Make Firefox 3 use green for secure web pages
My last posting was about how Firefox 3 no longer changes the color of the address bar to indicate encrypted Web pages. It was a feature I liked in version 2, and I explained how to restore the yellow address bar in Firefox 3 for Windows.
However, I never got the concept behind yellow. To me, yellow means "warning" rather than "good" and Web pages displayed using the HTTPS protocol are good things, not something anyone needs to be warned about.
Green means good. Firefox 3 uses dark green for the new site identification button. IE7 uses a light green address bar (see below) when the phishing filter is enabled and you're looking at a Web page with an Extended Validation certificate (IE7 doesn't color the address bar for normally encrypted Web pages).
So, if you're going to force Firefox 3 to color the address bar for encrypted HTTPS pages, why not use green?
Follow the instructions from my previous posting, but insert the below into the userChrome.css file. The only difference is the background color; this specifies the same light green that IE7 uses.
#urlbar[level] .autocomplete-textbox-container
{ background-color: #D0F2C4 !important; }
Here are three screen shots from Firefox 3 of the same page, the NewEgg user log-on page. This is a normal, secure, HTTPS page, it does not use extended validation. Chose the behavior you prefer.
Update June 27, 2008: This also works with Firefox version 2.
My next posting is about
expanding the blue site id button to make HTTPS pages more visually obvious.
See a summary of all my
Defensive Computing postings.
Michael Horowitz is an independent computer consultant and the author of several classes on Defensive Computing. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
