Creating A Full Theme For Firefox 40

Add-ons Themes
#1

Hi,

I’m a developer familiar with most common languages and paradigms. But I haven’t messed about with any Firefox development for years, so I’m very rusty on how it goes.

I would like to tweak the standard Firefox 40 theme a little bit – more than what the basic theme tweaker here allows: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/Themes/Background

Primarily, I would like to change the colour of the toolbar buttons like: home, history, downloads, etc.

I started going through the ‘Hello World!’ tutorial here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Building_a_Theme, but that seems out of date for Firefox 40. I couldn’t locate chrome/browser/skin/classic/browser or chrome/browser/skin/classic/communicator in omni.ja.

I tried some hacking about with a theme by making educated guesses as to what to do but didn’t get anywhere.

If anyone could point me to what the modern equivalent of the browser and communicator folders in omni.ja are; and where I can find some decent tutorials and documentation I would be muchly grateful.

Thanks

#2

It appears that the forum is a somewhat dormant one, lol…

Well, I downloaded a theme and examined the code and feel like I have an 85% understanding of what is going on.

I managed to suss out how to make the minimal theme I wanted, that changes the toolbutton colours.

I’d still like to have a much clearer picture, so I’d still appreciate some links to decent tutorials and documentation.

#3

@amyt do you know about up to date docs about theme development?

#4

There’s a more active complete theme developer community at Mozillazine. That said, complete themes are an increasingly obscure area of add-on development and it’s hard to keep up with the updates to the default theme. If you really want to give it a shot, though, that’s where you’ll find the people who can help you.

#5

Hi Nus,

First of all, great you’re trying to build a Complete Theme. We could use some more diversity, not much new ones have been created recently.

I updated the “Building a Theme” page quite some time ago so it should have some more updated information because since the release of Firefox 4 the omni.ja files have changed quite a bit. Theme stuff is mostly found under/in the omni.ja in the browser folder where Firefox is installed.
browser\omni.ja\chrome\toolkit\skin\classic for the browser stuff and omni.ja\chrome\toolkit\skin\classic for the global and mozapps folders.

We also have a IRC channel where I’m in where you can ask all of your questions and would be the place to ask your questions; the articles on MDN are quite a pain to rewrite/update. The channel is quiet, but the people who are there have extensive knowledge of how to build one, what not to do (common pitfalls etc) and more.
https://chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.mozilla.org&channel=%23themedev

Regards,
rctgamer3

1 Like
#6

Thanks for the link, man. I shall have a browse. Ironically, it was a Frank Lion theme that I used to suss out what do, and it seems he is one of the active posters there.

#7

Thanks for the info and the invitation, brother. I shall certainly take you up on the offer when I am completely stumped