You have to give Mozilla’s design team credit for trying to make the new default theme for Mac Firefox look “native,” but to anyone barely familiar with Apple’s UI design, it is a horrible facsimile. The big back button cluster was laughable during beta, and it’s even more ridiculous in the full feature release. Dubbed “Firelight,” it firefailed.
Via a tweet from Jon Hicks, I came across Aronnax’s FF3 theme collection, called GrApple (currently on the site front page. If the themes go missing, search around).
Finally, Firefox has the correctly rounded corners, the right touch of minimalism, the perfect bit of “Apple.” The only downside I’ve found so far is that I often forget if I’m in Firefox or Safari. Things could be worse, right?
Available in several flavors, the designer went above and beyond the call of duty to keep the visual experience consistent, including taking into account other add-ons, and modifying them to fit in with the new theme. One add-on that I have on both my computers is Developer Toolbar. As you can see, it doesn’t stick out like a sorethumb.
To each their own, but I find this a vast improvement over the theme that ships with Firefox 3. And for those with aesthetic sensibilities, I can’t recommend this more highly.
Yeah, I’ve been using this for quite awhile.. since the FF version 2 betas actually. I can’t stand the look of FF, but with this theme, it makes FF look awesome.
I am actually quite floored that the moz team didn’t end up using this theme as the default.
Aronnax is also really good about updating his themes.. Even during the FF3 nightlies, he’d update the theme so that things like the awesomebar, bookmarks, etc.. were already updated - which is a godsend for anyone wanting to live on the edge and still look good doing it.
Hi Eli, it was on my list today to replace the dire bubble-wrap UI of FF3 after spending yesterday squinting at it, shaking my head and muttering. You saved me a search. Cheers!
@todd You’ve been using this for ages? share the wealth, man! I was dying in FF3 before I found out about this. Where have you been hiding this info??
@jon tan glad I could be of service! someone seriously needs to smack some sense into the firefox team. I read some random post where a member of the team commented, explaining some of the reasoning for their design choices, but none accounted for the ridiculous big back button.
Now if only I could get a theme that merged the stop/refresh like in Safari, I’d be in heaven.