IE7 Tab Bars are a great way to organize your tabs in IE7. However, if you remove the Command Bar from the Tab Bars, you lose the ability to control your tabs with keyboard shortcuts. This can be a big inconvenience if you need to quickly move between tabs or close a tab. To workaround this issue, you can add a shortcut to your shortcut bar that allows you to control your tabs with keyboard shortcuts. To do this, open the shortcut bar in Windows Explorer and add a new shortcut called “ctrl+alt+tab”. Type “ctrl+alt+tab” into the text field and click on the Add button. Now, when you press ctrl+alt+tab, all of your tabs will be closed and opened in their original order.

Instead of the default like this:

We can remove those buttons, giving us more space:

Add or Remove Buttons

Instead of removing the entire bar, you can simply add or remove the buttons from the bar by right-clicking on it, choosing Customize Command Bar and then Add or Remove Commands.

From here you can limit the buttons to only the ones you want… do you ever really use the Help button?

Or you can just make the toolbar’s width small enough that it only shows a single button, with the others still being accessible through clicking on the chevron (make sure to un-check the “Lock the Toolbars” option)

If you still insist on removing the toolbar entirely, keep reading.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

Find the key named “Enabled” in the right-hand side, and set the value to 0. You’ll have to restart IE for the change to take place. Obviously you would set it back to 1 to put the command bar back in place.

Disable the Command Bar the Easy Way

Instead of messing with the registry, you can simply download the IntelliAdmin IE 7 Tweak Utility, which will perform the registry edits for you, and also let you hide the search bar, or force the menu bar to the top, both topics we’ve covered the registry hack method for in the past.

Download IE 7 Tweak Utility from intelliadmin.com

You can really minimize the amount of browser UI space by removing both the search and command bars:

You can always use the Alt key to temporarily show the menu, or get to things via keyboard shortcuts.