Firefox: Persona vs Theme

Recently, Mozilla launches a new feature for their Firefox browser, called as Firefox Persona. It’s an addon that allow you to change the skin of your Firefox with your favorite brands. They’ve made a new site for the Persona Gallery where you can download the Personas made by many designers. One thing in my mind when I know this: “What about the Firefox theme?”.

As you know Firefox has already had the Theme Gallery, which is integrated to the Addon Gallery. What about them after the Persona is launched? In their FAQ page, they said that Persona is a special type of theme that changes the look of your browser without changing the navigation buttons, toolbars, and menus, while Themes change the appearance of Firefox.

Still curious, then I made a test: install Persona and a theme at the same time. And here is my conclusion: Persona is made to re-skin your Firefox, it is only capable to give a new background for toolbar and statusbar, while it can’t make any modification to the style of the buttons, tabs and any color like Themes do. Imagine that installing Persona is like making a tattoo to your body, while installing theme is like getting a plastic surgery on it. And happily, you can combine both!

Here is the screenshot of my Firefox tattoo-ed with WordPress Vintage Persona and altered with Vista-aero theme. Nice, eh?

Oh, I just realize that the Personas is much like Google Chrome themes. Hmm..