Firebird Theme - a "light-weight" Theme

[WildcatRay]

All I can say is that I have been using Firebird without any trouble on both Fx and Minefield.

If you come up with something to test involving Firebird, I'll give it a spin.

[ShareBird]

Hey guys, has anyone else here played around with "override" themeing?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/chrome ... n#override

So far I've just been playing around with creating a theme that just overrides browser.css, Toolbar.png, and Toolbar-small.png. As long as my browser.css calls for images that exist elsewhere in the default theme, it seems to work fine. Big win doing this over an overlay theme seems to be that I don't have to use any !important tags... and unlike a skin theme, I don't have to cover the entire skin. I'm thinking I could reduce a theme down to just the basics and cover quite a bit of territory. I'd love to be able to keep themeing without dealing with the hassle of supporting features I will never ever use, and without having to go through the trouble of overriding all of the ridiculous toolbarbutton stuff in the default theme.

I'm not sure if the override flag is available for themes... Did you try to register, as a theme, an override file?
If it's possible, don't forget that you still need to track changes on browser.css and the theme will not be compatible with previous and future Firefox versions...
In the way Firebird is done, I don't see any necessity to update it for Firefox 4.0, maybe a couple glitches, but it works well until now, doesn't do it, WidCatRay???

[WildcatRay]

In the way Firebird is done, I don't see any necessity to update it for Firefox 4.0, maybe a couple glitches, but it works well until now, doesn't do it, WidCatRay???

The only thing I had to do for current Fx 4.0/Trunk/Minefield is change the file suffix from .jar to .xpi. Aside from that niggle, it has been fine.

[patrickjdempsey]

Hmm... it looks like it will only support Firefox 4.0... I guess the override tag does not apply in older versions. I had only tested it in 4.0 last night, sorry about that!

I ran into some serious problems with my light-weight themes in 4.0 because of those icon size limits, so I have to add code to work around the things in the default theme. And despite the apparent ability to support any version of Firefox, there are actually weird things that you have to do to work around differences in each version, depending on what you want. All of those !important tags also wreck havoc on appearance modifying extensions.

So far all I've done is take my browser.css from one of my themes that is currently compatible with 3.6 and 4.0 and thrown in the support images. So on one hand yes I have to make sure I'm theming everything that the default theme touches for the files I override, but I don't have to worry about changes in the default theme breaking my code directly. I also don't have to worry about removing every little thing I don't want to appear, box-shadows, background gradients, etc etc. I can just say, here's how I want the main browser frame to look without worrying about Mozilla slipping in some lines in the default theme that moves things up and down or adds some style that I later have to force compatibility with. So really all I have to do is that the browser.css file from the default theme, modify the things I want to modify, and add in the support images. If I want to add support for scrollbars or text-boxes, just pop those files in. So far it seems breath-takingly simple.

[patrickjdempsey]

One interesting thing about this is if you wanted to create a theme that all you are doing is replacing the default toolbar button icons in 4.0 with colorized versions of them, this would be the absolute simplest way of doing it.

Example:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... e-theme-1/

When I uploaded it, it warned me that override is not valid for themes but it installs fine. Maybe it's just a bug in the new addons manager? That would be too bad.

Edit: Hmmm... the new "Developer Hub" is being very annoying... it was up and now it's not... I'm not sure what's going on.

[patrickjdempsey]

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you all know that something is seriously broken in the latest nightly build... I think this bug effectively kills lightweight themes:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=671553

[WildcatRay]

Things are OK for me. The buttons just don't have the outlines they used to have.

[patrickjdempsey]

Mine was OK *at first* and then I played around with switching between small and large icons and now large icons mode doesn't display the theme icons for any of the 6 different lite themes I tested.

[WildcatRay]

Mine was OK *at first* and then I played around with switching between small and large icons and now large icons mode doesn't display the theme icons for any of the 6 different lite themes I tested.

Ditto (but, since I don't use large icons, it is not an "issue" for me).