New versions of Bloody Red and Blue Fox

Hey it's my birthday tomorrow and I'm giving you presents! New version of Blue Fox and Bloody Red are now available! Download Version 11.0.29.02.12 of Blue Fox from: HERE!

*Added greater distinction between enabled and disabled add-ons in about:addons
*Fixed bug in the new style editor (Tools > Web Developer > Style Editor) in FF11
*Fixed bug in about:permissions
*Fixed text bug in about:memory
*Fixed tiny color bugs
*Fixed bug with Inspect Element

Download Version 11.0.28.02.12 of Bloody Red by clicking HERE!
*Added greater distinction between enabled and disabled add-ons in about:addons
*Fixed bug in the new style editor (Tools > Web Developer > Style Editor) in FF11
*Fixed bug in about:permissions
*Fixed text bug in about:memory
*Fixed tiny color bugs

To install the themes
1. Go to Tools-Add-ons manager
2. Drag and drop the archive in the Add-ons manager to install
3. Restart Firefox to see the changes

Enjoy : )

March 3rd - Bulgaria’s Liberation Day

Freedom is priceless. If you don't have freedom you're nothing. Today me, my family, every Bulgarian family actually celebrates March 3rd. I personally love March. The weather is can change from cold to hot to cold in 24h. I have a birthday on March 6th and a lot of people I know have birthdays that first week of march. Spring is coming and it's awesome. So here's some info about March 3d.

Bulgaria celebrates Thursday the country’s National Holiday, March 3rd and the 134 rd anniversary of its Liberation from five centuries of Ottoman dominance.
Bulgaria was already a sovereign nation with established culture, language, arts, technology, among others even before it succumbed to the forces of the Ottoman Empire in 15th century.
Bulgaria’s nationhood was established back in the early 7th century (A.D.) when the first Bulgarian Empire began at around 632 and 681 A.D lasting until 1018 covering most of the Balkans, a geopolitical region in Southern Europe. Bulgarians had their own government, and distinct culture, education, literature, arts, religion and economic way of life before the Turks came in. The Slavic people consider Bulgaria as the centre of European culture and arts before the Ottoman Empire colonized the region.
The Ottoman Empire occupied Bulgaria from the latter half of the 14th century (or 15th century in some literature) until the end of Russo-Turkish War in 1877-1878 taking advantage of the decline in power of the Second Bulgarian Empire between 1185 and 1396/1422. Right after the Russo-Turkish War, Bulgaria saw the opportunity to re-establish its Third Bulgarian Empire and founded a new era of constitutional monarchy in 1878 as supported by the Treaty of San Stefano.

Today, through various legislations, Bulgaria’s government is now under parliamentary democracy within a constitutional republic where the head of the state is run by people who are elected by Bulgarians through popular vote. Bulgaria is a member of several international intergovernmental organizations such as the

On 3 March 1878, the Peace Treaty of San Stefano (a tiny town near Istanbul) between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was signed, bringing Bulgaria back to the political map.

March 3 was honored for the first time in 1880, in the occasion of the Enthronement of Russian Emperor Alexander the Second. Since 1888, March 3 has become Bulgaria’s Day of Liberation, but it was not declared National Holiday until 1978.

With a Parliamentary Decree from 1990, March 3 was included in the list of Bulgaria’s official holiday.

The Peace Treaty of San Stefano marks the revival of the Bulgarian State, dominated by the Ottoman rule since the end of 14th century. Bulgaria, however, became a truly independent country after the Congress of Berlin, which took place a couple of months later in 1878, despite the fact that it ended with the redistribution back to the Ottoman Empire of certain Bulgarian territories that the previous treaty had given to the Principality of Bulgaria, most notably Macedonia.

The Congress of Berlin (June 13 – July 13, 1878) was a meeting of the European Great Powers’ and the Ottoman Empire’s leading statesmen. In the wake of the Russian-Turkish War, 1877-78, the meeting’s aim was to reorganize the countries of the Balkans. Otto von Bismarck, who led the Congress, undertook to balance the distinct interests of Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary. The congress was aimed at the revision of the Treaty of San Stefano and at keeping Constantinople in Ottoman hands.

