While browsing through the Mozilla Addons site yesterday I came across the official WALL•E Firefox theme!

Unfortunately the theme is Windows only. However, with a bit of investigating, I was able to extract the jar file and install it on my Mac.

The theme is pretty good. WALL•E is a bit hard to see behind the address bar and I wish the bar was semi-transparent so that he was more visible. It’s also a bit hefty at over 3MB. Other than that, it looks pretty slick and works well. Nothing to extraordinary, but fun none the less. As it makes its way to 1.0, the theme has a lot of potential to grow into something spectacular.

Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

Well, I spent a few hours yesterday trying to figure out how I was going to go about upgrading all my themes to Firefox 3.  So far, I haven’t had any good ideas.

The new theme structure with Firefox 3 is different than Firefox 2.  I knew it would be.  And, at this time, there is nothing out there to help a theme developer know what to change or what to update.  There is a long list of ongoing theme changes, but what does that really mean?  What are the steps to upgrading a theme?

Introducing the iPhone Socialthing! sidebar for Firefox. It’s simply an extension that loads the iPhone version of Socialthing! in Firefox’s sidebar. All features are controlled by Socialthing!, I’m just brining it into Firefox.

Download the iPhone Socialthing! Sidebar extension. (right click, save links as)

How it works.
1. Download the extension to your desktop. Then go to Tools -> Add-ons and drag ist.xpi to your add-ons window. It’ll install and you’ll have to restart Firefox.

2. Log into Socialthing.com via your main Firefox window. Doing this before hand will make things a lot easier. If you log in through the sidebar, it won’t redirect properly. (Socialthing! developers, please fix this.)

I was excited about Mozilla’s Prism application when it first arrived on the scene. But then Fluid came out and I realized how un-polished Prism was.  However, Prism 0.9 is quite a large step forward.

What’s new in Prism 0.9?

The big thing is that it’s based off of Firefox 3.   It’s got the speed and upgrades that the Firefox 3 betas have.  Also us Mac users now get native widgets!  It’s no longer got ugly checkboxes and drop downs.

The Firefox 3 rendering engine alone makes it feel much snappier and more responsive than the first Prism 0.7 release.

I updated iPox to install on Firefox 3  and took it for a run.  What happened?  Well, lets just say there were a few issues.

I was hoping for an easy transition from Firefox 2 to 3 but I’m not sure that’s going to happen.

Once the betas become release clients, then maybe I’ll start theming.  However, this looks like it could be a complete re-code.

I thought I’d write a random post with some of what’s on my mind this weekend.

• I’m now running Firefox 3 betas thanks to MultiFireFox.
• MidnightFox was updated the other day with incorrect buttons.  Oops.  That has been re-uploaded and should be made public soon.
• yExplore and GA? have been updated for Firefox 3. Actually, for the beats not the official release.  That’ll happen when the final release comes out.
• Now that I am running Firefox 3, I can start theming it.
• Just started to watch Entourage.  It seems like a pretty cool show.

MidnightFox has always been a great theme. It’s dark, yet usable and, as stated by others, one of the best dark themes out there. However, I wanted more.

While fixing a few toolbar issue with MidnightFox, I started updating other pieces. I reworked the tabs, the bookmarks, some menus and the the navigation buttons. Taking extero’s icons and leveraging Pixelmator’s menu design, I created much nicer toolbar with icons that ‘pop’ when you roll over them.

MidnightFoxy was first set to replace MidnightFox, however some of the testers were partial to the old buttons. So MidnigthFoxy was born. It’s basically the same theme, only with a more polished toolbar.

If you tried to download the iPhone Facebook sidebar extension or the latest MidnightFox theme beta, you may have noticed the button didn’t properly install the files. Instead it threw some odd error. This is an issue that effects mostly Windows users.

I’ve since been made aware of the issue and included a link to download the theme and extension file directly. Once downloaded, just open your addon’s window in Firefox, drag and drop them in and they should install.

Sorry about the confusion and thanks to those who brought it to my attention.

If you’re looking for a nice Valentines day theme for Firefox, check out PinkHope. It’s heavy on the pink and should work out well. Better yet, it’s completely free.

Granted, it wasn’t designed especially for Valentines day, but it works. PinkHope is actually a theme to help spread breast cancer awareness. It just happens to be a good Valentines Day theme too.