Recently, I just disovered an awesome Firefox Addon. It doesn’t really help in productivity, but it is visually appealing. But, I mean, some would argue that if one thing isn’t visually appealing, that it wouldn’t help in productivity. I agree with that statement because you’re only as good as your environment is. If you’re in a place with less distraction, nicely painted, and visually pleasing, you want to be there, and be square about being there and doing whatever you need to do. Heck, you may even want to stay where ever you are, and never leave.
I’m at this point with Firefox. After using many other browsers in the past, I’ve never been happier in geekdom. The appearance of Firefox, and Thunderbird now has made my Desktop, or GNOME desktop environment visually pleasing. I can customize the look of Firefox, or Thunderbird to make it stand out and not just let it drap around like I did before. I won’t lie, I even did it with Firefox, and various others.
As mentioned before, they’re not really for producitivity. Personas for Firefox are more visually pleasing to the eye than anything. It lets you customize the looks of Firefox, or Thunderbird just like any other theme available for Gnome, or KDE but, it’s only for Firefox, or Thunderbird. They’re simply skins which is driven by the commity of users who want to create their own. You can design, and upload your own which will individualize your browser. There are hundreds of artist-created skins as well.
What makes Personas really shine is the ability to look at them via your own browser – just by opening the browser up. Once Personas are installed, the bottom left side of the bar Foxy’s head appears. Just simply click on the head, and you can have your choice of what skin to use. There’s a huge variety of whatever you want. Even hovering over each skin that’s in the addon, it will change the theme while just hovering over the picture(or name) with your mouse.
It’s easily one of the best addons I’ve used because of the quality of the addon, and the aesthics are pleasing to the eye like I’ve mentioned before.
NOTE
Personas come as a default installation with Firefox-3b5. However, if you want to use Personas in Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope’s version of Firefox which is Firefox-3.0.10 you’ll have to download the addon. And, if you don’t have Firefox, and want to download and install Firefox to use Personas – here’s the URL: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all.html
To use Personas in Thunderbird, you’ll have to download the beta version of Thunderbird which is Thunderbird-3b2, and install Personas via the URL above. Download the .xpi file, and install the addon like any other addon. You’ll come to an “install” button in the window – just browse to the file and press ok to install. Here’s the link to the Thunderbird download page.
In Jaunty Jackalope, I downloaded Thunderbird into /opt so I have the beta, and stable versions so if the beta messes up, I have the stable to use. Just symlink the thunderbird executable in /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird into /usr/bin. Here’s the code: “sudo ln -s /opt/thunderbird/thunderbird /usr/bin/thunderbird3″ without quotes. This will let you have two working Thunderbirds in an installation. Create a new profile with, “thunderbird3 -P”. Howto in the ubuntuforums.
Hopefully this helps you.
Enjoy.
Justin
Posted by Justin 