Liberty Monument at “Shipka”

Bulgaria – 1878

Bulgaria after the Treaty of San Stefano

Due to the lack of time, real life things I have to do, the lack of downloads, active users, donations and the fact that creating and supporting a Firefox theme is not an easy thing I won't be supporting the Extero 2 for Firefox 11 and above for now. I haven't worked on the theme since April last year. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/minty-fresh-green/

Recently I've been really busy and I'm barely spending time on my computer and working on my 10 themes. I haven't been following what's new in latest versions of Firefox as well. Sure I see the main problems but I miss smaller problems like the purple app button while the user has enabled private browsing and some minor things. Btw I'd like to thank Ken for pointing out problems with my themes in every review email I get. You're doing a great job with that.

So if there's anyone who'd like to take over Extero 2 I'd be happy to send him/her the theme archive. If not I'll update it when I find time which probably won't happen till 15th July.

About my other themes. All of them need some work. Bloody Red got an update a few days ago but still I need to fix some things here and there. Now I'm working on iAqua. Next is Green Fox, Purple Fox, Blue Fox, Pink Fox, Toy Factory and Sky Pilot classic which requires a lot of work and is my most difficult theme to support. I'm down to supporting 9 themes now and soon I may reduce the number to 8.

Thanks for using my themes!

Happy birthday Bloody Red

Back in 2009 on 13th February I released Bloody Red version 0.1. It was my first dark theme and the first theme in which I used my own icons, images and code.

It has been 3 years since I first released version 0.1 and man a lot has changed since then. I improved the design a bit with Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 but with the release of Firefox 4 the theme has been completely redesigned and soon after that I have created 4 sub-skins which are absolutely free to use, easy to install and look amazing. See how to install and use the Bloody Red sub-skins by clicking here http://firefox-goodies.net63.net/sub-skins/bloody-red-sub-skins.html 

For the future I'll try to keep up with latest Firefox releases and continue to support and improve the theme if possible. Now I don't have time to work on themes and web development but this summer I'm planning to put more time in that. I have some real life things I have to deal with and I think you'll all agree that real life problems are more important than supporting a theme. Besides I'm not getting paid for doing that.
So yeah Happy birthday Bloody Red! I'm hoping for more downloads, users, donations and theme improvements in the future. I'm looking forward your creating comments in the comments box below.

3 years of Firefox theme development

Yup last Thursday January 12th I celebrated 3 years of Firefox theme development. I would like to thank you users of all the support throughout these 3 years, the amo editors, those of you who donated and those who downloaded and tried my themes. I have ten themes, 523 288 users and 8 385 077 total theme downloads which in my opinion is a pretty good result.

Also I haven't been posting here lately because I was way to busy with real life problems and stuff and when I find time I am spending more time on my web-site project http://web-goodies.comli.com/ If you want to find more information about how my theme development started visit this page: Click

Firefox 9 is out - review! Merry Christmas and Happy new year!

Yup Mozilla keeps releasing new versions of Firefox every 6 weeks. This month Firefox 9 came out. Like I wrote in one of my previous posts I don't use the final releases and today updated to Firefox 10 beta.

So enough with what I use. Lets talk about what is new in Firefox 9 and why should you try it. It's 30% FASTER than Firefox 8 or at least that is the information all over the internet. Everyone says that Mozilla has improved the JavaScript page rendering by 30% which is a good thing. A lot of websites use tons and tons of Javascript code so in my opinion this is definitely a step forward. Again there is nothing new in terms of design and my Firefox themes are compatible with Firefox 10 beta even so it's ok to use them. :)

Finally I want to wish Merry Christmas and Happy new year to all my users, especially those of you who donated. Sure there's not much money but it's something. It's been a good year for my Firefox themes - design improvements, sub-skins, Firefox 4-5-6-7-8-9-10 support and not many bug reports. Thanks for using my themes. Best of luck and happy holidays! :)

