“Some of them end up in the recycle bin and never get used. Not every design makes it from her computer to her theme page. She likes natural scenes with wildlife like bear, elk and deer, but wolves are her favorites.
Within a few years, MaDonna upgraded to Adobe Photoshop, and she has an extensive collection of visuals, all organized at her fingertips. “Whenever one of my themes rises to the most popular category, I have to admit I’m pretty thrilled,” she said with a cheery smile. At one point, Sunset over Water, which features her own photo of locally famous Chuckanut Drive, boasted over a million users. Then she made another and another, and soon she was off and running, creating some of the most used themes on our site. MaDonna submitted her first Firefox theme design in 2008, which she designed with Microsoft Picture It software. And if what you want isn’t there, you can create and add it yourself. Any time you want a fresh look, drop into the themes page for a refresh, from manga to sports to unicorns to cats to abstractions to just about anything else you can think of. Today the Add-ons page hosts more than 400,000 colorful themes, all designed and freely submitted from around the world by thousands of contributors like MaDonna. User-submitted themes - free, easy-to-install graphic “skins” - have long been a part of Firefox. “We actually had to update our system because we never anticipated anyone would create so many themes.” “We joke internally that MaDonna is our best QA tester,” said Amy Tsay, who manages Mozilla’s Add-ons community experience.
Over the last ten years, MaDonna has created an astounding 17,000 themes for Firefox, all available for anyone to use. “I like to keep busy,” she told me over coffee and a slice of delicious rhubarb pie (her grandmother’s recipe) one sunny morning in her kitchen.Īccording to the numbers, she has been very busy. MaDonna discovered she could spruce up her browser’s look with custom graphical themes, so she started dabbling with her own creative ideas.
Way up in a bucolic corner of the Pacific Northwest lives one of the most prolific designers of Firefox themes, a twinkly 78-year-old great-grandmother who goes by the online handle “ MaDonna.” When her grandson, who works in the IT department at a nearby university, set up her computer, he installed Firefox on it.
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