Transparent background in Firefox

balrog · Post by **balrog** » August 19th, 2005, 11:16 am

Hi there,
Any desktop tuning freaks that want to try background transparency in Mozilla Firefox try my new little patch. I took the idea from gnome-terminal. You can get the patch from http://www.zabor.org/mozilla-firefox-transparency.patch
I know it still needs a lot of work, but there are cases where it looks good. Here is a screenshot: http://www.zabor.org/screen2.png (on the left is a gnome-terminal).
Suggestions welcome!
Greetings

Rattlesnake · Post by **Rattlesnake** » August 19th, 2005, 11:21 am

Hmm...this must be for freaks. Even though it looks nice, I actually like to read the web-pages.

balrog · Post by **balrog** » August 19th, 2005, 11:46 am

Sorry, I should have posted this in General Discussion Firefox instead of Firefox Support, ofcourse.
By the way the feature isn't causing me any difficulties in reading (so far..) because the desktop's background only appears in webpages that don't have a background image of their own and when their bg colour matches the desktop (by default only white or very bright).

Post by **Vectorspace** » August 19th, 2005, 12:39 pm

Hey, that's cool. Does it only work on the Linux platform?

Added bonus, I'll move this to FF General for you.

Rattlesnake · Post by **Rattlesnake** » August 19th, 2005, 1:08 pm

balrog wrote:Sorry, I should have posted this in General Discussion Firefox instead of Firefox Support, ofcourse.
By the way the feature isn't causing me any difficulties in reading (so far..) because the desktop's background only appears in webpages that don't have a background image of their own and when their bg colour matches the desktop (by default only white or very bright).

Okey, I'd like to try it....but how do you actually install it? I couldn't find any readme or anything.

Thumper · Post by **Thumper** » August 19th, 2005, 1:31 pm

You don't install it. If you don't know what to do with a patch file, you're not in a position to apply it.

- Chris

RadioactiveMan · Post by **RadioactiveMan** » August 19th, 2005, 1:49 pm

You patch the source and build it.

Rattlesnake · Post by **Rattlesnake** » August 19th, 2005, 1:50 pm

Thumper wrote:You don't install it. If you don't know what to do with a patch file, you're not in a position to apply it.

- Chris

Allright, but was it smart of me to learn how to compile programs from source or installing a .deb-package. Or wasn't that smart either, since I didn't know what to do with it without reading a howto the very first time?

balrog · Post by **balrog** » August 19th, 2005, 2:04 pm

Vectorspace wrote:... Does it only work on the Linux platform?

Unfortunately yes, but I tried to follow OOP guidelines so that it is enough to overload a single method for Windows, Mac or BeOS support.

And yeah to install it you need to download the firefox sources, unpack them, apply the patch with "patch -p0" and then follow the normal README instructions

Post by **Vectorspace** » August 19th, 2005, 2:09 pm

balrog wrote:
Vectorspace wrote:... Does it only work on the Linux platform?

Unfortunately yes, but I tried to follow OOP guidelines so that it is enough to overload a single method for Windows, Mac or BeOS support.

Curiosity killed the cat...

What do you mean by 'overload a single method'?

balrog · Post by **balrog** » August 19th, 2005, 2:21 pm

Vectorspace wrote:
balrog wrote:Unfortunately yes, but I tried to follow OOP guidelines so that it is enough to overload a single method for Windows, Mac or BeOS support.
Curiosity killed the cat...
What do you mean by 'overload a single method'?

Well, it's a C++ term. In detail: the interface class for rendering contexts (nsIRenderingContext) has one derived class for each platform, for Linux it is nsRenderingContextGTK and for example for mac it is nsRenderingContextMac. If a derived class for your platform doesn't overload the method that implements transparency then nsIRenderingContext will simply fall back to normal non-transparent background. (well, it may sound complex, but it makes porting easy)

Post by **Vectorspace** » August 19th, 2005, 2:58 pm

I see, thanks.

feverfive · Post by **feverfive** » August 20th, 2005, 5:22 pm

With the right desktop background (wallpaper), this theme would be cool. But, as noted, it could get in the way of reading/viewing text as well....