Inspired by Jon’s attempt to make Mac Firefox HTML form widgets a little easier on the eyes, I’ve taken a shot at making a set of widget styles that blends with Mac Firefox. It has focus rings too!
Instructions: Download the userContent.css file and copy it to your ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/(profile name)/chrome folder. Or add the code within to your existing userContent.css file. It’ll look best on a recent Firefox branch build.
I just checked in new revisions of the back, forward, reload and stop icons for Mac Firefox by icon wizard Stephen Horlander. These new buttons attempt to address the critics of the previous set, and they share their shapes with the Windows Firefox theme. We went with a more colorful toolbar this time instead of making the nav icons all blue. This will probably be the final major change before Firefox 1.0 is released.
[ Update: Download the latest Firefox nightly build to see the new icons ]
[ This post is by Stephen Horlander, the designer behind the majority of the Firefox icons. – Kevin ]
After the release of “Winstripe” into the wild there was a large and varied response. Ranging from mindless petulant rants and demands, to well thought out critiques. Lets just say there were more of the former than the latter. Even before it’s inclusion in Firefox I was personally less than thrilled about how it turned out. The idea, as you may have read, was to take the icons from Pinstripe and make them fit into a Windows environment. The theory was sound as the icon concepts used in Pinstripe were, I feel, fairly strong. Due to time constraints and my own admittedly limited familiarity with more recent incarnations of Windows I think they failed on this count. They do however work well enough and are a good deal better than most of the icons used by many Windows applications, in my biased opinion anyway : )
Continue reading “The Browser, Redesigned: Take Two (or 0.2)”
Now that the dust is settling from the 0.9 release, I thought I’d turn my attention to the Mac Firefox experience and what I think needs to happen to make 1.0 great. Firefox’s UI is “good enough” for day to day use, but there are some not so subtle rough edges that make Mac Firefox user experience less than stellar. Here’s a list with some thoughts. The ones on the top are very important in my opinion. The ones near the bottom will probably be random gibbering 🙂
Continue reading “Closing in on Firefox 1.0: the Mac user experience”
Firefox 0.9 has been released. This new version includes a lot of great features and optimizations as well as a new default theme.
Mac users will allso notice that the default theme also gets a set of Aqua icons to replace the previous “button” icons. The new icons are more consistent with the Aqua icon guidelines and are easier to hit with the mouse. They also work with the Windows default theme to create a unified look across platforms.
I will create a Graphite version soon. Oh, and before you ask me to put the old icons back, please turn on “small icons” and live with the new ones for a week. Then we’ll talk 🙂
You might have read that Firefox is getting a new default theme. Here’s a first look. I’ll post more about the making of the theme in the next few days.
Edit: I appreciate all feedback, negative as well as positive, but please reserve final judgement until you have actually used the theme 🙂
Click on the image to enlarge.
Finally. Here’s a version of Pinstripe for the Mozilla suite. I’m not done yet but I thought I’d share what I have so far. The status bar icons need some work. I didn’t touch the Composer or Chatzilla components so they still have a partially Classic look. Click here to install. Mac OS X only please.
This should work with any version of the Mozilla suite back to 1.5, but I have only tested so far with the latest 1.7rc. If you want to know what the theme looks like, check out the Firefox gallery and Thunderbird screen shots. I welcome your questions, comments, criticism, and abuse 🙂
The 0.6 version of Thunderbird, the open source email and news reader from Mozilla.org, was released today. This is the first release to feature the Pinstripe theme and Jon Hicks’ spiffy new icon art. Mac users will also appreciate the new mail notification badge in the dock. Try it out! Keep in mind that this is beta software, but it has come a long way since the last release.
Here are some screenshots:
Main Window, classic view
Main Window, vertical view
Message window
Compose window
Junk Mail controls
Preferences window
The new icon hasn’t made its way into the Mac OS X Thunderbird nightly builds yet, but when it is included it will be a great compliment to the new Pinstripe theme.
A look at the history of a BBC News article provided by my RSS aggregator. Each of the three items in the image below link to the same article.
Update: Josh pointed out that the headline changed *again*. Now it reads “US chides Spain for Iraq pull-out”. Up next: “US gently cautions Spain not to track mud across its nice clean floor”.
