Bereninga

Today, I found out that most Firefox personas suck and here’s how I found out.

Yesterday, Firefox released 3.6.2. I upgraded as usual and was sent to the Firefox Updated page. I finally gave in to trying out the Personas feature and browsed for about half an hour trying to find a theme that was not distracting and looked seamless with the browsers buttons and input fields.

Here are some reasons why I think a lot of the Personas did not look right:

1. The background image(s) and/or colors were too distracting. Do we read websites with photographs as the background? Various colors in the background just make it hard to look for something quickly and easily.
2. The color of the title bar was too bright or makes the window title hard to read. This may be picky, but the title bar is present all the time and is pretty hard to ignore. I tried one theme that made the title bar text black and the title bar background red. Is this really that enjoyable to look at constantly? Seriously?
   
3. The browser buttons didn’t fit with the theme. It just looks strange to have these gray buttons over a natural Persona or something colorful. The buttons should look like they fit into the Persona or at least share colors that are used.

Unfortunately, I really only found one theme that fit the bill: MozillaZine. Thanks to jrocknyc I was able to find a list of some decent themes. MozillaZine was my preferred choice of his ten, but I may go back to using Themes. I just miss the full integration of Themes. Developers were able to customize fonts, tabs and buttons with Themes. Personas unfortunately only change the background.

Think of it like this: what if everything on my website was the same except the background? It would look silly.