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Tag Archives: mozilla
Are Firefox Themes Dying?
I’ve been developing Firefox themes for the past few years and, as I see Firefox change and evolve, I’m beginning to wonder if themes are going to become a thing of the past.
Why?
- Firefox is pushing personas. They are now standard in Firefox 3.6.
- Themes are complex with lots of pieces to edit and are not easy for users to create.
- Getting them to work cross platform is tricky. Testing cross platform is even harder.
- Themes have to be tweaked often to work with Firefox updates. On major releases, possibly completely re-created.
Tinseltown Is A Part of Mozilla’s First Fashion Your Firefox
Have you heard about Mozilla’s Fashion Your Firefox? It’s Mozilla’s way of showcasing exceptional Firefox addons and grouping them in a way that makes it easier to find great addons.
Under the Decorator heading are a handful of themes that were picked based on quality and usability. One of those addons is Tinseltown.
I’m honored that Mozilla has chosen one of my themes to showcase. I make themes because I want to and the recognition from Mozilla, along with all the positive feedback, is really appreciated.
iPox for Firefox 3 – Beta
Now that Firefox 3 is out, I have a lot of themeing to do!
The first theme to be released for Firefox 3 will be iPox and I’m happy to announce the beta is out today.
The beta was born from the Mac default theme and has been built from the ground up. This is all new code people. 
The beta has been working great on my iMac, but it’s not as pretty on Windows. And Linux I have no idea.
Get ready to download Firefox 3 tomorrow!
Tuesday June 17th is the release date for Firefox 3! We (Firefox fans) are hoping to set a Guinness world record for the most times a piece of software is downloaded in the first 24 hours! If you could download Firefox 3 on Tuesday, that’d be a great help!
So what’s new in Firefox 3? Lots of stuff. Here are a few high points.
- A browser interface that look and acts more like your opperating system. Including native Mac checkboxes, buttons and scrollbars!
- Smart bookmarks, aka Places. The browser will automatically remember your ‘most visited’ and ‘recently visited’ sites via a quick bookmark in your bookmarks bar.
Silvermel – Return of Firefox Style
Remember a while ago when Charamel roamed the streets? It was one of the most detailed and perfect Firefox themes I’ve ever seen. Well now there is Silvermel; a silver version of Charamel.
Silvermel has every detail down and outstanding design everywhere you turn. It’s a work of art that you just have to see. Lucky for you, you can! It’s available on the Mozilla Addon’s site and works for Firefox 1-3 and Thunderbird 1.5 or 2.
This is one Firefox theme you have to see to believe. 
Fastest Mac Browser Test: Firefox 2, 3 and Safari
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.
Firefox 3 & iPox – An Update
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?
Updated Mozilla Prism Shows A Lot of Progress
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.
From Outlook to Thunderbird and Back Again
The process of exporting email from Outlook to Thunderbird on Windows is really easy. Exporting it from Thunderbird and importing in to Outlook is not hard either, just time consuming. Both ways can be done.
Outlook to Thunderbird
This is actually really easy. The first thing you need is all your email in Outlook. Then, when you setup Thunderbird it will ask you if you want to import your Outlook email. Say yes and it does all the work. No, Thunderbird doesn’t have an import function for the PST file, but it can import anything that’s in Outlook on the same machine. It’s as easy as that.
iPhone Facebook Sidebar for Firefox
In the past, I’ve talked about how to open Facebook in the sidebar of Firefox. Now, I’ve taken that idea one step farther and created a Firefox extension.
The iPhone Facebook Sidebar extension opens Facebook’s iPhone page and allows you to keep tabs on your friends, update your status, message people and accept friend requests.
Features include:
- Seeing friend’s updates.
- Updating our status.
- Viewing Friends
- Writing on friends wall.
- Viewing inbox.
- Sending messages.
- Other miscellaneous Facebook fun.
- Works on Mac and Windows. Possibly Linux too.
