I fixed the Black Rain Firefox theme
This article was written on 6/4/2023
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The Story
Like a miniature flashbang for your browser! Imagine what'd it be like if you had a larger drop down menu?
Some time ago in 2021, I made the switch from Google to Firefox, and while I was still exploring the shiny new features of the fox I discovered the various Firefox themes. Among them was the Black Rain theme by SimAr_. Its a dark theme centered around that cyperpunk feel, mainly featuring dark purples and bright pink highlights. We hit it off immediately and I remember using the Black Rain for months, even for a year even, until the extension seemingly broke. Most things about the theme looked fine, however things like dropdown menus appeared as a blinding white, which totally contrasted with the aforementioned dark purples.
As much as I loved the theme, the now white menus were a huge turn off for me, so I switched themes. While I could recreate the theme (which someone has tried to do!), the big thing I seriously lacked was the artwork needed to do it. See, even though SimAr_ listed the artist of the theme background in the theme summary (which is kirokaze by the way), I couldn't actually find the artwork in the flesh. I looked on the artist's DeviantArt and Tumblr, but somehow I just couldn't find the original image. This was until I stumbled upon a particular website.
Introducing the Space Bar! Its a cosy LGBTQ friendly site with a similar aesthetic feel to the Black Rain Firefox theme and more importantly is what's on their enter page at the time of writing. If you went to look at the Black Rain page, you'll recognize it as the artwork used in the Black Rain theme! The image quality on their website is a little crunchy, however a quick image search brought me to higher quality versions of the theme, and now I've finally been able to restore the theme to its former glory.
But wait, didn't you mention someone already tried to recreate the theme?
[1] is SimAr_'s Black Rain, [2] is Freezer's Black Rain, and [3] is my Black Rain.
Indeed! Around a year before me, a developer named Freezer made their own recreation of the theme. In my earlier days of looking for kirokaze's art, I found that theme and was initially very happy to use a recreation someone else went through the trouble of making, but there were a couple of things... For one, Freezer's version did fix the issues with dark mode not working with the theme, but some colors were off. The text colors, mainly the dark purple ones, were too saturated to read at times, and things like the transparent background which partly revealed the artwork underneath are now fully opaque. A user on the Firefox extension marketplace... thing, also noted that the art used in Freezer's recreation is smaller than the original, though that's a smaller detail.
Let me download the theme already!
To get this new and improved Black Rain theme onto your Firefox browser, click this link to get the .xpi file (a Mozilla installer package). Assuming you're using the Firefox browser, you should then get a pop up asking if you want to download Black Rain 2: Electric Boogaloo (yes, this is what I named the theme). Click "Add" and the theme will be applied to your browser!
If you want to try out other themes and try out Black Rain 2 at another time, you can find it in the same place as all your other Firefox themes. One quirky thing is that this theme has no preview which could make it harder to find in theme storage, but rest assured it should be there. I suspect the lack of a preview is because I couldn't distribute this theme through Mozilla's official distributor.
Problems with the extension?
If there's any issues like Black Rain 2 somehow reverting to light mode again, then please drop me a message on my contacts page!