Homer Simpson says to push the anger deep inside until it finally bursts out in a terrible rage like "when Daddy hit the refferee with a whisky bottle" (this may have been a whiskey bottle; he doesn’t specify). Well thanks for the advice Homer but in this case I’d rather just rant. It’s therapeutic (fun too).
Here I was trying to get my user stylesheet to work in Mozilla and nothing I did would persuade it to consider my ‘suggestions’. So after many attempts during which time I fell on my virtual ass many times (and my real ass once), I decided to create a new profile, on the basis that all of my screwing around (that being of course the technical title for my research) had broken something. Before I altered all of my settings for this new profile I checked that the rules set out in userContent.css were being obeyed. They were applied with all the giddy satisfaction that Mozilla always seems to feel when it completes a task successfully. So I began the Herculean, or perhaps Xenan, task of altering my settings. Disable popups; Don’t loop GIFs; Open tabs in the background; Change theme… Damn! My theme was ‘orbit’, which isn’t available by default. No problem, I’ve got it on this computer somewhere, I just need to install it. And with this simple thought I fell, once more, on my virtual behind. Mozilla does not, in fact, have such a feature that can install a theme that lives on the local machine. My journey of discovery had begun.
Of the succeeding minutes there is little to tell. I visited themes.mozdev.org, the home of orbit, and discovered that it weighs in at a considerable 1.6Mb. No way will I download that if I can help it. The solution that I chose, and there may exist others, was to copy the ‘javascript:’ link from the site, paste it into my address bar, change the target URL to one at localhost, fire up my own server locally and let the magic work. This, it should go without saying, was more effort than clicking a button would have been.