Everything Changes

So when it comes to change I am a hypocrite. I am all for change - why hold on to relics of the past? If it's broken give it a ruddy good fixing. This is for partially ideological reasons, but also because I like to believe in the relentless march of progress. With each version brings more efficiency, and greater outcomes. Unfortunately the most "the relentless march of progress" affects my life is when Facebook implements a slightly different layout.

"I cannot believe "Top stories" is default over "Most recent"! I fucking hate Facebook. Join my Facebook petition if you agree!"

I suppose that kind of thing doesn't matter all that much to me because I am more of a spectator on Facebook - I don't have thousands of friends and millions of photos. And that's not because I am a loner (although it is) but because I don't usually want to advertise my social life to everyone. Sure, I'll post a status update about some Youtube video I have found - but what is the point? Nobody really cares!

If ever you see me daydreaming, or it just seems like I am not really listening, and you wonder what is going through my head - it is this exact thing.

However something has changed that I really do care about - Firefox. I recently upgraded to Firefox 4. I was ready for the address bar being below the tab bar, but for some reason my home, stop and refresh buttons re-arranged themselves into some crazy configuration. Menu items re-arranged, I can focus on some things I wasn't expecting. Such as the weird transparency in the menu bar and tab area. I can sort of understand the change - in a "you know what would look cool?" kind of a way - but I don't understand why there isn't a checkbox or about:config setting to turn it off. Seriously, with my wallpaper it looks like crap. Thankfully I found a forum post that helped me to correct it. Create a file called "userChrome.css", in the folder "C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\fahhwhja.default\chrome" - or whatever your equivalent is. Then copy and paste the following into that file:

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"); /* set default namespace to XUL */

#toolbar-menubar {
-moz-appearance: -moz-win-browsertabbar-toolbox !important;
}

#TabsToolbar {
  background-color: -moz-dialog !important;
}

window, page, dialog, wizard, prefwindow {
  background-color: -moz-Dialog !important; }

Save the file, enjoy the difference. There is one more thing - the status bar isn't always shown by default. I like the status bar. Thankfully an extension is available that enables it again - Status-4-Evar. Despite the quite frankly rubbish name it does everything required, so you can enjoy Firefox again.

Well almost - you'll probably want a decent theme that is actually Firefox 4 compatible. MX3 is what I am currently using - it seems pretty good and unlike a lot of the themes of Mozilla.org isn't an assault on the eyes.

So I now finally have things looking as they should be - and am able to enjoy all the cool new features of Firefox 4. A lot of the new features appear to be to do with the interface - which I have now mostly disabled. But there is some neat speed enhancements, WebM-compatibility, app tabs, a bookmarks and history sync thingy and a load of other features that I probably won't use but will happily tell people all about.

After this nothing of a post I promise I'll get back to the Things That Are Nice/Shit series - once I actually think of something.