electric relaxation

I really hate the weird purple color that Windows Vista uses by default for menubar backgrounds. Most Vistatized apps, like IE7, WMP11 or Explorer, don’t actually show the menubar until you activate it with e.g. a keyboard combination, so the ugliness is not as noticeable. But plenty of applications do show the menubar, and that purple is just plain nasty:

It’s even worse when using Firefox, since Firefox uses this color not just for the menubar, but also for any and all toolbars:

I tried out a few of the Firefox 2.0 themes that are floating around (there aren’t very many), but none of them actually tweak the background color. I also found some open bugs in Mozilla’s Bugzilla related to beautification of Firefox on Vista, but there hasn’t been much action on that front.

Fortunately, I found an outlet for my impatience. This simple addition to userChrome.css was good enough to get rid of the ugliness:

menubar, toolbox, toolbar {
   background-color: #eeeeee !important;
}


I don’t think #eeeeee is actually the perfect color, and if I were more motivated I would track down the exact value used on e.g. XP hosts or something, but at any rate it sure as heck beats the default: