My First Firefox Theme

[KLB]

Today my first Firefox theme was approved and added to Mozilla's add-ons site (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3699/).

This isn't the first theme I've created, but it is the first time I've shared it with others via Mozilla's Add-ons site. If there is one thing I don't like about themes, skins, etc. is when they waste desktop real estate so when Firefox 2.0 came out the first thing I set out to do was to take Firefox's new "Classic" theme and squeeze every pixel of wasted space out of it and in the process ended up creating my "Classic Compact" theme (see attached screen shots). Since my goal was simply to compress the classic theme, not change the look, I did not change any of the graphic files in the theme.

I started with the default "Classic" theme, which uses 134 pixels of vertical space for the menu, address, bookmark, tab and status bars and squeezed them down to 108 pixels of total vertical space. If one turns off the bookmark bar as I do, my theme uses as little as 86 pixels of vertical space (plus the space consumed by the "title bar" which is controlled by the OS).

I think I could squeeze maybe 2-4 pixels pixels out of the theme, but not without starting to hurt the appearance of the classic theme.

So if you are a Firefox user who appreciates the conservation of desktop space as much as I do, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3699/, give my theme a try and tell me what you think. If you like it, please make sure and give the theme high marks on the theme ranking.

For those who get just as annoyed as I do about losing themes and extensions on browser updates, I have already downloaded and tested my theme on Firefox 3.0a1 and reflected this in my theme's maxversion. As a result you won't have to worry about updates to Firefox disabling my theme until at least Firefox 3.0. :cool:

[stymiee]

Wow, that is compact! Nice job Ken.

[KLB]

Thanks John.

I can't believe that it has gotten over 2,000 downloads in less than 24 hours.!

If I could figure out how to modify the text box on the find bar I could further reduce that bar by four pixels. I could eliminate two pixels by getting rid of the horizontal stripe between the menu bar and tool bar. 2px could be eliminated inside of the URL and search boxes and I could potentially eliminate one pixel from the tab bar if I could just figure out how the dark gray space between the top of the tabs and bottom of the tool bar is controlled.

[adon]

good luck.

[KLB]

I figured out how to style the text box on the find bar and have worked out most of the extra space on that bar. My plan is to push an update of my theme to the Mozilla Add Ons page next week once I get some other tasks completed. I might also test it against FF1.5 to broaden the number of people who can use it.

So far my theme has been downloaded over 5,000 times in just over a week.

[KLB]

Just an update.

As of this moment, my theme has been downloaded a total of 13,056 times. Who would have thought a theme could get so many downloads in such a short period of time. I did push out my update with the find bar tweaks (v2.0.2)

I tried my theme against FF1.5 and determined it wasn't worth the effort required to make it support FF1.5 as everyone should be switching to FF2.0 within the next several months anyways. There were some serious rendering issues on 1.5.