Tips to give your browser a Windows 8 look
To get real thing you’ll have to wait a year, but in the interim, but for a dash of Windows 8 look, here’s small nourishment for you. Ľubomír Krupa, a smart Web programmer or designer has arisen with a mode to give your browser the tiled windows 8 Metro UI look. Of course, this technique won’t give you the entire Windows 8 Metro functionality-it won’t update the present weather or stock prices in tiles, but if you need the Metro look, it’s a prime step. You can use this free, copy, modify, distribute, publish, merge, and/or sell, sublicense, as long as the copyright info stays together, because that Web programmer offers the customization under the MIT license.
For giving a windows 8 look first you need to download the zipped folder page contents used by the start page, getting from the DeviantArt download page. Then, unzip all the contents under your My Computer folder which are download archive to a folder, say to Downloads or Win8start. Next, copy the full path name by entering in the Windows Explorer address bar: on my PC, this was
C:\Users\mmuchmor\Downloads\Win8Start
Paste this into your browser’s address bar (or, as Mozilla likes to call it, Firefox’s Awesome bar), adding \index.htm to the end of the pasted path, like
C:\Users\mmuchmor\Downloads\Win8Start\index.htm
For Firefox, except you want to customize the tiles, all that’s gone to do is to set this address as your home page.
While you want to perform this for internet explorer it takes one more step, unless you want see a group of blank colored tiles. You are required to open internet options from the browser’s cog icon at top right, and then select internet options.
On the appeared dialog’s advanced tab, scroll down to the Security section, check the Allow active content to run in files on my computer option, and search its box.But we clearly notify that this change is at your personal risk: it does eliminate one layer of browser security, and still you’ll get a yellow Allow blocked content? Late at the bottom of the window while you load this page. We are unable to find a path to facilitate the capability in Google’s Chrome browser.
Customize your Tiles
You may be like to put your own links in here, sooner than Krupa’s default ones. So for this you should create image file of the similar dimensions as the given ones and enter their filenames in the Thumbs directory which was created while you unzipped the download. For a more reasonable Windows 8 experience. I replaced the large Google tile to a Bing tile. For this, I grabbed the Bing logo from Microsoft’s press site.
I resized it according to the tile pattern utilized in the start page, in this case, to 440×215 pixels, and saved it to the Thumbs directory in my Win8Start folder. Next, I require associating the image with the tile and changing its link. You do this in the source.xml file set up in the Win8Start folder. You can right-click on this and select Edit to open it in Notepad. I changed this:
<bookmark-6>
<title>google</title>
<url>http://google.com</url>
<thumb>google.gif</thumb>
</bookmark-6>
to this:
<bookmark-6>
<title>bing</title>
<url>http://bing.com</url>
<thumb>bing.gif</thumb>
</bookmark-6>
If you want to continue the original color patterns, you want to create transparent images, but you don’t have to do this for the tiles to come. If you change your browser to full-screen view by clicking F11 after maximizing its windows, you’ll get an extra Widows 8-like look.
This is all about change your browser like a Windows 8 look.
Drop your comments on this for more suggestions and views.
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