Firefox looks nice enough on Ubuntu, right? It fits in, which is all you can ask for — unless you love a pop of colour, that is.
Which is where a neat, open-source Firefox add-on I was tipped to recently comes in.
Ambient theme by Site Colour is not, repeat, not a standard theme. It dynamically re-colours the tab bar, toolbar and other top-of-the-window-bits baed on the dominant colour of the web page being viewed.
If you’ve tried the Vivaldi web browser (or Apple’s Safari on iOS) and admired its accent colour capabilities then this add-on enables a similar thing to Firefox, albeit without the rubber-stamp of being an official features.
But it works.
Re-colours vertical tabs, standard tab bar and alternative options
When you switch between tabs (from, say, a dark-mode news site to a snarky blog about Ubuntu that uses a lot of orange), the colour changes instantly. The effect is eye-catching – though for better or worse is entirely subjective.
If you like the idea but there’s a website that is especially garish, there is a small settings panel where you can manually exclude any URL from being dynamically themed. Similarly, you can set a minimum contrast ratio and a toolbar blend.
An overview of its features:
- Dynamic, per-site UI colouring based on the page’s dominant colour
- Ability to disable dynamic theming on a per-site basis
- Works with standard tab bar, vertical tabs and some other UI tweaks
- Minimum contrast and toolbar blending controls to preserve readability
- Works automatically on tab change, page navigation and window focus
- Per‑site quick toggle from the popup with full controls in Options
Like other add-ons which attempt to adjust Firefox’s theme in non-standard ways (you may notice I’m using another add-on in my screenshot which merges the tab bar and address field), the ‘Ambient Colour’ add-on is not 100% perfect.
For one, permissions the add-on requires to function are broad, which may put people off. The developer of the extension explains the reason behind each, in turn on the project’s GitHub page, and stress that everything that happens, happens on-device.
No data is collected or shuttled across the web simply to add a pop of colour. The suspicious can build the add-on from source code or use a network monitoring tool like Wireshark to keep an eye on background activity.
Secondly, it doesn’t always inherit the colour from a web page that I would have assumed was the dominant colour – but that’s an expectation thing and also true of other web browsers which colourise their user interface in this way.
Should You Install It?
The Ambient theme by Site Colour add-on is far from being any kind of “essential” or “must have” extension that makes the web better, but it is fun. If you like to browse the web and want to enjoy a lively lick of colour as you go about it, give it a go.
You can install it from the Firefox Add-ons website at the link below. The add-on works on Windows, macOS and Linux, and is able to dynamically colour the default tab bar mode as well as Firefox’s newer vertical tabs column (which is rather popular).
Get Ambient Theme by Site Color on Firefox Add-ons
Thanks Manikandan
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