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freedom4all: You might enjoy a wander through the myriad of old Firefox themes via WayBackMachine (WBM) sometime?
Recently I was looking for a particular Persona that I like to use along with a series of CSS scripts to compact the UI of current Firefox and LibreWolf much more to my taste. I was curious to see if that Persona (
'Gradient Blue' by 'Nh0jNG' if you were asking) also existed in a pre-Firefox 57 and pre-WebExtensions version before November 2017? It had.
To my surprise I found that WBM stores a large number of captures of the pre-Firefox 57 Mozilla Addons (AMO) Complete Themes pages... see full list of captures 2013 onwards here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170401000 ... te-themes/
Many of these captured 'Complete Theme' pages are still searchable to varying degrees e.g:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170829120 ... ort=rating
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Likewise, WBM has captured a truly vast number of pre-Firefox 57 'Personas' too...see a full list of captures 2013 onwards here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170315000 ... ox/themes/
Many of these pages listing thousands of Personas are also searchable, again to vary degrees depending on each particular WBM capture e.g:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130722191 ... ox/themes/
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To my further surprise I found that a good number of the individual Personas held on WBM are still 'live' and can even be 'downloaded' to current Pale Moon 31.3.1. Thus, as originally intended, these 'captured' Personas can still change the tab bar background colour/picture/design. However, the surviving Personas all seem to be simple solid colours and colour gradients, perhaps WBM was unable to access and save the .png files that were needed for more complex Personas?
Note: IIRC Firefox Personas were never 'downloaded' to your browser as such (more's the pity IMO). What was actually held in your browser's Profile and activated from your Addons Page 'Themes' list was only the URL address of your chosen Persona file(s)... the files themselves being held on the Firefox/Mozilla Addons (AMO) website. This means that the 'still active' Personas to be found on WBM must now have a 'live' URL held somewhere on WBM's servers! A slightly bizarre state of affairs... and I'm not sure if this might present some level of security risk to anyone attempting to use those 'still live' Personas available via WBM?
If interested... the only way to find out if a particular Persona is still live on WBM is good old trial and error... simply testing each of the instances of a particular Persona captured by WBM unlit you find a live one... a somewhat tedious process.
(
FWIW - the Persona I was looking for 'Gradient Blue' by 'Nh0jNG' didn't survive the cut... there isn't a 'live' version of it stored by WBM... but luckily for me the author did update so at least it is easily available for use with current Firefox and LibreWolf.)
Just for fun... here are just a few of the dozens of Personas that I found still working on WBM. Apologies, I obviously have a bit of a thing for simple solid/abstract shades of blue 'easy on the eyes' type Personas for browsing... so 3 of the example Personas below are all boringly blue ones selected from 'Solid Themes' + 'Most Popular' AMO sort pages like this one WBM captured in August 2017:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821094 ... lar&page=2
Mono Blue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171104161 ... /monoblue/
Blue Sharepoint:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170822033 ... harepoint/
Bluez Vista:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170822033 ... uez-vista/
Basic Grey Gradient:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171015222 ... -gradient/
Mini green4:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170821012 ... ni-green4/
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If nothing else, I found my trip back to pre-Firefox 57 AMO's Theme and Persona pages via WBM a sad reminder of all that was thrown away with the move to WebExtensions... so many wonderful pieces of work, contributed by thousands of individuals, the majority of which did not get updated and just ended up in the bin marked history.