Firefox customization site, GetPersonas.com, now open for business

Personas, the cool Mozilla Labs’ Firefox add-on that lets you change the look of the browser with a couple of clicks or less, is now finally open for business with the launch of GetPersonas.com, an official Mozilla repository for all available personas.

With Personas, you just click on the fox icon in the status bar and browse through the collection of personas currently published by Mozilla. As in previous versions, there’s still an option to define your own persona by selecting header and footer images and text colors for the upper and lower toolbars.

Here’s a well done demo video featuring lots of Mozillians:

Getting Started with Personas from Mozilla Labs on Vimeo.

The site also supports personas development: just register, accept the terms of service (which basically grants Mozilla the rights to redistribute your creation, requires you to own the rights to uploaded content),tell if you want to allow derivative work , upload a couple of images (2500 x 200 and 2500 x 100 for the header and footer respectively), define the text colors and you’re ready to go.

A concern I initially had was to notice that when browsing GetPersonas.com, the actual persona of my browser was temporarily applied as I hover on the screenshots, as this could pose a security thread. However, Mozilla Labs’ Myk Melez clarified that it is just as risky as loading any web image on a web page and that the behavior is restricted to GetPersonas.com.

While Personas has been around for roughly a couple of years it’s not until now that Mozilla takes a serious step to allow users to take advantage of it, providing a gallery and an easy way to create and share.