There are several very cool features in the latest version of Firefox that finally released yesterday, Firefox 3.6. Most are cool in a behind the scenes way such as speedier performance, support for the latest DOM and HTML5 specifications. A few you may notice under the right circumstances 
such as out of date plug-in detection (good for thwarting hackers who take advantage of bugs in old versions of plug-ins like Flash) and full-screen video for a few video formats. Those are all much appreciated, but the one that takes the cake is support for “Personas”.
What is a Persona? Quoting Firefox, “Personas are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your Firefox (browser)”. Themes? Well browsers have had themes for years and years and most of the time the theme you liked the most made the interface more difficult to read, fell apart when you added certain extensions, or in the worst cases, slowed your browsers performance. Personas are different.
Before you bother to go look at the Firefox Personas website, force your Firefox browser to check for updates. You will need the latest 3.6 version. If your Firefox version is older than 3.0, you will need to download and install 3.6 in full. BTW, there are numerous security flaws in the older versions so do yourself a favor and upgrade immediately. Once you are browsing in 3.6, go to http://www.getpersonas.com and mouse over any Persona image and you will see cool thing number one right away. That’s right, your browser tries on the Persona all by itself. That trick made my day. When you want to keep the Persona you are testing simply click “wear-it” and you are done. No downloading a package, no restarts.
Don’t like any of the thousands already available or have a special image that would make the perfect Persona? Making your own is simple as well. All you need to do is create a header and footer image to Firefox’s specification found here and you are done. What could be easier?
There are a couple of small imperfections to this terrific new feature. First, just like many old themes, a lot of the Personas I tried on badly obscured the system text in the browser chrome. Second, because of the differences between the way Mac and PC’s deal with the title bar, a huge number of the Personas don’t look nearly as cool on my Mac as my PC. I have not seen it on Linux yet but I suspect it’s a similar story to the Mac.
Firefox, can we have a fix for that in 3.7?
