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Lightweight browser themes on the Web (Update)
Monday, 28. Sep ’09If you’re using a recent Firefox nightly, your browser is now capable of installing lightweight themes from Web pages — except that you probably don’t know a single site that offers lightweight themes.
I’ve spent some time creating such themes based on my various website styles. Basically I just had to make the header images wider and specify some colors. You can see the result here.
Note that any site can offer lightweight themes. Each theme installation needs to be confirmed by the user, unless the site has been whitelisted to install extensions and themes (via Page Info > Permissions). Whitelisted sites are also allowed to preview themes to the user without selecting them persistently.
If you’d like to create and distribute your own themes, take a look at the source of the simplified example page that I prepared.
Update: getpersonas.com started working with trunk and 1.9.2 branch builds without the Personas add-on.
7 Antworten auf Lightweight browser themes on the Web (Update)
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Gabriela meint 09/28/2009, 11:06:55 PM:
Hi Dao,
I’m on a Namoroka nightly and I tried with your lightweight themes on http://en.design-noir.de/mozilla/themes/?stil=land. I previously went to Page Info > Permissions and enabled the “Themes or Extensions installation” option.
I’m very happy to you the new feature works perfectly!Not so in Minefield.
Any idea why? Would this be a bug?Any idea where else could I find these kind of theme to try?
Keep up your good work!
Many thanks.
Best regards,
Gabriela -
dao meint 09/28/2009, 11:34:36 PM:
It should work in Minefield. You should maybe try a new profile and then file a bug if it still doesn’t work.
You’ll be able to install lightweight themes from getpersonas.com soon.
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Peter Lairo meint 09/29/2009, 12:28:56 AM:
Very nice! But how do I get back to Firefox’s default theme? And wouldn’t it be better to allow some sort of live preview on hover for all sites, so I can see in advance if the theme is going to make my UI unreadable?
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You can use the add-ons manager to select the default theme.
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Tomer meint 09/29/2009, 01:42:22 PM:
How does this deal with RTL UI? Personas currently don’t deal with it well enough, so it make the UI widgets to overlap the background image while using Arabic/Farsi/Hebrew Firefox.
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We don’t handle RTL better than personas does. We can’t mirror the images, as this wouldn’t make sense for certain images (e.g. those with text or a asymmetrical logo).
That said, UI widgets overlaying the images also happens with LTR quite often. I tried to address this by using text-shadow to make text more readable on vivid backgrounds.
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Alfred Kayser meint 10/02/2009, 05:11:26 PM:
Why is Firefox 3.6 introducing a feature that blocks “heavy” themes?
I have been a faithful developer of themes for Mozilla (from M10 till 3.7a1 onwards), but if 3.6 is essentially throwing/forcing people of my themes, I will stop further development and support of Mozilla, especially Firefox.
Introducing a new feature is nice, but forcing out extension developers in this way is NOT nice…P.s. as said in the forum on mozillazine, AMO expects themes to support all features of the application before it is allowed. I would expect the same vice versa.
