One of the things that the Opera browser does way better than Firefox is skinning. In Opera you can go to their skin site, find a theme that you want to install, and preview it immediately in the browser. No restart is required.
Mozilla looks as though they are experimenting with a similar method via an extension called Personas. With Personas you’ll be able to perform basic skinning operations in Firefox without ever needing to restart the browser.
All of the goodness happens in the bottom-left corner of the Status Bar. That’s where a little icon will appear once you’ve installed the extension, and clicking on that icon will immediately present a list of themes that can be chosen. They’re organized according to the most popular, newest ones, and also broken up into categories. As of right now there are a few dozen different themes available for Personas users.
It’s important to note that these themes are not the same as the ones you download from Mozilla’s add-on site. The Personas themes do not skin any of the buttons or the Control Panel area, and the only changes you’ll really see is a new background image behind the Menus, Address Bar, Bookmarks, Tabs, and Status Bar. Despite being such a basic skinning alternative I did find that the themes give Firefox a refreshing appearance.
Now one can only hope that this will result in full skinning capabilities down the road, and that they’ll apply a similar technology to extension installation. Maybe Mozilla will be able to make restarting the browser a thing of the past!
Get Personas [via CyberNet Forum, Firefox Guru, and Ars]
Thanks to Richard and “S” for the tips!
I have been using this extension since this morning… it’s funny but not as good as I thought. But it’s pretty good for children.
Skins are retarded anyway. I like my apps as bland as possible, completely text based even. Vi anyone?
This looks best if you have the Menu bar, Navigation, and Bookmarks toolbars all visible. I usually put every thing on the Menu bar and hide the Navigation/Bookmarks toolbar to keep things more clean and have even greater screen space on my 20.1″ 1680×1050 monitor without going fullscreen.
Oh that reminds me, lynx still remains my favourite browser.
I’ve never used Opera or Safari, but do THEY allow installing add-ins without restarting the browser. I don’t think it’ll ever be possible with Firefox or IE.
I do use Vi quite often, but I do like to have my skins.
I like to condense things down as well, and that was one of the first things that I noticed. The tabs become very hard to read for some of the skins which are designed assuming you have all of those toolbars open.
Never say never!