Major Update to Personas for Firefox

Chris Beard

49 responses

Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds lightweight dynamic theming to the browser.

This version builds upon the previous release and allows developers and designers to submit Personas that are based on Web content, including support for anything that can load in a browser window, including HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, Javascript, SVG and Canvas.

Personas for Firefox

Major Updates and Features

  • support for dynamic Personas that can change over time and can incorporate rich web content (HTML, SVG, etc.):

    • Where Am I Persona

  • custom persona editor that makes it easier to customize Firefox with your own style:

    • Custom Persona editor

  • styling of additional UI elements like the window titlebar on Mac and the Find toolbar on all platforms:

    • Using accent color on titlebar on Mac

  • various bug fixes and other minor enhancements.

Personas Directory

Coming soon: a new directory of personas to make it easier to contribute and browse them. In the meantime, see this documentation on creating a persona.

Get Personas for Firefox

  • Install Personas v1.0a1 for Firefox 2 or greater, Windows/Mac/Linux
    Warning: This is early prototype software. Use at your own risk.

How to Get Involved

49 responses

  1. Cat Girl wrote on :

    The menu doesn’t appear for me anymore…
    I uninstalled it and installed it again, and it still didn’t show up, so I uninstalled Firefox then re-installed it, and then I got the personas add-on and the fox you click on to open the menu STILL does not show up.

  2. B wrote on :

    Personas aren’t working for me either. I’ve tried several different ones, rebooted the computer, nothing. The little fox face says I’m using Yosemite, but it doesn’t show up. Neither do any of the other personas I’ve tried.

    I’m on Firefox 3.1.10

  3. Kirsten wrote on :

    I don’t know what to do… I downloaded and installed but for some reason I cant get a persona. I have the latest version of firefox so I don’t know what could possibly be the problem. Help?

  4. Aleex MUUgridge wrote on :

    I downloaded the first time and had to download it again and now it doesn’t even appear any more. Help i want the skins back to spice it back up. It also bugs me that i can’t get to do anything i have hit the download button many times and says that its doing something like it did before except it restarts and is just the download screen again.

  5. Daisy wrote on :

    love the idea ,how about some leopard print .thank you

  6. Keith wrote on :

    I keep trying to upload a persona I made but the upload page is just blank??? try on another computer even. Any clue whats wrong I would love to upload this and possibly others!!1 πŸ™‚

    Please E-mail me letting me know what I should do or if it’s been fixed thank you!!!

  7. Andrew Conkling wrote on :

    Looks great; do you know when we can expect 3.1/3.5 support?

  8. Amy wrote on :

    The only thing that I find wanting in this is support for the all in one sidebar. It detracts from the beauty of the skins when the color goes so far down and then suddenly cuts off. Otherwise this is great.

  9. Jack wrote on :

    I like Personas, and have been used Personas for a year…

    1. Personas doesn’t allow firefox “cache” current theme, so when network issue occurs, the theme will be very ugly, and get error alert pop up. This affect user experience a lot.

    2. β€œCustomize Personas” experience has big room to improve…e.g. it doesn’t have a “preview” function, doesn’t allow people to chose the area of the picture they want to display, and choices of “accent color” are too little, cannot find match color…

  10. Heather wrote on :

    It’s not working on mine either!!! I want my Alice Cooper back! I miss him!
    I had an Alice Cooper theme on my browser till it updated to 1.0a6 and now I can’t even get the darn menu to load let alone come up. Of course it seemed this was more happening when I updated JavaScript.. before that my theme kept disappearing on me but would leave the colors of the text just as the same I had it.
    C’mon and fix the da** thing!

  11. edc wrote on :

    personas used to work fine for me now when I start firefox it doens’t work at all and always says not available yet try restarting firefox nothing I try works.I use Vista premium on firefox 3.04. anyone have any suggestions?

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  13. kouhei ogawa wrote on :

    Thank you

  14. kouhei ogawa wrote on :

    Thank you!!

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  18. Omar wrote on :

    Wow thanks for the update this work for FF3?

