Thanksgiving is coming fast, and with over 50 personas available on Mozilla Add-ons for you to try, you can bring the season joy to your favorite browser as well. Here are just a few to consider.
Remember you need the Personas extension or the latest Firefox 3.6 beta to try it. Have fun!
With over 30,000 personas now available at Mozilla Add-ons, it’s no surprise there are now 81 Halloween themed available ready for the scary night!
Here are my favorite five, but there is something for everyone: really scary, cute , and even pink ones!
In preparation for Firefox 3.6, due later this year and which will feature lightweight themes support or personas, Mozilla Add-ons has just added a section dedicated to personas, so users won’t have to go a separate site for all their customization needs.
Like GetPersonas.com, you just hover the personas thumbnails to live preview it on Firefox. If you like it, just press Wear it to keep it. To choose another theme, open the Add-ons Manager and select a different one in the Themes tab.
As Firefox 3.6 approaches its first of two planned beta releases, it has gotten one of the most distinctive features of this release: support for lightweight themes, also known as personas.
Like with Mozilla Labs’ Personas extensions and unlike full fledged themes, personas only customize the toolbars and status bar backgrounds, and the menus text color, just a couple of elements of Firefox UI that makes a large share of what we perceive as customization.
Warner Bros. has released a set of four Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince personas for Firefox. So if you just can’t wait for the July 15 premier, at least you can have Harry and company staring at you all day from your favorite browser.
Within the web today, a browsing transformation is underway. We’re seeing constant advancement from the static browsing Middle Ages of old and the ushering in of a new Modern Era of openness, speed and security.
With this words, Mozilla’s Sean Martell presents his cool Da Vinci-esque A Web Browser Renaissance wallpaper available for 4:3 and widescreen formats. Also available as a persona.
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.
Despite my worst expectations, the Iron Man movie proved to be a very entertaining one, a good story, perhaps the best told for a comic character based movie so far, fast paced, appropriate special effects. In sum, recommended.
If you also enjoyed the movie, here’s an Iron Man persona for you. You will need Personas 1.0 alpha 1, Mozilla Labs’ Firefox extension that allows to set a background for the toolbars and the status bar.
