Personas is live, and an uglier Firefox is easier than ever!

By Lee Mathews, Downloadsquad

Fans of other browsers have slammed Firefox’s rather plain appearance for ages. Now, at last, Mozilla fans have a weapon which they can proudly wield against their friends who run IE7 with bikini-clad Hotbar backgrounds!

Personas has gone live, complete with a gallery chock full of prefab styles that can be easily applied to your browser. As with any desktop theming, there are a few aesthetically pleasing creations but there are also a number of abhorrent designs.

Too many of them wind up making a cluttered, distracting mess of the menus. Strata, for example, puts an annoying orange line right through my bookmark buttons. With Cool Black, I can’t even read the labels. On the plus side, switching Personas doesn’t require restarting Firefox like traditional themes do.

Still, kudos to Mozilla for making themes easier for users to put together. Firefox’s easy and flexible personalization is one key advantage it has over competing browsers, so they may as well ride that horse ’till it drops.