My latest Firefox theme is entitled extero and you can install a preview of it today!

What’s different about extero? The main thing is the tab bar. It was designed to bring the tab bar to the front. It’s kind of hard to explain, so you’ll have to check it out. extero also uses dots instead of little arrows for menus and, back by popular demand, the close button is on the left.

Granted, it’s not finished in my mind yet. I’m unsatisfied with the right click menus and am torn on what to do. If I leave them black, I have to get rid of the border somehow. If I change them, what to?

If you’ve tried out GA? or Google Personalized Search Switch, please take a moment to either add a comment over at the extension’s page on the Mozilla Addon site (they are in the sandbox) or on the individual blog posts. The reviews will help me get them onto the public Addon site faster and out to the general public. They’ll also help me find out if there are any bugs that need to be fixed up.

Each extension will be undergoing some updates as I work towards version 1.0, but testing is a big part.

Thanks

Did you know that there are Firefox themes and extensions stuck in the sandbox and that you can help save them? It’s true, with just a few clicks of the mouse, and taps on the keyboard, you can bring joy to a Firefox addon and their developer.

It’s really easy, just head over to the Mozilla Addon site and sign up for a free account. Once you are logged in, click on the ’sandbox’ link next to the search box and you can then browse though the sandbox looking at many brand new & updated themes or extensions. Some of which you may have never seen before! Find one you like, install it and try it out for a few days. Then, head back to the addon’s page in the sandbox and write a review. That’s all there is to it.

Check out iV, my first Thunderbird theme.

Currently iV is in beta mode and this is the first public release. Seeing as I’ve never themed Thunderbird before, there are a lot of issues. It’s funny, I can now create a sweet Firefox theme in just a few hours, but with Thunderbird, I’m fumbling left and right.

iV beta 1 includes all toolbar buttons, basic Lighting support (it works), custom buttons, folders and all sorts of icons.

iAqua is rolling along at a fantastic rate. I’ve been working on adding in some of the feedback I’ve been given and theming many other areas. It’s now a much more complete Firefox theme.

The number of additions to 0.2beta are to many to count but here are a few:

• Apple like scrollbars.
• Re-worked and completed large toolbar buttons.
• Add small toolbar buttons
• Added preferences buttons.
• Added bookmarks manager buttons.
• Updated bookmark bar colors.
• Updated auto complete hover colors.
• Window backgrounds customized.
• Apple like progressbar.
• Apple like buttons.

Today’s question comes off the iPox Remix request line:
How do I make the font on the bookmark toolbar change color when I hover over it?

Since Firefox runs mainly on CSS, this is a pretty easy edit. Just go into /browser/browser.css and look for the following chunk of code:

toolbarbutton.bookmark-item:hover,
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item:hover:active,
toolbarbutton.bookmark-item[open="true"] {
background: url(chrome://browser/skin/bookmarks/bookmark-highlight.png) !important;
color: #fff;
padding: 2px 4px;
}

Where you see color: #fff this states that it’s using white as the rollover (aka hover) color. Change that to another color and you’re good to go. Colors can be in HEX format or you can type in an actual color like red or blue.

Once you’ve gone though and created your own, original, Firefox theme via the iPox Remix tutorials, you’re next step is to submit it to the Mozilla Addon site for the world to enjoy.

Head on over to addons.mozilla.org and register for a free account. Once that’s done, you should see a ‘Developers Tools’ link in the left sidebar. Click on it and the left sidebar will change and you’ll see a link to ‘Submit Add-on’. This is where you upload your theme file (.jar).

There are three main toolbars in Firefox, each that can have a separate background.

1. Navigation Bar
2. Bookmarks Bar
3. Status Bar

The main toolbar background graphic is named toolbar-background.png and located in the /global/toolbar/ folder. If you just recreate a new png file, you won’t need to edit any of the CSS code. If you want to make some modifications to how it’s displayed, you can open /global/toolbar.css and edit the toolbar elements. For the most part here, you are just concerned with the toolbar style.

This edition of iPox Remix, we are talking about creating custom toolbar buttons. Good buttons can really make a theme so don’t just rush through them.

Firefox’s toolbar buttons are really just two images. One for all the large and one for all the small. Each image is made up of 14 (or 15 if you include email) individual buttons. Large buttons in iPox Remix are set at 32×32px and small are 24×24px.

Each button also has five states. From top to bottom they are:
Normal, Pressed, Disabled, Hover, Active.

Announcing iPox Remix. No, it’s not a new theme, it’s the iPox source for you to customize.

iPox Remix is not only the files, it is going to also be a set of walkthroughs that help you better understand how to create a Firefox theme. They could be used to modify iPox as you wish, or it could be to use it as a base to create your own, all new, Firefox theme.