Personas for Firefox is a prototype extension that adds easy-to-style, easy-to-change skins to the browser.

The Personas project launched six weeks ago with a friendlier look and feel, improved functionality, and an expanded set of categories. Since that time, we have been working with the community to make the Personas user experience better and have done so through a series of three quick website releases, and one extension release. Here are a few of the key modifications that were made since Personas 1.0:

• Added Designer Detail Pages: the Personas community now has over 7K designers that have submitted over 10,000 designs. As the gallery expands, it becomes increasingly important for each designer to have their own personal space within the site to display their creations. We solved this problem by creating designer detail pages for each artist (see graphic below).
• Localized in Additional Languages : the Personas extension is now localized in Polish, Serbian, Turkish, and Chinese. This is in addition to the other 12 languages that were supported during the last launch, including Spanish, German, Bulgarian, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese. In the future, we plan to localize the website with these languages.
• Ported to Thunderbird: thanks largely to the contributions of Huang Yaoquan, Personas can now be installed on Thunderbird. Integrating the extension into Thunderbird is a work in progress (see buglist), and Huang and others are continuing to make progress.
• Enabled Sharing: it is now easy for you to share Personas art work you admire with your friends. Each design’s detail page now has a ShareThis link.
• Pagination: as the Pesonas gallery continues to expand, it became increasingly important to organize the art in a way that enables you to browse all designs without performance issues. We included pagination in the All/All section of the gallery so that your browser loads the full gallery in sections, rather than 10,000+ designs at one time.

What’s Next?

The Personas project will continue to evolve quickly with your ideas and feedback. If you have thoughts on how to make Personas better, please discuss and debate them with the community in our discussion group or add a solution to our newly created support wiki. We will continue to update you with the progress of the project.

– Suneel Gupta and Toby Elliott, on behalf of the Personas development team