How to make Firefox look and feel like IE, Safari, or Opera
Making Firefox look and feel like Safari
Apple’s Safari is a pretty cool browser, but it’s closed source, runs on Windows and Mac OS X only, and doesn’t have add-on support. If you’re switching from Safari to Firefox, here are some add-ons to make it resemble your old browser.
Making Firefox look like Safari is dead simple: Install the iSafari theme created by Fear Fox. It’s an almost exact replication of Safari’s brushed metal interface. You’ll also want to install Fission to add a Safari-style progress bar.
There are only a few features in Safari that Firefox doesn’t have. One of the best is called SnapBack, which lets you “snap” back to the page you were originally viewing. If you enjoyed that feature in Safari, try out SnapBack or How’d I Get Here.
Another Safari lets users resize text areas to provide for easier editing. Firefox’s Resizable Form Fields goes even further: it lets you resize text areas, select boxes, text fields, and even iframes.
Making Firefox look and feel like Flock
Every time I see a story boasting about the Flock browser’s features, I think, “Why would anyone use that?” Sure, it has nice social networking features, but all those features are available with Firefox.
First off, get the Flock Theme For Firefox. For some reason, the site claims to support only Firefox 1.5, but the theme actually runs on Firefox 1.0-3.0.
Almost everyone uses Facebook, and Flock does a great job of integrating Facebook out of the box (it basically runs a mobile version). However, Firefox can do the same thing with the Official Facebook Toolbar. It includes a toolbar with notifications, a friends sidebar, and a share button.
Flock also integrates well with Flickr, letting you view your friends’ (or anyone else’s) photostreams. Luckily, the Flickrfox add-on will do all of that and more.
If you swear by del.icio.us and love the fact that Flock syncs with its bookmarks, try out Foxylicious. It will sync the remote del.icio.us bookmarks with all the Firefox bookmarks.
Another nice built-in feature in Flock is the ability to blog directly to TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress, and Blogger. But Flock isn’t the only browser that will do this. All you need to do is install Deepest Sender or ScribeFire (formerly Performancing) in Firefox.
Making Firefox look and feel like Netscape
Believe it or not, the main Netscape theme for Firefox was created by the Netscape team. The theme is called Netstripe, and it is basically an exact replica of Netscape 9. Unfortunately, the team didn’t include Linux support (their reasoning was that a tiny search field bug looked bad. I don’t use the search bar so I’d have been fine with that). Therefore, I’ve hacked it for Linux.
You can add a few more Netscape-specific features to Firefox. There really aren’t a ton of features in Netscape that Firefox doesn’t have (it is, after all, built on Firefox). URL Fixer is a great add-on that corrects domain misspellings. A user named Gomita created a program called ScrapBook that is similar to LinkPad. And you can emulate Propeller integration with Propeller.com Friends’ Activity Sidebar and Propeller.com Sitemail Notifier.
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Tags: Firefox, Flock, ie, internet explorer, netscape, opera, safari
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