Webupon

I’m back with a quick blog on what I find to be the best Firefox appearance customization using the new FirefoxPersonas skin gallery along with a regular theme. Hopefully, you’ll get some ideas on how to make the most out of the Personas addon and maybe you’ll learn something that you didn’t know before about it. If not, you’ll never get back the time you’ll waste here. Of course you’ll already need a basic understanding of downloading Firefox themes and addons, so study up because you won’t learn squat about that here. I’m sure there’s a couple million pages on that subject around the net. Unless you don’t know how to use search engines, then you have no business online, really.

The Personas website http://www.getpersonas.com/ is one of the best additions to Firefox lately because basically, you can make your browser look the way you want. We all know how people like to put their own touch on their crap, so Personas does just that. You can even make your own skin, tho I haven’t done so yet, so I’ll leave that to the other tutorials out there.

There’s one drawback that I find about personas, however. It just doesn’t give you a full theme experience. Firefox admits that it’s just a top image and a bottom image for your browser and it only looks nice if you don’t use a normal Firefox theme at all. They recommend that you turn off your themes when using it. Also, many of the persona skins use detailed graphics that can block your bookmark links, and your other toolbar menu items.

So what you might end up with is something that looks terrible, like this image.

As you can see, the links in my toolbar are barely visible and the Persona skin doesn’t really feel like a theme that we’re used to seeing. Just a bit too plain if you don’t have a theme installed as Firefox recommends.

However, I found a Firefox theme that can alleviate this problem. It’s called “My Firefox” and the purpose of the theme is to simulate a Vista appearance.

Of course, you’ll also need to find a good looking Persona skin in the gallery to suit your color preferences and make sure it doesn’t clash with the visible links in your header.

My Firefox can be found here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4129

It seems like they found the same thing I did, because they recently edited their page to say that you can use Personas with their theme.

The idea is that My Firefox is mostly transparent or translucent, or whatevercent, so your background shows through.

This is what the end result looks like.

As you can see, the toolbar is now a solid color, but you can still view quite a bit of the Persona skin that says “I love Vodka” (I really do, down to my belly).

Persona does the work of changing the link colors, so don’t worry about that.

There’s another feature of My Firefox that I enjoy, it highlights the active webpage in your linkbox. I like the button appearance and it’s a nice clean skin that has the handy little icons that you’d find in Internet Explorer on the bottom right corner.

Of course it’s not perfect, because you can’t view the entire Persona skin, but I happen to like it that way. I don’t need a giant image. Makes it look too Myspace to me.

There’s also one other problem with Personas that hurts a lot of their skins.

In the bottom corner, I have icons that I use a lot and many Personas skins cover them with hard images. But that’s an easy fix if you find the right skin. They all don’t have images there. I sacrificed this for now.

There’s a few settings that you can play around with for the My Firefox theme once you install it, so you can tweek away. Those can be found in the extensions area of your addons, not on the actual theme. I used the ‘use original background of statusbar’ setting so the bar is translucent.

Then there’s probably some of you who just don’t want anything to do with something that says Internet Explorer or Vista. You’re on your own.

Hope that helped a couple of people.

If you like, follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/Rough_Kut Hey, I like meaningless popularity contests too.

Thanks.