As Firefox 1.5 is now here, I would like to say that I’m still very much interested in making Firefox fit in with the Linux desktop as I did with the Industrial theme for 1.0.x (which does not work with 1.5). However, a few things should be noted.

  1. First of all, I unfortunately do not have the time to currently work on Firefox beautification. I may have a little bit of time in a few weeks, but I also might not, depending on how things go. (Right now I’m working on some really cool stuff at work that you’ll see sometime in the future.)
  2. I’ve heard through some grapevine somewhere that there’s a patch for firefox to enable gtk-stock icon support for the default theme (and I believe it was done by someone at Red Hat, iirc). If this is true, then that’s half the battle to fitting in.*
  3. I really believe native looking changes should go upstream. This includes all of the little spacing / padding tweaks, the correct order of buttons, and making sure that all native widgets are fully represented in their XUL counterparts.

*Note: For KDE users, if an icon theme is ported to use the standard icon naming spec that Tango recommends, then it’ll inherit the same icon theme that the rest of the desktop would use too. For native looking widgets, there is GTK-QT. Of course there is Firefox ported to Qt as well.

If Firefox had native icon support and the tweaks mentioned above for the default theme, then it should just inherit the look of the desktop by default.