  19. Counselor in Carrollton TX wrote on :

    In my marriage and family practice I often find that people are fatigued with the persona of their significant other.

    As it is mightily difficult to motivate change in an adult human my hope is that your new product will facilitate change in the personas of their computers, and thus provide some comfort.

    With all my best wishes for your success with Personas I remain

    Dr. Lowell A. Worthington, Ph. D.

  20. gaming kasino wrote on :

    Lovely. Made my day (which is saying something)

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  23. finalexpenseleads wrote on :

    This will be a major timesaver for me when it is finally debugged. I spend half my day changing from one persona to another. finalexpenseleads to beadwrangler to the_recovering_executive…it is tiring!

  24. ulises wrote on :

    quiero colocar firefox 3 pero no puedo en el sistema como grasias

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  28. Bud Winks wrote on :

    The updated version of Personas 1.0a6 really sucks!!!!!! It makes my Firefox 3 browser jump and vibrate on my monitor.The older version before this updated version,worked great!! You screwed up, PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  30. djglass wrote on :

    In your post you state:

    “styling of additional UI elements like the window titlebar on Mac and the Find toolbar on all platforms”

    is there anyplace I can go to get documentation on how to do this on the mac platform?

  31. B2R wrote on :

    Excellent idea that this extension.
    It seems that gamma of the footer is weaker than that of the header…

  32. Mulder wrote on :

    Personas exenstion appears to work fine with Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Mac OS X, but I see no Personas editor. Is that for Windows only, or is this a known bug?

  33. maniacOtaku wrote on :

    Is there any chance of this being integrated with Weave?
    Would be awesome to have your looks and your data on any Firefox you use…

  34. David wrote on :

    I upgraded from ver 0.9.x and after restarting FF, whenever i clicked on a bookmark, the URL for that site wasn’t populated in the address bar. So I removed & reinstalled ver 1.0a1 and restarted, and then I didn’t see that problem again.

  35. Lim wrote on :

    nice add-on… good job…but the problem is it loading slow…

  36. Alesandro O wrote on :

    I’m also in the same boat as Gonz. I updated from 0.9.x and it only gives me the ‘Default’ option. Also the custom editor doesn’t seem to work, although when opening the editor, it applies a gradient image, which I assume is the default. Firefox 2.0.0.14, Debian. If you want more debugging info and testing, contact me at, mozilla -at- thephpjedi.com

    Here’s an error from the FireBug console:
    this.personas has no properties
    [Break on this error] _getPersona: function(aPersonaID) {
    file:///home//.mozilla/firefox//extensions/personas@christopher.beard/components/nsPersonaService.js
    Line 735

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  40. Gonz wrote on :

    @cbeard: I’ve enstalled Firefox 3.0b5 and now it works like a charm. Maybe the issue has something to do with firefox 2

  41. Gonz wrote on :

    @cbeard:what do you make of it? May it have anything to do with vista?

    thanks πŸ˜‰

  42. Leon wrote on :

    @Gonz: Owned.

  43. Gonz wrote on :

    @cbeard:I’m running windows vista home premium. I’m using Firefox 2.0.0.13.
    And no, I can’t switch to any other designs.

  44. Ken Saunders wrote on :

    Fantastic job on the improvements.

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  46. cbeard wrote on :

    @Gonz: Can you switch to other designs besides “Viva Firefox”? Also, which version of Firefox are you running and are you on Windows, Mac or Linux? Thanks for the feedback.

  47. Gonz wrote on :

    it stopped working for me. I was using “viva Firefox”, and now I don’t see anything, except for plain white toolbars….

  48. MDW wrote on :

    This is, hands down, one of the coolest extensions Firefox has seen yet. I just wanted to let you know that this is outstanding, and keep up the great work. Granted, it doesn’t do anything but make it look “pretty”, but the standard procedure for changing themes (install, switch, restart) gets tedious when checking out new ones – this makes all the difference.

    Bravo.

  49. Trackback from foxiewire.com on :

    Major Update to Personas for Firefox…

    This version builds upon the previous release and allows developers and designers to submit Personas that are based on Web content, including support for anything that can load in a browser window, including HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, Javascript, S…