Holidays are coming! Christmas is that time of year when families are together and New year is all about parties, fireworks and fun. Why not bring that holiday spirit to your browser? As I have mentioned before in one of my previous posts I am a Firefox theme developer. It is a hobby. A hobby which requires a lot of time and effort. Firefox themes change the appearance of your browser.
I have 10 themes. One of them is called Purple Fox . It has a unique dark design, over 700 000 downloads and around 85 000 users. This summer I have been think about making a Christmas Firefox theme since the current are no longer supported. I wanted a theme but I Firefox themes are not easy to make a support. They require some image editing knowledge + Css and Css3 for the code.
I've been thinking and I decided to create a Christmas Special version of my Purple Fox Firefox theme.  ( preview below )

Personally I think it is amaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing! What more can you ask for? Awesome background! Dark snowy night in the mountain mixed with some Christmas lights. And lets not forget those candy scrollbars. This comes with 2 sub-skins .
Also the Purple Fox theme pack is absolutely free to install and use. All you have to do is click the green install button and restart Firefox to see the changes.
Since this is a Christmas Special I'll bring back the classic Purple Fox design in early January 2012!
I hope you enjoy this theme as much as I enjoyed creating it! Happy holidays! : )
Download theme from:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/purple-fox/?src=cb-dl-users

Here comes the hero of Christmas!

Holidays are coming soon and unfortunately for me and all Firefox theme users we no longer have a custom Christmas theme. All that's left are some Personas backgrounds which in my opinion don't look that great when combined with the default theme. I have mentioned this before in one of my previous posts and what I've written is about to become a reality.

I am making a Christmas version of my Purple Fox theme ( preview below ).

In other words I will try to become the hero of Christmas and create a modified version of my Purple Fox theme which will include this awesome Christmas design. The idea came to me back in July when I was on a holiday with my family high in the Rila mountain.

All I can say is : I am happy with my theme. By far I have only created a custom toolbar background and I'll see if I can add custom Christmas icons to the add-ons manager as well. Also I will be uploading the theme around November 15th. It takes a week or two for an add-on to get reviewed. In other words you'll have a Christmas theme somewhere around November 20th. I will remove the Christmas version in January 2012. After that you should download the Classic Purple Fox theme with the 2 sub-skins.

Large preview of the theme: http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/536/large.png
More info soon. I'm looking forward your comments! : )

Firefox 8 is out! Review in few sentences.

Version 8.0 of our favourite browser has been released. The folks from Mozilla are following the fast release cycle. Soon I will be moving to Firefox 9 beta but I thought it would be nice to make a post about what is new in Firefox 8 is a few short sentences.

1. Again there are no changes in design so it safe to update. My themes are compatible. Hope you like them.
2. Speed has been slightly improved compared to version 7. It feels a bit faster.
3. Guys from Mozilla fixed some bugs

What's new in Firefox 8:

The latest version of Firefox has the following changes:

• Add-ons installed by third party programs are now disabled by default
• Added a one-time add-on selection dialog to manage previously installed add-ons
• Added Twitter to the search bar for select locales. Additional locale support will be added in the future
• Added a preference to load tabs on demand, improving start-up time when windows are restored
• Improved performance and memory handling when using <audio> and <video> elements
• Added CORS support for cross-domain textures in WebGL
• Added support for HTML5 context menus
• Added support for insertAdjacentHTML
• Improved CSS hyphen support for many languages
• Improved WebSocket support
• Fixed several stability issues
• Fixed several security issues

Please see the complete list of changes in this version. Web and extension developers should also view the curated list of platform changes. You may also be interested in the list of changes in the previous version.

That's basically all users. Changes are not that big but I guess Mozilla is trying to take small steps in Firefox development. I still think that this should be version 4.0.4 but hey I'm just a theme developer. I can't do anything about this.

