Personas – Customize your Firefox

If the standard look and feel of your Firefox browser is too boring for you maybe you want to try the new Personas for Firefox. Personas is a free add-on just released from the Mozilla labs. It is a Mozilla Labs experiment. Just surf to getPersonas.com, download the free add-on, restart your browser and choose from a selection of totally different looking skins.

After the restart you’ll find a small fox icon in the lower left corner of your browser. Klick on it to open a menu from which you can choose skins by popularity, age, category and from the ones you recently tested. You can also easily go back to the standard look and feel which you are used to.

Personas are lightweight, easy-to-install and easy-to-change “skins” for your Firefox web browser.

Among the most popular skins are a California sunset, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, Hanami, Fireflies, Minefields and the Firefox Robot of the upcoming Firefox 3.5 which I chose. You can preview a new skin just by rolling over the menu entry. The skin changes almost instantly without selection, restarting or any other hassle. Great way to do themeing!

User Agent Switcher as Mozilla Firefox Addon

If you do web development or cannot access a page because it asks for a certain user agent you might want to test how a site reacts to a user agent string other than which your default browser sends a little add-on called User Agent Switcher comes in handy.

If you are using Mozilla’s Firefox as a user agent most likely you are almost aware of its capability to add features through its add-ons. One of the available add-ons is the User Agent Switcher by Chris Pederick. With the add-on which is available for free (donations are welcome!) you can switch the identifier your browser sends on the fly. That way you can pretend you are surfing a site with a mobile user agent if you are still using your regular desktop browser.