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If you’re anything like me, and you’re on Windows, you’ve probably grabbed a decent Beta 2 build of Firefox 2 for your platform, and everything is nice and fast. But, let’s face it, cool people stick to Windows Classic, and every Firefox milestone to date has looked worse and worse on that theme. Beta 2 definitely isn’t an exception to that rule: it looks dreadful.
First off, a couple of notes on that screenshot. I don’t like the Home button, since I always use Alt+Home, so that’s why it’s not there. Also, I use Classic Menus for Winstripe to keep the menu bar from sucking, so the menu items are probably off by a couple of pixels. And, finally, pigfoot’s builds all use “Firefox Community Edition” as the window title, which I’m not that fond of, so I use Nightly Tester Tools to change it back to “Mozilla Firefox.”
If you tried to install any of those extensions, and Firefox complained about compatibility, you probably aren’t aware of the new about:config preference called extensions.checkCompatibility, which you can set to false to be able to install any addon without Firefox whining about the version problem—provided that it’s actually compatible, of course.
Now, back to the screenshot … Whether you’re a Master of Arts or not, you’ll probably agree that it’s still horrible, and, beta or not, personally, I don’t want my browser to look like that. Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to clean up this mess. Don’t bother with the Winstripe package—it’s seriously flawed. Instead, you can just tamper with userChrome.css to apply some quick fixes. I used the DOM Inspector to discover the IDs and class names of the user interface elements that I wanted to mess with, so if your configuration is any different from mine, be sure to give that a whirl.
The first thing we’ll take care of is the ridiculously cramped toolbar buttons. After some experimenting, I found out that 5 pixels of padding above and below them looks much nicer, or at least more like the old Winstripe. So that gives us:
.toolbarbutton-1 { padding: 5px 0 !important; }
Moving on, with the Go button. I’ve always hated that thing. I like how they’ve integrated it with the Location bar, but I still think it’s an utter waste of space, and I have yet to meet someone who won’t just press Enter instead. Now, while this is very likely to be fixed in an upcoming build, mine wouldn’t let me remove the Go button without taking the entire Location bar with it. It’s easily fixed though:
#go-button { display: none !important; }
Now, if you apply those changes, Firefox’ll probably look pretty decent already. Personally, I wanted more space on the left and right of the Location bar. Adding 3 pixels on the left and 6 on the right gave me the nicest result:
#urlbar-container { margin: 0 6px 0 3px !important; }
Obviously, YMMV, but, while I still miss Winstripe, the result could grow on me. And I didn’t like Winstripe at first either, so I’m sure I’ll adapt eventually.