Have a nice day! : )

One million Green Fox downloads

My first post this month and I have some awesome news. Green Fox has reached 1 million downloads. Thank you very much for trying the theme and special thanks to those 50 000 people who are using it. First Blue Fox reached 1 million, after that Bloody Red and Pink Fox and now Green Fox. I sure am happy. I've been waiting a lot. Close to 1 million downloads is Purple Fox. It has 700 000 downloads and nearly 100 000. Again thanks for for using my themes and BIG thanks to those who have donated . : )

Web - Goodies slowly growing and improving !

I haven't been posing anything on my blog lately and somehow I felt that I need to update you visitors and theme users out there.

Not much work has been put in theme development lately. Sure there are some things which I need to work on but for the last 2 weeks or something I've been focusing on my website http://web-goodies.comli.com/ With it I'm trying to collect video tutorials from the internet and put them in one place. Hopefully these tutorials will help you learn how to create your own website or improve you web-design or image editing skills.

If you have visited before you'll notice the difference. Each page has more content, new tutorials have better description, I've added a comments section (users can use their tweeter, facebook or google + accounts to comment), share buttons, floating menus, improved backgrounds and much more. 

Design before :
http://web-goodies.comli.com/lessons/gimptuts/gimp-lesson-1.html

Design now :
http://web-goodies.comli.com/lessons/csstuts/css-lesson-1.html

As written in the title this site is slowly growing. It has 64 tutorials and nearly 100 pages. I am almost done with the updates and after that I'll probably pay more attention on theme development again. I need to fix few things in Orange and Pink Fox.

That's all for now. Be sure to check the site :  http://web-goodies.comli.com/
Have a nice day! : )

Custom themes and Personas at the same time is possible!

I haven't been posting anything here last week but now I have found something which may sound interesting to you. I've been searching Firefox stuff on the internet a lot lately. I love visiting mozillazine.org .People are friendly and there's always someone who can help you when you have problems with Firefox, extensions or theme development ect.

While reading the theme development forums I've come across an interesting article called: Custom themes and Personas at the same time is possible!

When I first saw the title I said to myself this probably requires some Firefox modifications but I was surprised to see that  a developer with a nick name David.Vincent has developed and add-on which allows you to use a custom theme and a personas skin at the same time. I tried it and it works. There's only one tiny problem. It requires multiple restarts. Anyway the add-on is called Toggle Persona and you can download it from the Mozilla add-ons site or by clicking here : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-persona/

Here's how to use it :

This simple add-on install a button in the add-on bar.
With this button you can enable/disable Personas with one click (Grey : Persona disable - Blue : Persona enable).
This add-on works with default Firefox theme and all other themes (if they support Personas).

Instructions for personas for all themes :
* Choose a Personas in the galery (or in your themes manager if you already have downloaded personas)
* Restart Firefox.
* Select your theme in the theme manager.
* Restart Firefox.
* Enable Persona by clicking on the add-on bar button ('P' button icon must be blue).
* Restart Firefox.
* That's all. You have now a new style theme.
If you want to test an other persona, you must repeat all the steps from the beginning.

This add-on avoid to enter in the 'about:config' and toggle the preference 'lightweightThemes.isThemeSelected' to true. For novice users it is better, and confirmed users will save time.

If you have no Persona in the Themes Manager, the button will stay blue even if you click on it. It is not a bug.

If you don't want Persona display just for a moment, disable it with the button. Restart Firefox.
When you want to come back to the Persona, no need to reinstall it. You have just to enable Persona with the button. Restart Firefox.
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As you can see the developer has given very detailed information about how to use Toggle Persona. I tried it and everything works great! Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-persona/ ,give the add-on a try and give the developer credit (write a review or something) .He did a really really nice job. It's not easy to create add-ons, trust me! : )

Download Toggle Persona from : HERE!

New version of Bloody Red waiting for the editors review.

New version of Bloody Red waiting for the editors review!

