Firefox 3.6 Breaks Themes and Personas Coexistence
I was excited to see that Firefox 3.6 was released today, so I promptly downloaded and installed it on my Asus Netbook (which I have been loving by the way). Upon restarting Firefox after the upgrade I noticed my Persona was missing. Now would be a good time to explain that I run a theme on my Netbook other then default. The default Firefox theme is generally ok, but on a Netbook it is simply too bloated and chunky. It takes up way too much real estate on a Netbook’s low res screen. To resolve that annoyance I run a theme called Classic Compact. It gives you a good chunk of your screen space back, leaving you more room to view your porn websites.
After loading up 3.6 and seeing my Theme was lacking my Persona (the clean Firefox B), I hopped back over to the Persona website and reapplied it. But at this point something disturbing happened. Firefox switched back over to it’s morbidly obese default theme. I turned Classic Compact back on and applied the Persona again, and again Firefox’s ugly fat theme butted in. After a quick goog, I discovered that this was a common complaint on the Mozilla forums. Evidently in the new version of Firefox, with the Persona integration, they merged Persona’s in to themes. You can no longer have both, as you always could before.
After screaming a few choice words I decided to just downgrade back to 3.5.7 until Firefox fixes this issue or someone else releases an add-on that will fix this bullshit.
It’s pathetic that Mozilla would take a feature that has been working fine for such a long time, integrate it, and completely fuck it up!
I also find it rather pathetic that Mozilla couldn’t scrape together a single fucking Windows 7 feature for Firefox… I would’ve been happy with even some god damn jump lists, but noooo… heaven forbid the Mozilla team actually be on the ball about what it’s users want.
So the lesson here is, if you run a theme and a persona, don’t upgrade to 3.6 quite yet. Wait for a fix to come out, either from Mozilla, or from someone in the community in the form of an add on. And since pictures are always more fun to look at…
Here is Firefox’s Ugly Fat Theme (with Persona):
Here is my nice Classic Compact running with Persona in 3.5.7:
And here is how it looks in 3.6:
(I know from the screen shots it doesn’t look like that much of a difference in real estate, but when you’re stuck with 1024×600, every line of resolution you can reclaim helps!)
Brandon
I didn’t know Personas was getting built into 3.6. It’s kind of neat, but, since I’ve had it, it seems like they update it all the time. I wonder if FF 3.6 will need to be updated just as often, just for Personas.