It’s time to finally end my theming efforts. I have no plans to update my themes for Firefox 4 or later. Reasons for this include a better default theme, a lower number of users of my themes and a large amount of work required just for maintenance. Thanks to everyone who has been using them.
I welcome suggestions of opportunities to make use of my design skills.
With a new Firefox version almost out, it is time for my “traditional” theme updates. Other than Firefox 3.6 compatibility, Qute 4.1 hasn’t changed very much. An exception being a few changes to the back and forward buttons.
The forward button has a revised shape, inspired by Firefox 4 mock-ups. It is shaded with more depth to better match the back button. The etching around the buttons is removed which helps reducing clutter, and the drop-down arrow has a clearer mouse-over indication.
The SVG set is also updated.
The oldest Firefox theme available has returned in a completely new version. I’m proud to announce Qute 4, available for Firefox 3.5.
The icons in Qute 3.* date back to late 2004, shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0. It has remained fairly popular, but has increasingly lagged behind my skills as well as in completeness. To maintain the theme properly, the only option was doing everything from scratch. And here it is.
With this being a new version, I naturally tried to stay pretty close to the old icons. Still, to make the style consistent, and generally improve the quality, I felt some significant changes were necessary. The result is I think 4 is closer to the original “spirit” of Qute, not to mention just simply better. See for yourself in this comparison.
In addition, as with Kempelton, I’m making the Qute 4 SVG files available and allowed for use under license. Just get Inkscape, which is free and easy to use, and you can edit, convert to PNG or learn from them.
Supporting Mac OS X has turned out to be too difficult. I was able to fix the scrollbar issue but it’s a clumsy solution I’d rather not have to deal with. And even then, a host of other issues remain. So I will just consider it unsupported. If anyone wants to create Mac OS X versions of my themes, let me know.
I’ve marked the themes as for Windows on Firefox Add-ons. I’m not sure it’s necessary to mark other systems such as Linux unsupported, but they only allow the choice of a single platform or all. There appears to be many problems on Linux anyway, so it might be best. You can always download and install it manually.
Qute 3.3.2 for Firefox has been released. This version adds Firefox 3 compatibility, but doesn’t replace the default icons for any new features. I’m not happy with the quality of this release. A proper update necessitates a complete remake, which I’ve begun developing, but the focus of my efforts lately has been Kempelton 3.
The updating of my themes for Firefox 3 is progressing well. It will be more than just compatibility updates, too.
Arvid Axelsson 