Solarize Firefox

..or “how to freely change the web page display colors in firefox”.

In short: in the “about:config” settings in Firefox, you can freely adjust the default colors for links, text and background.

Time for another technical post here. If you change the display colors of web pages (link color, foreground text, background etc) in Firefox’ preferences, you have just a small range of (mostly ugly) colors to choose between. In about:config on the other hand, you can search for “color” and freely adjust the variable values to whatever you want (the variables are browser.active_color (active links, i.e. thats being pressed or just have been pressed, before loading next page), browser.anchor_color (links), browser.visited_color (visited links) and browser.display.background_color and browser.display.foreground_color I guess, but you can also take this from your system theme, which I’ve done since I’ve adjusted this as well).

Now, this will only change the color of pages that hasn’t defined page colors by itself (like this blog, apart from the links, which I just discovered). It takes some other tricks to apply to every page: if you are radical, you could uncheck the “Let pages use their own colors, instead of the colors above” box in the color preferences, but this makes the rendering of many pages rather radically different. Personally, I mostly use this on Wikipedia. Having an account you can select different styles, and the “simple” one uses the colors defined in the browser.

So where does “solarize” get into the picture? Solarized is a very well-made color scheme for a lot of occasions that I’m currently using the colors from in my Firefox. I can really recommend having a softer background than just the usual bright white, and I use the light background from Solarized in a lot of places now, with the “base01″ (#586E75) color as my foreground.

This is getting boring. Hope it might be useful to someone nonetheless!