Skip to main content

Dynamic Weather Theme for Firefox

Dynamic Weather Theme for Firefox is a new extension for the Firefox web browser that changes the theme of the browser based on the weather conditions of a location in the world.

Mozilla dropped support for full Firefox themes with the release of Firefox 57 which reduced the browser's theme-related capabilities significantly.

Firefox users may install basic themes that change, more or less, only the address bar and tabbar of the web browser, and they may install extensions that may also change the appearance of the browser or the style of individual sites only. Firefox users may use CSS to style the browser.

Mozilla works actively on improving theme related capabilities of Firefox. While those will probably never match the capabilities of full themes, new APIs did and will introduce new theme-related options in Firefox that developers may take advantage of.

Dynamic Weather Theme

dynamic weather theme

Dynamic Weather Theme is a simple extension at its core. The extension changes the theme of the Firefox web browser based on the weather conditions of a location that you set during the initial configuration of the extension.

The extension loads the configuration page after installation automatically. You may open about:addons and click on the options link of the extension to open the configuration at any time as well.

The Firefox add-on supports two options to set a location. You may use geolocation functionality or set the location manually. Geolocation has the advantage that it changes the location automatically when you travel; the feature is not useful if you use the browser in a single location only.

Setting the location manually is easy, just enter the city name and country, and hit the submit button. If your city is not found, try a larger one nearby instead.

The extension uses [GET] requests to get weather data from Yahoo Weather. Note that it needs to communicate with Yahoo for that. The developers may add support for different weather services in the future to give users more choice.

The extension updates the theme of the browser based on changing weather conditions. You get a cloudy background if the weather is cloudy, a sunny background if it is sunny, and a night background at night (and so on).

Closing Words

I have to admit that I'm not a huge fan of themes that throw some paint on the Firefox toolbars as I find the themes distracting, especially if they decrease readability of tab titles and (some) icons.

Dynamic Weather Theme does that and that is the main reason why I won't use it. I do think, however, that it is a nice idea that some users will certainly love.

Now You: Do you use themes or do you run the stock-browser theme?

 

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

HOME