Dynamic and Page-Specific Personas May Be Coming to Firefox

Mozilla has introduced a host of customization options with the integration of Personas into Firefox 3.6. But it's not the end for the Mozilla Labs add-on that spurred the project and brought it to its current level. The separate add-on is now being renamed as Personas Plus and the current online gallery, which already houses more than 30,000 designs, is being moved and integrated with the main Mozilla Add-Ons Gallery.

"Personas was a Mozilla Labs experiment that has matured and graduated from Labs. Much of its process and code was for a prototype and is beginning to suffer from the overwhelming popularity in Firefox 3.6. In order for Mozilla to give Personas the support it rightly deserves changes are in order," Mozilla explains.

"The biggest and greatest part of this change is migrating getpersonas.com to addons.mozilla.org... Currently getpersonas.com is built on a prototype code base and simply is not capable of supporting the features and scale we need to bring to the Personas community," the announcement reads.

For the regular users, this won't mean much, except they'll have to browse a different site if they want to search for new Personas designs by hand. For the designers and especially the Mozilla developers supporting the online gallery, it will be a big and mostly beneficial change taking advantage of Mozilla's existing and proven add-on infrastructure. The second change has to do with the Personas add-on itself, which will live on as Personas Plus even after the integration of the feature with the browser.

As for the future of the feature, which enables users to customize the look of their browser with just a couple of clicks by applying 'skins' from tens of thousands of designs available online, Mozilla has some pretty interesting ideas, though some are likely to remain at the concept stage. One idea is to have the add-on support 'Dynamic Personas,' which would change with the context. Another one is to have 'Page-specific Personas' or window- and tab-specific ones. There are also some more practical ideas as well, like making text more legible with multicolored Personas.