Personas for Firefox

This weekend, Mozilla Labs released a new Firefox extension, “Personas for Firefox.” This browser add-on gives you the ability to quickly apply different themes to your Firefox browser. Personas hopes to address several issues with the current process involved with theming your browser, including that fact that themes are too hard to find, install, and use and also that graphic designers can’t style the browser without having to code. In this newer version of Personas (an older prototype was discussed and tested earlier this year), a tool called the “Persona selector” is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all the designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. When you apply a new theme, the changes are applied instantly, with no need to restart the browser. Yay! Unfortunately, loading a new “Persona” is not the same as loading a real Firefox theme, as Personas do not change the browser buttons; instead the Personas extension loads a custom image behind the buttons, like a sunset, a pattern of some sort, or a winter wonderland scene. The Firefox status bar is also set to match the color scheme of the image used. It would be great if you could use your own images, but as of now, that is not the case. Still, the Personas extension did make my boring default theme much more interesting. This extension has a lot of potential as more designers get involved and more Personas become available. In the meantime, it certainly is fun to play with! You can download the Personas extension here. (Via RRW)

Tags: Firefox, personas