Nova? No big deal

Firefox GNOME theme updated to work with Nova

The unofficial GNOME theme for Firefox has been updated to work with the Firefox 157 release and its newer, rounder Nova theme.

It is not a traditional Firefox theme (like the ones you can install from the Mozilla Add-ons site) but, to quote its GitHub page, a “bunch of CSS code to make Firefox look closer to GNOME’s native apps” – an excellent job it does at it too.

With Nova now rolled out, the theme team working on the unofficial Adwaita-esque garb needed to update to account for CSS class changes and new widget style Nova adds in newer versions of the browser.

You won’t be able to directly tell anything has changed in it – that’s the point of the update. But patches and tweaks were needed to keep the uncannily Adwaita vibe going.

You can install the GNOME Firefox theme using a single command that fetches an auto-run script (running random commands you find online is generally frowned upon, especially if they also execute scripts but you can vet the code on GitHub if you’re suspicious).

curl -s -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme/master/scripts/install-by-curl.sh | bash

The command above download the theme files, unpacks it and moves the various stylesheets, icons and other notifications to your (hidden) Firefox profile folder. The script works with most builds, including binary, Flatpak, .deb, RPM and – hurrah – Snap.

It’ll zip by in a flash and be done. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

Some features, like hiding the tab bar when only one tab is open or – my personal favourite – using tabs as headerbar, do need to be manually enabled via about:config. A full list is available on the Firefox GNOME theme GitHub page.

Uninstalling is a bit more involved, but only requires deleting a few folders. You won’t need to expunge your profile and start over. See the GitHub for uninstallation details should you need them.