Change Firefox Themes instantly with Personas

The normal way of changing Firefox themes is painfully slow. You download and install the theme from the Mozilla website and activate it afterwards. Then, after activating the theme in the Themes menu you have to restart Firefox so that the new theme will be displayed after the next start.

Personas is a Firefox extension that was developed at the Mozilla Labs. It adds an icon to the status bar that allows you to quickly select a theme which will be activated without a restart of the browser. I would say that roughly 30 themes are available in categories like popular, sports, nature and geometric.

While this is surely a great way of enabling themes - something that Opera can do for a long time with all themes available on the Opera homepage - it has its limitations. The biggest is of course the limited number of themes that can be activated with no way of adding additional themes to Personas.

This is in my opinion the biggest drawback of the add-on. What if you do not like the themes offered in the extension and prefer to switch between several of the more popular themes that can be downloaded from the Firefox homepage ? You are out of luck then which is very unfortunate.

Another downside is that it does seem to add quite a few Megabytes of Ram usage to Firefox.