Great news! AvantGarde 5.1, fully compatible with Firefox 4, has been reviewed by Mozilla and released to the public :-)

Better now? I thought so. Anyway, what's new? Not a whole lot, I have to be honest. The main usability improvement is that you can drag any of my big colourful buttons anywhere you like in the user interface (Customise Toolbars), and you won't screw up the functionality of Firefox. If the button is in the main toolbar, you'll get an AvantGarde button, but if you've moved it to the tab bar or the add-on bar, you'll get the default Strata theme icon. This way, you won't have a useless tab bar that is 48 pixels high just because you like the idea of the home button being up there.

There is one notable omission in AvantGarde 5.1 - unlike previous versions, there are no IconMinis, the tiny little icons which brighten up Firefox's menus. I have to make serious revisions to the way I code IconMinis before I implement them into Firefox 4. Rather than delay the release of AvantGarde 5.1 until I got those pesky little icons sorted, I decided to release it without them, and sooner.

I also know that many people have lamented the fact that AvantGarde doesn't come in a variety of colours anymore. This is not because I have turned my back on colour - rather, because I couldn't make the theme in enough colours to satisfy everyone! Instead, I have been focusing on making AvantGarde 5.1 compatible with Personas. And... it still isn't, because Mozilla STILL won't allow personas to skin on top of themes, even though many theme developers (like me) have already taken the steps to make our themes compatible. BUT! There is a way around this little niggle (although it does have limitations), and I can assure you that I am using a Persona with AvantGarde 5.1 on my home computer. I will be making a tutorial for this blog's user support page very soon.


All in all, what have I done with AvantGarde 5.1? I have: made it fully compatible with the release version of Firefox 4; programmed some things so that AvantGarde can adapt to the even more customisable user interface of Firefox 4; and provided the possibility of using your favourite Persona with your favourite theme.

Though they are few in number, they are nevertheless big points, and provide a base structure for more features to be added in updates for the months to come. Number one on that list... IconMinis. But after that? Well, anything you like - if you have any suggestions for cool things I should add, let me know in the comments below.