Yet another reason to like Mozilla: customizability.
Not only can I change what buttons are on the tool bar (like the dreaded Internet Exploder), but I can change the way the buttons look, their color, their background, their foreground, etc. It’s called a skin and without any add-ons (IE 5.x has some add-on skin programs) I can download skins from many places and install them. Heck, if I want to, Mozilla has an add-on that allows me to create a skin; it’s called XULMaker. My personal favorite is DeskMod, where you can get skins, wallpapers, heck - anything for your desktop. Right now my skin is called Noia. I like it because the color is nice and the icons are 3D without being obnoxious. To get more skins all I have to do is download one from DeskMod and choose to install it. Even easy for the Mac-impaired learners out there! By the way, the process is the same if I have Mozilla in Windows, Linux, Unix, OSX (on the Mac) or any other platform.
One more thing I can customize easily is the throbber. Yeah, I know it’s kind of a silly name. It is the icon in the upper right corner that animates while the browser renders your page. In the Internet Exploder, the default install animates between a spinning globe and a lower case e. Yes, you can change this, but you have to construct two bitmap pictures (256 colors only!) that are a specific width; to animate, you make your bitmap have pictures change slightly as they cycle vertically, kind of like a filmstrip. In Mozilla, you change the contents of one file, then add 2 other files. One is an animated GIF (to be shown while rendering), the other a static GIF (to be shown when rendering is complete). It took me 5 minutes to find the animated GIF I wanted (a spinning basketball) and extract the first frame for the static GIF and then change the file. Again it’s the same on all platforms, just like the skins.
July 14, 2003
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