Version 7.0.10.10.11 of Bloody Red includes the following changes :
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*Added two new awesome Bloody Red designs
*Fixed bug with nav-buttons in add-ons manager 
*Added Firefox 9 support

The two new designs : Bloody Red pattern and Bloody Red rainbow (images below) can be activated by adding these lines of code to your userChrome.css document :

@import url("chrome://browser/skin/skins/skin3.css");  for Bloody Red pattern

@import url("chrome://browser/skin/skins/skin4.css"); for Bloody Red rainbow


If you want to learn more about the lines of code, how to edit or use the userChrome.css document and other Bloody Red sub-skins please visit this page : http://firefox-goodies.net63.net/sub-skins/bloody-red-sub-skins.html
There I've given more information about that. Hope you like the new sub-skins. Have a nice day! : )

Bloody Red pattern

Bloody Red rainbow

 

Over 50 tutorials on web-goodies!

You all probably know that I develop themes for Firefox. That's cool and all but at the same time I have been working on my website called Web Goodies. I have uploaded over 50 tutorials on it. The idea of this site is to collect video tutorials from the internet and put them in one place so that you can learn or improve you web design or image editing skills! : ) This is a perfect opportunity to thank all youtube users who gave me permission to upload their videos. The site has html, css, javascript, jquery, sony vegas, photoshop, gimp and more tutorials. Soon I'll start a php tutorials series.

Hope you like what I'm doing. Leave a comment if you have something to ask or just want to give your opinion. Link to Web-Goodies : http://web-goodies.comli.com/

Happy holidays Mozilla! Chrome beats Firefox on December?

I have been following this whole who's the most popular browser statics thing and recently I have come across something interesting. The internet is full with topics such as Chrome beats Firefox on December 2011. Here's a popularity diagram which shows how many people worldwide use IE, Firefox, Chome and other browsers.

I've taken the text in italics from a topic on the internet :
If you’ll check statcounter’s global stat graph, you can see the plotted green line (chrome) is growing steadily for the previous years hitting 23.6% share (we’re talking the percentage of worldwide users here) while Firefox continues to dip. If the projections are correct, we should expect Google’s browser to beat Firefox on December having a share of 26.6% while Mozilla Firefox at 25.3%.

However, it’s not clear though if this chart represents the totality of all Chrome versions and Firefox releases including 3.5. Then again, this is not really a cause of surprise since Chrome already beat the orange browser in UK last July.

If you can still remember, we reported on December 2009 that Firefox 3.5 is the most popular browser at that time. But within a span of two years, it’s bound to lose its spot to number 3 already. Obviously, everyone’s wondering if there’s a chance Chrome will beat Internet Explorer staying ahead on the lead at 41% in the near future.

We’ll see! 


The text in italics has been taken from http://pinoytutorial.com but you can find the same articles all over the internet.


My opinion is that Mozilla should do something about this. They should stop coping design of other browsers and come up with something fresh and new, something which nobody has experienced yet. I don't like Chrome because it's way too simple looking and it is not that fast compared to Firefox as well. On the other hand in Firefox you can change the appearance however you like. Tabs on top - 2 clicks and bam. Tiny menu - 2 clicks and bam you have it.

What's your opinion on this? Will Chrome be the 2nd most popular browser after IE? Leave your interesting responses in the comments below! : )

Firefox 10 Nightly Released

After they released Firefox 7.0.1 Mozilla released Firefox 10 nightly. Firefox 8 moved to Beta channel, and Firefox 9 moved to Aurora channel. Firefox 10 has already landed to the nightly channel of Firefox. The most recent nightly build version is Firefox 10.0a1 (alpha).

Compared to Firefox 9 Firefox 10 nightly has nothing new for now besides the version number change. Firefox team has a long list of new features for the Firefox 10. Some of them currently being considered by the team are : Add-ons default to compatible, plugincheck functionality in add-on manager panel, improved display of location bar results etc. Firefox Mobile may get new features like Text Readability, Flash support (on Android platform) etc. 

Along with these features, the final version of Firefox 10 will bring many new tools for developers like Console Object Completion, more powerful and integrated Code Editor, Style Inspector and Editor. 

Firefox 8 beta short review!

Been using Firefox 8 beta for 24 hours. Here are my first impressions!

