I admit that when Firefox 8 was released, I was so busy in my personal life that I didn't even bother to check whether AvantGarde 5.2 was compatible with it. It had been compatible with Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7, so why wouldn't it be compatible now? Well how wrong I was. A big thank you to all the users who sent me screenshots of Firefox 8 not working with AvantGarde 5.2 - something must have changed so dramatically in Mozilla's source code, because now AvantGarde wasn't even useable!

But don't despair, folks, AvantGarde 5.3, with fixes that enable compatibility with Firefox 8 and above, is now available for download. If you have AvantGarde 5.2, you will soon receive a notification for an automatic update. If not... well, what are you waiting for? You're missing out! Download from Mozilla Add-ons or from the "downloads" page of this blog today!

After all, there are plenty of reasons to use AvantGarde. One of which I'm promoting heavily at the moment is speed. Every add-on you install and enable in Firefox slows the program down somewhat. It's an extra part of the program it needs to initiate every time you open up Firefox. Themes are no different - if you install a theme, you're getting sleek style but at a cost. In fact, this is one of the reasons why Mozilla introduced Personas; if you're browser's "theme" was merely one picture, that would barely slow down Firefox as a program at all. This makes sense, but you're still left with ugly grey buttons.

But AvantGarde let's you have your cake and eat it too. At just 205 kilobytes in size, AvantGarde is about 5 times smaller than most popular themes, and more than 10 times smaller than some. That's up to ten times less data your computer would need to load every time you open up Firefox. It makes a significant difference, and while I'm not saying that using AvantGarde is faster than using the default Firefox theme on its own, this does minimise the impact so that it becomes virtually unnoticeable. Even if you installed a Persona on top of AvantGarde, the impact on startup speed is minimal - a feat not possible with most other themes. Incidentally, AvantGarde 5.3 is another 13% smaller than AvantGarde 5.2 - despite the additions of new compatibility. So, have the buttons you want, and the background of your choosing. What's not to like?


Experience the difference for yourself. I know you'll love it.