I hesitated updating Firefox to version 4.0, since I feared it might break a lot of extensions I use. Well, it certainly broke my theme Orbit Classic. But now that I made the transition, I decided that I won’t maintain Orbit Classic any longer. With Firefox 4.0, I’m happy with the default theme – all the more since it’s possible to cram all the chrome tightly together, so there isn’t much left to style anyway. It’s the compactness of Google Chrome combined with the awesome extensibility and flexibility of Firefox.

That’s how it currently looks like on my machine.

- I’m used to have the title of a page displayed in the title bar, so I prefer to go with that.
- Since my screen is wider than the 640 px of this example picture, there is ample room for both the address field and the search field, so I see no reason to hide the menu bar.
- I could give the back-button and the forward-button the orbital look and feel, but to style just these two tiny buttons seems a bit pointless.
- My favorite bookmarks are of two kinds: of webpages I have always open in tabs (so I seldom need their bookmarks), or of the front pages of search engines. So using the search field, I don’t need a favorite bookmarks bar.
- Using some userChrome.css, I made the currently selected tab highlighted in yellow, like I’m used from Orbit Classic.
- I also styled the currently hovered-over tab. With Colorful tabs, I gave the other tabs a default color that matches the persona I have chosen; which I selected to fit with Windows 7 Aero.
- I urgently need the addons bar to be open all the time, to display the HTML Validator, to give me that smug feeling of superiority by displaying all the errors of other people.
- I hid all the icons of those addons I seldom tweak (like Adblock Plus or Greasemonkey) – it’s sufficient if I can access them via the menu bar. Unfortunately, KeySnail isn’t updated yet to the new addon bar instead of the old status bar, so currently, I can’t get rid of its icon.
- Since the addon bar is always present, I can utilize its unused space by displaying status messages with the Status 4 EVAR addon. I also got rid of the unnecessary close button.
So, I’m quite content how my new Firefox looks, and don’t see how I could substantially improve it with a custom theme.
Postscriptum:
With a tiny bit of code in my userChrome.css, namely…
#keysnail-statusbar-icon {
visibility: collapse !important;
}
… I even got rid of the old Keysnail statusbar icon.
Regards Steve