Compared to Firefox 7 Firefox 8 beta doesn't feel faster. It actually feels the same as Firefox 7. Maybe there are some small improvements when it comes to speed but when I was using Firefox 6 beta it felt much faster than Firefox 5. Same goes for Firefox 7. When I was using the beta it felt much quicker than Firefox 6.

The are no design changes as well. Maybe mozilla are focusing more on performance rather than design. They are probably fixing known issues and stuff. The new and cool thing I've noticed is the new tab animation when you have 3-4 or more open tabs. If you want to move the active tab left or right it doesn't drop like it used to be. It moves the inactive tab. It's a bit hard to explain. You have to see it yourself. Another thing I've seen on the internet is that it's faster on 64bit machines. I'm running a 32bit windows but if you have 64bit machine and you feel any difference in performance in Firefox 8 beta let us know by sharing your thoughts in the comments below! 

Bloody Red version 7.0.19.09.11 reviewed. More soon!

Version 7.0.19.09.11 of Bloody Red has been reviewed. It includes 2 awesome Bloody Red skins and many bug fixes. If you want to learn how to use the new skins click here : http://firefox-goodies.net63.net/sub-skins/bloody-red-sub-skins.html
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New version of Bloody Red coming soon. It is going to include 2 more Bloody Red skins.

One of them has the same design as Purple Fox skin 2 but it looks nice with Bloody Red as well so I'm making it a 3rd Bloody Red skin. (see image below)

The second new Bloody Red design has this nice looking rainbow effect. I'll cover how to use all the new designs in another post as soon as I upload theme on the Mozilla Firefox site.

Bloody Red new skin 2 - rainbow effect

Thanks all for now. Enjoy! : )

Firefox 7 is out! Review in few short sentences!

Yup today Mozilla released Firefox 7 and they are definitely following the new release schedule. My first impressions of Firefox 7 is not the design but the performance. In terms of design nothing has been changed but these people have improved the speed. I don't know how much compared to Firefox 5 or 6 but you can definitely feel that they've made our favourite browser faster.

Not only that but the start-up time has been improved as well. Don't know how faster but I'm sure that some people will stop complaining that Firefox starts slow.

Another good thing is that most add-ons which worked with Firefox 6 work great with Firefox 7. You can get Add-ons and Themes by opening the Add-ons Manager, or by visiting the Add-ons Web site. Add-ons installed with previous versions of Firefox may not yet have been updated by their authors to work with this Firefox. If you wish to help test Add-ons, please install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter - your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

Here are the official release notes :

• Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases
• Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
• Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync
• The 'http://' URL prefix is now hidden by default
• Added support for text-overflow: ellipsis
• Added support for the Web Timing specification
• Enhanced support for MathML
• The WebSocket protocol has been updated from version 7 to version 8
• Added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox
• Fixed several stability issues
• Fixed several security issues

Please see the complete list of changes in this version. Web and extension developers should also view the curated list of platform changes. You may also be interested in the list of changes in the previous version.

By far I'm satisfied with the improvements in performance. Good job Firefox developers. Keep up the great work. For all of you who don't like what they are doing all I can say is : If you don't like it don't use it!

Enjoy and have a nice day! : ) Tweet

Firefox 7 coming tomorrow.

According to Mozilla Firefox 7 should be released tomorrow. Currently I'm using the beta and it definitely starts and loads pages faster. Personally I don't expect anything new in terms or performance or design. They are probably going to fix a few more bugs in the final release.

Meanwhile all my Firefox themes support Firefox 7 and 8 alpha. Everything works and looks fine. Latest versions of Sky Pilot and Purple Fox which includes 2 awesome new designs have been approved and are now available on the Mozilla add-ons site. Hope you like the new designs and bug fixes.

Next on the update list is Orange Fox and I'm working on a 3rd Bloody Red sub-skin ( see post below ) which should be released as soon as version 7.0.19.09.11 gets reviewed. Hope you like what I'm doing and despite the fact that I have less time to work on themes I'm doing the best I can to keep my themes compatible with newer Firefox versions.

Enjoy and please donate if you can. Even the smallest donation helps. If you want to help you can donate by clicking the pay pal button on the left. Thanks!

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