Comments on: Personalize your Thunderbird by changing it’s chrome

By: Roger

Roger — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:49:28 +0000

Lot of good info here, but of course, some of us have to be different. I am trying to change the hover color of the folder pane text and/or the selection bar. The account colors according to the account, which means the color of the selection bar has to be correct or the text needs to change color when the bar hovers. thanks…

By: david

david — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:40:18 +0000

Thanks! This also works well with Postbox. I was very impressed. I didn’t test all the features, but I did do most of them and they do a nice job of providing some customizing features for Postbox. Much appreciated!
david

By: Eric Wendelin

Eric Wendelin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:58:20 +0000

Glad you were able to find it, I’m sure that it’ll help other readers who find this article. Thank you!

By: Zach

Zach — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:17:16 +0000

Wow, Murphy’s Law that I would find the right post minutes after writing this. I got the info here and it worked great in Thunderbird 8!

http://www.linnhe2.free-online.co.uk/thunderbird/chrome.html#Change%20Thread%20pane%20alternating%20row%20colours%20in%20Thunderbird%202%20and%203

By: Zach

Zach — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:03:25 +0000

Hi Eric,

I’m sure you get a lot of comments like this, but as your post here comes up at the top of the Google Machine for editing userChrome, I thought maybe there was a chance you could help me.

Basically, I can’t stand the fact that Mozilla chose to “simplify” the thunderbird look in 4.0 and above. They took out the blue/white separations that appeared between each email in previous versions, so now the entire list of messages is just white by default. It’s very hard to read for someone who’s eyes are used to following the subtle lines.

your link to TwisterMC’s styles shows in the left example how it used to be, and Thunderbird 8.0 shows how it is now by default. http://www.twistermc.com/1143/thunderbird-labels/

Can you provide any thoughts on how it might be changed back to the old style? Or if not, is there a list of the full range of things that can be modified in userChrome somewhere? I’ve done basic editing before but never tried to input something to modify at random before! Thanks!

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:18:58 +0000

Thanks for this really helpful info on customizing thunderbird the chrome. I implemented many of your suggestions, but the one thing I cannot figure out is how to edit the userChrome.css so as to increase the size of the font used within messages that I am reading or composing (and since this is what I spend most of the time looking at that would be really helpful). Since I have a large screen, using Mac OS, the font ends up ridiculously small. Any hints appreciated, I’ve looked through many discussions and it seems this is the one piece that one can’t customize.

Thanks!

By: Jim Smitts

Jim Smitts — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:50:16 +0000

I was doing some android application development in Eclipse yesterday and wanted to do just this to Eclipse -- is there any way to update its Chrome? I'm guessing not, but I do appreciate the ability to do that with Thunderbird (and the rest of the Mozilla suite of apps).

By: Marcos

Marcos — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:11:39 +0000

Hello Eric,

thanks for this useful post!
One thing I didn’t solve though: the color of the selected message in the messages pane when the focus is over the message itself, on the bottom. When I select the message in the pane it turns blue and makes it very easy to know which message is selected. But when you position the mouse pointer below (for instance in order to copy something from the message or to scroll it down) the message line in the pane turns light grey, making it difficult to visualize which message is selected. Is there also a control in chrome for that? Thanks!

Marcos