Even though Firefox 4 might not yet be ready for the public, it does not hurt to take a look at some of the nice themes that have been developed for the browser of the future.  One theme that caught my eye for Firefox 4 is AvantGarde. It brings a unique new look to the Firefox 4 browser interface.

Once Firefox 4 gets released, one of the first things people will want to do is change the way it looks.  That is the reason we have themes for Firefox in the first place, right? AvantGarde brings a colorful and fun browsing experience to the Mozilla browser.

Here is a little more about the theme from the developer.

"Avant-garde" is a French term, with no real English translation, that essentially means "out of the cultural or accepted norm". Avant-garde artists and designers push the boundaries of what is known, and considered normal – and that’s what this theme is all about. It pushes the boundaries of colour, visual association, and user experience.

If you think the default look and feel of Firefox 4 is going to be a little too vanilla for you – the AvantGarde theme is a great way to spice it up.  Have any other Firefox 4 themes impressed you? Let me know in the comments.  You can pick up the AvantGarde theme from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Today I have for you three themes based on the ideas and icons behind the Gnome Colors project.  What is that? The Gnome Colors project really aims at making the Gnome desktop as elegant, colorful and consistent as possible.

So can these three themes, each accented with their own color stand up to the rest of the Firefox themes out there?  I will let you decide.

Gnome-Wise

Gnome-Noble

Gnome-Brave

So, what do you think – are they a hit or a miss?  I personally like all three flavors offered of this basic Gnome-inspired theme.

Dark Light

Brushed Metal

Dream of Waves

Auora Blue

Solid Royal

Brown Bag

Light Green Tile

Glass – Clear

Vista Greens

Royal Noir

What do you think? Do I have good taste, or does another one tickle your fancy even more than these?  Let me know in the comments – and feel free to share your own favorite Personas for Firefox.

One big complaint about search engines is they are all rather vanilla with their visual representation.  Wouldn’t it be better if you could color code things a ‘bit more?  One Greasemonkey script that does a great job at this is Colorful Search.

Once you install this user script, it will generate a random light background color for Bing, Yahoo and Google.  Colors are decided and grouped together based on the domain name they come from.  So you can quickly see that if Firefox Facts results are light blue, and you see 7 out of the 10 results are light blue, they all came from here.  It makes the visual representation much more useable. 

Want to color code your own search engine results? You can pick up Colorful Search from userscripts.org.

The features to love here are plentiful. You can dynamically, show bookmarks by using folder and search terms.  Highlight the bookmarks in any color you would like, sort the bookmarks by name, visit time, last visited and most visited, and a lot more.

Incredible Bookmarks also help you clean house.  It can:

• Run a check to find out duplicate bookmarks in each Incredible Bookmarks toolbar.
• Run a check to check the links in each Incredible Bookmarks toolbar to see which links are no longer available.

This video covers some more of the basics when it comes to using the Incredible Bookmarks add-on for Firefox:

This add-on for Firefox has incredible promise, and I could not find a feature I didn’t like.  My favorite overall feature is the ability to color code your bookmarks and bookmark folders.  I like to keep things neat, nice and organized – so this suits my needs, perfectly.

To learn more about Incredible Bookmarks, check out the official site, and you can download it from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

One thing is for sure, with the correctly equipped Firefox browser, you too can become a better web designer or developer. How so? Well, Firefox has some really great tools for both of these jobs. Finding the one that doe the best job, is another job all on it’s own.

Firefox has a lot of web development add-ons you can use, however these are the best of the best at what they do.

• Console² – Console² (pronounced Console Squared or Console Two) replaces the JavaScript Console with what could be the next generation Error Console. From v0.5 includes the Console Filter extension previously available separately from the Console² website.
• User Agent Switcher – The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
• Firebug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
• MeasureIt – Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.
• FoxyProxy – FoxyProxy is an advanced proxy management tool that completely replaces Firefox’s limited proxying capabilities. It offers more features than SwitchProxy, ProxyButton, QuickProxy, xyzproxy, ProxyTex, TorButton, etc.
• FirePHP – FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call. You must have Firebug installed and the “Net” panel enabled to use this extension.
• ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies. Perfect color picker tool for Firefox.
• Stylish – Perfect for testing those tiny CSS tweaks, you can also restyle the rest of the web too with this unique user styles manager.
• View Source Chart – Graphically displays HTML tag boundaries, nesting tag orders, structure and hierarchy. In other words, it makes it all pretty looking.
• Web Developer – The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

Disagree or have your own suggestion for the perfect web designer or web development add-on that should be on this list? Drop in a comment and let us know. We’d love to hear your feedback!

There are a number of different add-ons that will change the way your Firefox tabs look.  How would you like to have one that made your tabs match your web site you are browsing.  FabTabs does that.

How does it work?  I’m happy you asked…

FabTabs is kind of an experimental extension for now that will color your Firefox Tabs in a way you have never seen before. By taking a small screenshot of the website you are currently viewing, and calculating the most commonly used color from that screenshot, it tries to take the 1 essential color from the website and applies it to the tab.

Sounds like a good idea.  If your looking to make your tabs appear more like the pages your surfing, pick up the FabTabs add-on for Firefox.

There have been several highlighter extensions I have seen over the years for Firefox, however this one might be my favorite.  The ultra light-weight Highlights add-on for Firefox simply highlights selected text on web pages with a right-click of the mouse.

To highlight text on a web page, select the text, right-click (‘Ctrl+Click’, on Mac OS X) and select ‘Highlight’ menu from the popup.  The default yellow highlight color can easily be changed, by clicking the “Highlights” icon on the status bar, and choosing the color picker.  To remove the highlights, simply refresh the page.

No matter if you are doing research or you just like to highlight interesting points while you read, the Highlights extension is an excellent way to mark your spot on the Web.

Marsh Aqua

Marsh Chrome

Marsh Pink

Marsh Red

Marsh Orange

Marsh Purple

Marsh Green

Marsh Brown

So what do you think of these more colorful versions of the default Firefox 3 theme?

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© Mitch Keeler 2011 | Check out my personal blog and my hosting podcast too!

  ]]> http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2009/01/05/multi-colored-versions-of-firefoxs-default-theme/feed/ 0 http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2008/09/07/grab-color-palettes-in-firefox/ http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2008/09/07/grab-color-palettes-in-firefox/#comments Sun, 07 Sep 2008 18:37:18 +0000 Mitch http://www.firefoxfacts.com/2008/09/07/grab-color-palettes-in-firefox/ Sitting in the left corner of your status bar, until you are ready for it to jump into action Palette Grabber for Firefox, will grab the color scheme for any site on the web you are viewing.

Here is a little more about the extension from the developer:

Palette Grabber is a Firefox extension for web designers. It adds an “Export color palette” command to your Tools menu; selecting this command will extract a color palette for the current page and export it to a Photoshop/Illustrator color palette file. It’s useful for creating mockups of new designs which share a color palette with an existing design.

The Palette Grabber extension supports Photoshop, Flash, PaintShop Pro, GIMP, Adobe Fireworks, and Mac OS X Color Picker palette formats.  You can pick it up from the official web site at http://www.gusprevas.info/palettegrabber/.