Grupenet

If you’re a regular user of the Ubuntu operating system and Firefox web browser, you may have noticed that the buttons, text fields, radio buttons, and drop down menus in Firefox are quite reminiscent of those in Windows 98. Being a perfectionist, I always like all the buttons and fields (also known as widgets) to be uniform across the operating system and my applications.

Here’s a quick little hack to fix this, but you must be using Ubuntu version 7.04 and the Gnome desktop environment, otherwise you may run into some big problems. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you’re using Firefox to read this, you’ll first need to close it to begin this hack. Next, open up the terminal and run the following commands:

• wget http://grupenet.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/firefox-widgets.tar.gz
• tar -xvzf firefox-form-widgets.tar.gz
• sudo cp /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/forms.css /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/forms.css.bak
• cat firefox-form-widgets/res/forms-extra.css | sudo tee –append /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res/forms.css > /dev/null
• sudo cp -r firefox-form-widgets/res/form-widgets /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/res
• rm -rf firefox-form-widgets

Now launch Firefox. The buttons and fields should look something like this: