Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client is very popular among Linux users, but it has poor visual integration with the Linux platform. Fortunately, Thunderbird is finally getting some Tango love and its own Linux theme.
Mozilla user experience designer Bryan Clark published a blog entry this week that provides an early preview of some recent theming work that will significantly improve the look and feel of Thunderbird on Linux. Magnus Melin has started working on a Thunderbird gnomestripe theme which uses icons from the user's default theme in the menus. Michael Monreal also came up with a cool userChrome.css hack that applies Tango icons to the main user interface.
Image courtesy of Michael Monreal
In a comment posted in the Thunderbird bug tracker, Clark says that he aims to have the new Thunderbird GNOME theme integrated in time for the first or second beta of Thunderbird 3. The adoption of Gecko 1.9 for Thunderbird 3 has already brought support for native widget styles. The Tango icon theme and native widgets will make Thunderbird conform with the appearance of the GNOME desktop environment.
reader comments