks toolbar

This should work more generally, but (because it's the set-up I have) I refer particularly here to Firefox 7.0.1 running on Mac OS X 10.7.2.  [UPDATE: I'm now on Firefox 8.0.1 and this fix is still working fine for me. UPDATE X 2: Firefox 10.0 on 10.7.3 and still okay.] If someone has equivalent instructions for other platforms then please add them in comments.

I wanted to get rid of the icons in the bookmarks toolbar. I find some of them ugly and they take up too much space. I tried the Bookmarks Deiconizer add-on, but found that I had to reset it by disabling and re-enabling it every time I relaunched Firefox. Here's what I did instead.

(1) Find the file called localstore.rdf in

~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/[your unique user ID string]/

Your Library folder should be inside your Home folder. To see the Home folder in Finder click Go at the top of the screen and then select Home from the dropdown list. Lion hides the Library folder by default so if you can't see it in the Home folder then you need to go directly to it. To do that, click Go again but this time select Go to folder… from the dropdown list. This asks you to enter the folder you want. Enter

~/Library/

then click the Go button. That should bring you to your Library folder and let you follow the path above to find your localstore.rdf file.

(2) Make a copy of the localstore.rdf file as a backup.

(3) Make sure Firefox is not running.

(4) Open localstore.rdf in a text editor such as TextEdit or TextWrangler.

(5) Find the section that begins:

RDF:Description RDF:about="chrome://browser/content/browser.xul#PersonalToolbar"

at the end of this section an entry reads:

mode="icons"

change this to

mode="text"

(6) Save the edited version of localstore.rdf to the folder in your Library.

(7) Restart Firefox. Your bookmarks toolbar should be icon-free. If you have any problems then quit Firefox and dump the edited localstore.rdf and replace it with the original version that you backed up.