14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox is all about bringing people together but at the same time about freedom and individuality. From the start the browser has encouraged a collaborative atmosphere with thousands of developers around the world working on the project but, equally important, on the add-ons and all the customizations that have made the browser so popular. A recent project at Mozilla Labs, dubbed Personas, created to lower the entry bar for aspiring artists who want to create themes for Firefox, has proven a real success, with Mozilla announcing that 20,000 designs are now available in the online gallery set up for the project.
“Approximately ten weeks ago, the Personas gallery welcomed its 10,000th design. Today, we’re happy to announce that the gallery has since doubled in size.” Toby Elliott, Myk Melez, Ryan Doherty, and Suneel Gupta from the Personas team wrote. “With the support of the Personas community, we continue to make it easier for artists to create new designs and have them be discovered. We developed step-by-step templates for creating designs, raised awareness of the preview functionality, and offered links to free, online tools that anyone can use to create great looking art for the browser.”
Personas is a Firefox extension that allows users to easily change the look of their browser with skins from the online gallery. Over seven million people have downloaded and installed the extension, proving the users' interest in the project, a real success for the Labs team. The functionality may be integrated directly in Firefox at some point, removing the need to install the separate extension, but, for now, the developers are busy adding new features to the online gallery and Personas itself.
Firefox already has a powerful theming engine but creating a full-blown theme may be out of the reach of most users as it requires some advanced knowledge. Personas solves this problem by only requiring two images for a skin, one for the footer and one for the header, allowing anyone to create a new “persona” using basic editing software and, so far, 10,000 people have contributed designs to the gallery.
Personas for Firefox is available for download here.