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personas posts

Filed under: Fun, Internet

Personas: an online art installation with a personal twist

Personas is a fascinating piece of web-based art that visually represents just how much the internet knows about you. Type in your name, and Personas will analyze the text of the Google results, breaking your web presence down into various categories. These groupings include everything from "online" to "sports" to "illegal," and each one has a color, so each person's name results in a unique band of colors.

If you have a unique name, Personas can be disturbingly accurate. If not, it's still visually interesting, but other people who share your name can muddy your results. The flaws in this kind of data analysis are part of the project, though: Personas is about showing how smart the web has become, and how far it has to go before software can intelligently trace our digital histories.

Filed under: Mozilla, Browsers

Personas is live, and an uglier Firefox is easier than ever!


Fans of other browsers have slammed Firefox's rather plain appearance for ages. Now, at last, Mozilla fans have a weapon which they can proudly wield against their friends who run IE7 with bikini-clad Hotbar backgrounds!

Personas has gone live, complete with a gallery chock full of prefab styles that can be easily applied to your browser. As with any desktop theming, there are a few aesthetically pleasing creations but there are also a number of abhorrent designs.

Too many of them wind up making a cluttered, distracting mess of the menus. Strata, for example, puts an annoying orange line right through my bookmark buttons. With Cool Black, I can't even read the labels. On the plus side, switching Personas doesn't require restarting Firefox like traditional themes do.

Still, kudos to Mozilla for making themes easier for users to put together. Firefox's easy and flexible personalization is one key advantage it has over competing browsers, so they may as well ride that horse 'till it drops.

Filed under: Mozilla, Beta

Mozilla makes Firefox skinning easy with Personas

Personas Screenshot

In a move aimed at making Firefox easy to personalize, Mozilla has released an extension called Personas. After a quick install, users can easily change the look of their beloved browser without the frustration of dealing with Firefox "Themes".

We agree with the Mozilla labs blog that themes are way to hard to find and install. Plus having to restart your browser just to apply a themes is just annoying. Another advantage for Personas is that graphic designers can apply different styles to the browser without having to write code.


Here's how it works. First you install the plugin and restart your browser. After Firefox comes back up, you see a little fox in the lower left hand corner (screenshot below), click the fox and select among the themes. Your browser is instantly skinned with no headache whatsoever! Personas is ready to use on Firefox 2.0 through the 3.0 Betas.

A feature we love is that the list of "personas" will auto-magically update on a regular basis. Maybe Mozilla labs just made browser skinning so easy that our parents could do it? Hmm maybe not!


[via Mozilla Labs Blog]

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