Here is a quick screen grab of my own Firefox installation using the old Firefox 3 icons:

I do have to say, I don’t mind the change.  All of the design aspects from Firefox 3 that they decided to keep feel like they fit right in with Firefox 4.  I think I might actually use this theme for a while.

You can pick up the Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ over at the Firefox Add-ons website.

In addition to the interactive demos the website delivers to you, you can also learn more about how each demo works and what technology is used to make it happen. The man navigation of the website divides the demos between HTML5, Design, Video and WEBGL.  Hopefully more demos will be added soon!

As a bonus, if you want to see more great demonstrations of what HTML, CSS and JavaScript can do – head on over to the Mozilla Demo Studio. 

If you are using the new Firefox 4 release candidate, then this is a website you should definitely check out.  Take a trip to Mozilla’s Web O’ Wonder and let me know what your favorite demo was.

Are you a graphic designer looking for a new muse? Mozilla has a new contest going on for designing the new Firefox 4 launch t-shirt. All they need now is your submissions for some of the best and unique Firefox 4 logo designs.  The winning design will be printed as the official Firefox 4 launch t-shirt, a limited edition item featured in the Mozilla store and distributed to the world wide audience of Firefox fans.

I always love these types of public events like this that Mozilla puts together because you see all kinds of unique and excellent designs.  Here are a few more things to consider and keep in mind when designing:

• Ideal printing space is roughly a 10×10 inch square canvas on the front of the shirt.
• You’ll be designing for the front only, as the back will already have the Firefox wordmark printed.
• Please include a background color suggestion in your mockup. This will be the color of the t-shirt your design is printed on.
• You can use a basic t-shirt template as a reference guide for placement and size when designing. But please submit only the design itself, not a mockup with the t-shirt.
• Files should be uploaded as high-res (300 dpi) PNGs or JPEGs. But be sure to hold onto the original working files, because if you win we will need those. Be sure to optimize the file for print, and preserve all the layers.
• Original artwork should be created using a scalable vector graphics editor program (SVG format), such as Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

The submission period ends on March 13, so act now and get your design together.  Let me know if you submit one too – would love to feature it here on Firefox Facts. To learn more about how to participate, check out creative.mozilla.org.

Need help distinguishing which tab is which in Firefox? OK, maybe telling where one tab ends and another begins really is not that hard.  However, it would help if each tab was colored.  ColorfulTabs, one of my favorite add-ons for the Firefox browser – does that with style. 

Once installed, your tabs are automatically transformed from bland vanilla tabs to colorful and easily distinguishable tabs.  The colors really don’t interrupt the overall look and feel of the Firefox navigation experience either.  Some of the features included are:

• Beautiful colors — We promise you’ll fall in love with these colors.
• Unique Hues — Unique hues help you easily differentiate between various tabs and intuitively remember each tab. It’s surprising to realize how it just works.
• Coloring by site domain — Color each tab depending on its server/domain for identifying the website. You can tell which site is in which tab by just looking at the colors.
• Custom tab color — And just incase you prefer to tag the tabs with a custom color feel free to give your tabs a color of your choice right from the context menu of the tab.
• Generate colors on demand — This mode allows you to color only the tabs you want colored. The rest start the default shade.
• Enhanced tab highlighting — While we are theming the tabs how about some transparency effects? Fade the background tabs to as much as you want to highlight the currently selected tab. Let’s go a step further — place a beautiful background-pattern on the tab-strip for an enhanced effect.

I few years ago, I even got the chance to speak with the author of this fantastic extension.  You can check out that interview here:

A Chat with the Man Who Makes Your Tabs Colorful

You can pick up the ColorfulTabs add-on for both Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4 from binaryturf.com.

Want to make Firefox look a little more like Facebook?  I have a Firefox theme for you that takes its inspiration from the social networking juggernaut.  The Facebook theme for Firefox actually does a pretty good job at giving you a Facebook looking browser – but still seems unique enough to not be called a carbon copy.

You can pick up the Facebook theme for Firefox from the Firefox Add-ons website. To learn more about the theme author, be sure to check out thechillroom.com.

With just one keystroke, you can zoom out of your browsing experience and see all your open web pages like thumbnails.  You can then reorganize and arrange these windows in different ways.

What is so special about Tab Candy?

You could easily create a group for your mail, calendar and RSS reader.  Then you could make another group of tabs for your work related web pages you have to look at.  Many extensions out there for Firefox try to do this, but Tab Candy is the first execution of this tab reorganization that has really gotten me excited to see more.

Check out this video by Aza Raskin to get a better picture of what Tab Candy will mean to the way you really use the browser.

Mark my words, this will be the must-have feature in the next generation of the browser wars.  I might sound like a fan boy when I say it, but this is why I love Firefox.  They don’t tell you how you have to browse – they give you many different ways to get the job done, and you can use the way that works best for your own needs.

Right now Tab Candy’s future in Firefox 4 has been delayed due to some implementation challenges, so let me be one of the first to tell them, “Please get this feature added to Firefox 4, I really need it!”.

Firefox 4 will be a big change when it comes to how we all interact with the browser.  One slight change that people either cheer or boo is adding tabs on top of Firefox, rather than the current position most of you use today.

So why has Firefox made the jump from the current tab position to putting tabs on top of the browser?  Alex Faaborg does a great job at explaining thing here:

If you are not a fan of having your tabs on the top of the browser, do not think of changing browsers or not updating just yet.  They make it clear that Firefox’s user interface is still totally customizable, so you can drag your tabs back down to the Firefox 3 position if you fear the user interface change.

Want to know specific details about an image you are looking at?  You can quickly find an image’s width and height with the Image Spider add-on for Firefox.

Now I can not see where this would be useful for your normal day to day Firefox users.  I can see where it could serve as an important tool for web site designers.  For any image on a website you can pull up details such as the width, height, natural width, natural height, and HTML elements such as the alt, title tag and border tags.

To use it, all you need to do is click on the new icon it places in the navigation toolbar.

In the options, you can define how the text box looks that delivers you all the image details, as well as the fonts for that text box and the border color that goes around a image after you have clicked the Image Spider icon.

Overall it is a simple extension for Firefox that does a great job at serving a simple purpose.  You can download Image Spider yourself from the Firefox Add-ons web site.

Coming to Firefox, you will soon start to see your add-ons manager inside the Firefox browsing window, rather than a popup window.

Personally, I really hope they plan to do this with all the extra popup windows Firefox has, because I want everything to be integrated within the browsing experience, and it has always seemed to me that a tab would be a much better place to take care of editing add-ons, options and more.

So, do you like the planned change?  You can read more about it on Boriss’ Blog.

Looking for a lean, mean Mac only Firefox theme?  If you want Firefox to look a little more minimal on your Apple-powered PC, then look no further than Leanfox.  This theme has all the style and substance you need, and little to no distractions in the interface.

Here is a little more about the theme, from the developer:

The aim of this theme is to be no-nonsense, clean, utility like, compact, minimal. This theme has no extra lines or details anywhere: the tabs blend into the main chrome and only the active tab is really highlighted – making you concentrate on only one thing at a time. There’s also minimal separation between the tabs as it became apparent that separating lines were just distracting.

Only downside to this theme is it is Mac only for now (no Windows version yet) but maybe if we leave the author enough nice comments showing him the need for Windows version, he might reconsider.

You can pick up this theme from the Firefox Add-ons web site or via the official Leanfox theme site.