I’ve been working on Personas for Firefox for almost a year now and only in the past few months have I started to understand the impact and possibilities surrounding them.

Previous to Personas the only way to customize Firefox was via an add-on or theme. While this resulted in a fantastic ecosystem, only developers familiar with XUL, JavaScript and CSS could do this.

Enter Personas, a simple, easy way to customize Firefox. Create two images of your liking and in a few minutes you’ve customized Firefox. In a few minutes you’ve exerted a small amount of control over a piece software on your computer, possibly for the first time.

I firmly believe that the more control people have in their lives the happier they can be. Personas opens up customization, art and the potential for beauty to millions more people around the world. Personas aren’t just ‘background images’ or ‘wallpapers’, they are extensions of ourselves, our interests, our hobbies and passions.

Give people a canvas and they’ll create art, even in the most difficult of situations. Personas gives people a new canvas, but one that is digital, global and with hundreds of millions of participants. Personas brings art into millions of people’s lives on a daily basis.

Art can be controversial, emotional, human. Art can change your opinion, open you to new ideas and emotions.

We’re starting to see a fantastic mix of personas. Cute, funny, beautiful and inspiring. The past year for Personas has been wild and exciting. I expect the next few years to be the same.

Attribution:

Wear It http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/156977
Yakuza Paint: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/98983
WINHS of FLASH: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/persona/159007

Here’s a screencast of some of the new features:

For more info, check out the Mozilla Labs blog post about it or visit the site!

Sarah asked me yesterday to help her with editing Firefox’s userChrome.css to show favicons in the Bookmarks Toolbar. Vlad had written up a post about it, but many commenters had tweaks and fixes.

So I’ve put all the code I used together onto GitHub here: http://gist.github.com/186269. Add that to your ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/profiles/*.default/chrome/userChrome.css (or create it if it’s not there). And you should be ‘good to go’!

For the past month Mark has been working tirelessly on Cesium, a YSlow automator web app. It’s a hybrid web app that also has a daemon that regularly checks your website with YSlow and records the results. You can add and edit sites and pages and see the results over time.

We have a lot of neat ideas for it and are looking for contributors, testers and ideas. So, read the wiki, join us in IRC in #cesium on irc.mozilla.org or file a bug!

This definitely wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of Alex, Stephen, Aravind, Tara, Melissa and John. Big thanks to all of them!

So in some of my previous posts about becoming/being a web developer, I say you should write code, lots of code. I also think the more varied real-world experience you get, the better developer you’d be.

So how can you get more real-world experience when you are a student or have a full-time job? Easy, you can write code for Mozilla!

Want some Python, Javascript and MySQL exeperience? Help us with our Graph Server. Dying to show off your killer PHP skills? Help us with AMO. Want to work on Drupal? Work on spreadfirefox.com. Want to work on some crazy futuristic ideas? Check out Mozilla Labs.

All of our code is open source and available through svn.mozilla.org or hg.mozilla.org. You don’t even need an account to checkout the code!

The basic workflow would go something like this:

• Take a bug
• Submit patch
• Ask someone to review the patch
• Once reviewed, submit the patch
• Pad your resume

Want more info? Check out the wiki and mozilla.org/contribute.

Photo from onthetower.