This update to the stand-alone Pinstripe theme turned out to be more of a redesign than I originally intended. Stephen Horlander sent in a cool concept for the browser tabs. Check out the etched text on the inactive tabs. You’ll see some of the other details in the screenshot below. The theme has some rough edges but should be usable. As always I appreciate your feedback.
Click on the thumbnail for a full screenshot.
Install the Pinstripe Theme (requires Firefox 2.0RC1 or later on Mac OS X)
The Firefox 1.x classic default themes, called Pinstripe on Mac and Winstripe on Windows, are available for your installing and downloading pleasure.
These are simply stand-alone versions of the Firefox themes before the Firefox “visual refresh” landed. The themes require at least Firefox 2.0b1. I will work on them in the coming weeks to smooth out the rough spots. I tested the themes on my machines but they may be buggy. Please let me know if they don’t work for you.
Install Pinstripe FF Classic (Mac only)
Install Winstripe FF Classic (Windows only)
Download Pinstripe FF Classic
Download Winstripe FF Classic
By the way, you can get the Illustrator and Photoshop files used to make these themes here.
Designer Stephen Horlander and I are pleased to announce the availability of the toolbar and UI artwork seen in Firefox on Windows and Mac OS X.
Winstripe has been the default theme on the Windows version of Firefox for over two years. Man, how time flies. To explain the odd name, the Pinstripe project started in 2001 as an attempt to make the appearance of the Mozilla Suite fit in with the Mac OS X desktop. Icon designer Stephen Horlander joined the project and took the icon artwork to a new level of usability and polish. The Windows version of Pinstripe, dubbed “Winstripe”, became the default look on the Windows version of Firefox 0.9.
I’d like to see you take the artwork and remix it, mash it up with your own projects, use the artwork as the basis for your own Firefox themes. If you’re not familiar with Firefox themeing, start with the documentation at the Mozilla Dev Center. There’s an active community over at the Mozillazine Themes forum that’ll help you get up to speed. If creating a theme for Firefox looks daunting but you have a great idea, create a mockup of your idea and share it on the Themes forum. You might find people to help you turn your idea into a real theme. Enjoy!
The artwork source zips contain Illustrator and Photoshop files. The majority of the icons were created by Stephen Horlander with contributions by Kevin Gerich. You can use, modify and distribute them under the Mozilla tri-license.
Pinstripe Browser Art (3.6MB)
Winstripe Browser Art (5.9MB)
I am encouraged to read Mitchell Baker’s posts (part 1, part 2) about the usage of Stephen Horlander’s web feed icon which is seen in Firefox, IE7 and on an increasing number of web pages. She suggests that Mozilla should work with the web community to set usage guidelines for the icon. This is a great idea. Guidelines are necessary to avoid confusing web users about the meaning of the image.
It’s puzzling that Mozilla has already applied for a trademark on the web feed icon: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78836825. In light of Mitchell’s recomendation against the formal trademark option, does this mean that the Mozilla’s application will be withdrawn?
There’s also the question of the icon image license. Mitchell’s post implies that the feed icon is not subject to an open source license like the rest of the Firefox code. This is news to me. When Stephen Horlander and I checked in our images for Firefox and Thunderbird, we were told that they are covered by the Mozilla tri-license. In fact part of the move to replace the Qute theme before Firefox 1.0 was driven by the desire to have artwork that is free of proprietary licensing. I hope Mozilla will clear this up soon.
We should move quickly to come up with an icon kit that web sites can use and a clear set of usage guidelines. There has already been some good starts by Khoi Vinh, Matt Brett and others. I look forward to the discussion.
Update: Mitchell Baker posts details about the Mozilla Foundation’s trademark application.
The Mac-like form controls seen in Safari and Camino look nice, but tend to ignore CSS styling. I wanted to see if I could bring more flexible form widget styles to Firefox, while staying close to a native look as seen in Camino.
Single select boxes were the most problematic. How do you fuse the aqua pill-like control with a CSS background or border color? I think the answer is: You don’t. I decided to abandon Aqua for my own hand-rolled look which hopefully is Mac-like enough to blend with the other controls, but flexible enough to look good when CSS styles are applied.
The look for the select box is created with semi-transparent PNG images that allow the background color to show through. You’ll notice the widget also respects your choice of either the Blue or Graphite OS theme. Here’s a build off the Firefox 1.8 branch with the new Mac widget styles. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Download: ff-kmgerich-2006-03-11.dmg.gz, 9 MB
If you want a less experimental build of Firefox with native looking form widgets, check out Neil Lee’s G4 and G5 optimized builds.
A few days ago I took delivery of a brand-spanking-new Thinkpad T42. It’s a beast of a machine with the sex appeal of a brick, but it’ll do.
Why a Thinkpad? I’d like to be able to build Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows and Linux. I’m very slow in getting to my Windows Firefox bugs because of the lack of a good development machine. Now I have no excuse 🙂 I’d also like to develop themes for GNOME at some point.
Continue reading “Thinking Different”
This is a third try at making Mac Firefox’s primitive-looking HTML widgets work with the design of Pinstripe. This time I took care to make the styles play well with others. For instance these styles won’t override CSS set by a web page in most cases.
Continue reading “Pretty Widgets, Part 3”
Ben’s been working on making the Firefox preferences window more Mac-like and I slapped on a skin last night. Here’s a peek. The content fades in and the window slides open as you click from pane to pane.
Someone tell me where I can get the Goats font.
After the Pinstripe theme landed in Firebird, icon designer Stephen Horlander and I dove in to a companion Thunderbird theme. We started in early November 2003 and finally hit the “let’s stop fiddling with it and get it out there” phase in March of 2004. I’ve gone through the messages that Stephen and I exchanged during that time and pulled out a few examples of design decisions.
Continue reading “Thunderbird's Extreme Mac-over”
Mike Pinkerton does a great job of summing up the history of Mozilla, Chimera, and Camino on MacOS. His post describes the various Mac project codenames and answers some questions that I see from time to time like “Why doesn’t Mozilla run on OS 9?”.