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Make Firefox 3 Use Windows Vista Glass Like Internet Explorer Does

One of the things that has really annoyed me about running Firefox on Vista is that Internet Explorer looks really slick with the Aero Glass extending down onto the entire navigation bar… and Firefox just looks pathetic sitting next to it. Thanks to the Glasser extension from my new favorite person 6XGate, IE no longer holds the edge in slick UI.

Note: This extension only works in Firefox 3 Beta 5 or later, and is still an alpha release, so it's likely to cause crashes and generally have problems. But it looks sweet!

Notice how the glass extends all the way down the navigation bar now:

image

And you have the full transparent glass effect:

image 

You can also add in a Stylish script to change the bookmarks bar to look like Windows Explorer if you want, although I don't personally like the way that looks:

image

Installation

Head over to MozillaZine and install the extension, and then install the Personal Menu extension as well so that you can hide the menu bar by right-clicking on the toolbars area and unchecking "Menus Toolbar"

image

All of the links you'll need are on the MozillaZine page.

Note: I typically only write how-to related articles and don't cover geek news, but this one was too fun to ignore. More how-to goodness tomorrow, I promise.

Download Glasser from mozillazine.org - [homepage]

The Geek is the founder of How-To Geek and a geek enthusiast. When he's not coming up with great how-to articles, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 04/21/08 and tagged with: Firefox, Firefox & Internet

Comments (7)

  1. liode7

    Wow! thats awesome!

    I wish you had a news section - that would be great

  2. Jennifer

    I really wish you would have a GeekNews section! I would subscrice to it!

  3. Andy

    I'll third a geek news section. more geek news for the masses; how can that be a bad thing?

  4. Toby Adams

    unexpected error occurred :(

  5. The Geek

    @Toby

    The weird thing is that Firefox 3 Beta 5 was crashing on me every 15 minutes until After I installed this… so it's actually made Firefox more stable for me. Makes no sense!

  6. tim

    I'll put in a fourth for a geek news section - all the geek news sites are terrible - digg isn't even tech anymore, slashdot is still a zealot site, there's just no good site for us geeks that want to get geek news.

  7. Kevin

    The extension Fission turns your address bar into the loading bar, and allows you to customize the color scheme it uses. If you use this image for the color scheme:

    http://i32.tinypic.com/eq867c.png
    It'll look exactly like the loading bar within windows explorer, for an even more detailed mimicry of vista's explorer!


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