Add lightweight themes to your browser

Personas for Firefox is a special extension that improves theme management for Firefox and makes it easier.

So far, applying a new theme to your favorite web browser implies searching for it on Google, downloading the correspondent file to your PC, installing it on Firefox and then restarting the browser in order to see the results. Personas makes this whole process much simpler: just install the extension and you’ll see a tiny button on the lower left corner of your browser window. Then, every time you want to apply a new theme to Firefox, simply click on this button and select it from the context menu.

Personas for Firefox currently includes about fifty themes, but chances are there’ll be more in the near future, especially if we take into account that this extension also makes theme designing and updating much easier. I guess we’ll have to wait patiently as you can’t add any new themes to the menu, but use only the ones that come shipped with the extension.

The included themes are classified into several categories (Firefox, Holidays, Nature, Scenery, Sports and others) for a more convenient browsing. Though some of them make menu bars really hard to read, many others give a nice touch of color to the browser window. Also, bear in mind that the themes only change the main window’s appearance – icons and menus remain the same.

Despite the limitations of a first version, Personas for Firefox is a great extension to change your browser’s appearance in just two clicks.

Fixes bug 590608

Changes

• Fixes bug 590608

Personas is a prototype that builds upon the ideas that:

• themes today are too hard to find, install and use
• graphic designers should be able to style the browser without having to code
• browsers can be more than just desktop software, they can include online components
• people just want their computer to be a little more fun and personal

This version improves upon a prototype that was discussed and tested earlier this year. We’ve just started talking about the possible benefits of taking advantage of an online component to deliver a better browser experience. There is certainly more to explore in this regard; Personas is but a simple example.

In this version, the Persona selector is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. All changes to the browser chrome are applied instantly, with no need to restart.

We’ll shortly be releasing an API that will allow developers and designers to submit Personas that are based on Web content, including support for anything that can load in a content window such as HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, Javascript, SVG and Canvas.