All Things Appy: 5 Best Firefox Themes
If you're a daily Internet user, there's a good chance that you're also a daily Internet browser user. If your choice is Firefox, you may be tired of its look -- it hasn't changed much recently.
However, Firefox allows you to customize its background look with more than 300,000 themes. Plus, with complete themes, a more in-depth form of theme, you can separately personalize the address bar, buttons, menu, tabs and window frame.
Following are the five best free mods you can perform on your Firefox browser.
About the Environment
Themes and Complete Themes are downloaded from the Add-ons page within Firefox.
Look for the Featured Themes panel and click on See All to browse themes. Or use the search box to search for themes.
No. 1: Dark Fox
Dark Fox has 5 stars out of 5 from 100 user reviews in Firefox's Add-ons library. It has 207,535 daily users.
Dark Fox, from Randomaster, is one of the most popular Firefox themes. It's simply a very fast-installing, dark version of the Firefox menu bar, top banner and logo. A dark theme allows for a less garish blast of screen light when viewing Web pages at night.
Be aware that you need to be viewing websites with dark page backgrounds to take full advantage of the effect.
No. 2: FT DeepDark
FT DeepDark from Steva has 5 stars out of 5 from 328 user reviews in Firefox's Add-ons library. The add-on has a total of 214,266 users.
DeepDark is similar in concept to Dark Fox -- it provides for black webpage surrounds.
However, it's what Firefox publisher Mozilla calls a calls a "complete theme" and thus requires a more time-consuming download and browser restart than a normal theme, such as our No. 2 choice, Dark Fox.
DeepDark heavily blackens more of the Firefox browser than Dark Fox. Again, visit black-backgrounded webpages for the best effect.
No. 3: Simple White
Simple White has 5 stars out of 5 from 83 user reviews in Firefox's Add-ons library. It has a total of 17,503 users.
Our No. 3 selection is the antithesis of the first two blackened themes. The Apple-esque Simple White theme by Louis Chan is equally minimalist, although as you might expect from its name, it's predominantly white -- and supremely elegant.
Gorgeously thin black lines define the white browser address bar and search box and are a pleasure to view. Using a sybaritic theme like this will make you want never to go back to clunky-old Firefox default.
No. 4: Walnut for Firefox
Walnut for Firefox has 5 stars out of 5 from 194 user reviews in Firefox's Add-ons library. It has a total of 55,546 users.
If you ever feel like technology is taking over your life, here's the antidote. Alfredkayser's Walnut for Firefox is a wooden-themed rendition. This theme skins Firefox with a grainy wooden box-like look.
The address bar and search box appear carved into the screen rendered by a subtle shadow effect. There's nothing half-hearted in this theme and a lot of work has gone into the detailed, textured graphics.
No. 5: Noia Fox
Noia Fox by David.Vincent has 5 stars out of 5 from 83 user reviews in Firefox's Add-ons library. It has a total of 105,091 users.
Noia Fox is an accessibility-oriented theme and is great for those with visual requirements.
Buttons are colorful, and a default grey theme reduces tiredness in the eyes.
Customizing options are unfortunately a bit unintuitive and tricky to find -- they're in the Extensions area of the Add-Ons Manager, not Appearance, by the way. We give it a downgrade because of that.
