Having upgraded Firefox yesterday, I restarted it this morning only to find that my beloved theme, AeroFox, has not year released an approved upgrade to make it compatible with FireFox 3.5.whatever-it-is. Being a creature of habit, I quickly searched through the themes website to find a replacement. I tried out a lot of black/dark ones to try and replicate AeroFox, sadly, none of them cut it. Here are some that I tried.
Gradient iCool: I chose this because it looked very similar to AeroFox. However, when I tried it out, it was far to dark, much darker than the preview suggested. Barring the icons, it was all completely black, with very few gradients or anything to lighten it. The icons being consistently blue didn’t help.
LavaFox: I tried out the red and blue versions of these themes. I preferred the blue, which was a lot more calming. These themes had a nice style, with rounded corners and a shiny gradient at the top, however it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Again, all of the drop down menus were solid black, and I felt it was too dark.
Noia 2.0 (eXtreme):
These themes are based upon a set of icons designed by Carlitus at deviantArt, and the icons are really what makes the themes special. They’re very cute, brilliantly designed, and are all over the place – nearly everything has its own icon! The only thing I didn’t like about these themes was that the toolbars didn’t have enough padding and felt very squashed to me.
Utopia FFSE White: This was a lovely theme, being very retro, with a cute little firefox in the top corner. Although I didn’t like how the icons were so black, I got used to it after a while. It’s also got nice rounded tabs, and the papery gradient doesn’t make it too white. The only think I really dislike is the scroll bar, which remind me of the days when I’d insert “border-bottom: 4px dashed;” everywhere into my internal CSS.
Blue Fox: This was a disaster. Bright aqua blue and black everywhere, with no pattern to where the gradients seemed to be shoved. Much worse than the screenshot. Ew.
Dark Revisited: This was a nicely balanced dark theme, but after a while the different colours of the toolbars, which were designed to make the whole thing lighter, started to annoy me, because they didn’t really fit together. From the top it was grey, black, and navy. I have my bookmarks toolbar and the Web Developer toolbar up constantly, and the two navy gradients really didn’t fit well together either. I also found the icons too small.
In the end I stuck with the Utopia theme, but not before I tried (and failed) to download the experimental version of AeroFox. What can I say? I dislike change.
For those of you who use Firefox, what are your favourite themes?
Tags: design, firefox, internet, themes
I use CrystalFox Qute, because it’s simple and elegant. I liked the general appearance of FireFox when I got it from the start, but I just wanted to smooth out some rough edges, like the icons. I haven’t tried any other themes, as I am more than happy with CrystalFox, but I do have a few addons like Colorful Tabs to make things a little bit nicer.
Atm I’m using Whitehart, it’s super simple and fits well with the rest of my desktop. I have also installed Miint, Naver, rein and Smoke, in case I feel like changing the theme.
I think I’m the only one who uses the default theme.
I hear people complaining about how ugly it is, but I don’t mind it.
I use the default theme when I’m at work. It’s perhaps a little plain, but simple’s necessary sometimes. It’s certainly not ugly!
I like to spice things up a little at home though. Nearly everything on my laptop is decorated in some way!
I use the default theme, but I apply the “Green Light” FF Personas skin to it.
I use
Chromifox Basic. I really like the simpleness of the theme. I use to use another one but when I upgraded to Firefox to 3.5 I couldn’t use that theme anymore.
I personally use MidnightFox (here). However, based on this post, I don’t think you would like it. I also use Gradient iCool whenever I feel like changing things up.
I’m a darker theme girl, as you can probably tell
Nice themes. Most often, I’m very lazy and use the default theme but I might install some of these and play around with them. They’re lovely. Thanks for sharing!