Ditch the Firefox Australis look with Classic Theme Restorer

Hi, my name’s Nick and I like the new Firefox Australis user interface. There, I’ve said it. However, it seems an awful lot of you hate the new look unveiled in Firefox 29, which is why you’ll want to install the Classic Theme Restorer 1.1.8 add-on immediately.

As its title suggests, Classic Theme Restorer pretty much dumps everything Australis introduces, except the new menu accessible via the hamburger-like button on the main Firefox toolbar. In its place is the Firefox you know and love, complete with Firefox button in Windows.

If that’s all you want from Classic Theme Restorer, your job is done. But the add-on does a lot more than that -- access its settings via Firefox’s Options menu, and you can fine-tune the changes it makes, plus customize Firefox in other ways too.

You can customize the appearance of your tabs, for example, restoring the Australis look or choosing an alternative square or curved look. You can also tweak the size and placement of tabs, plus pick a different color scheme from the Custom colors tab.

You can also remove or restore the Firefox button in Windows from here, plus customize it with your own choice of color. There are other tweaks for customizing the general UI here too. Switch to the two Special tabs and you’ll find other customization options, letting you not just banish (or fine-tune) Australis, but remove or amend other aspects of the user interface you may find annoying too.

Where multiple choices are to be made, you’ll see Classic Theme Restorer handily marks the default settings, making it easy to put things back the way they were.

So while Classic Theme Restorer is a good way to remove the Australis user interface entirely, you can also use it to gradually ease yourself into the new way of doing things: switch on curved tabs, but keep the Firefox button for now, for example, or change the way text is displayed on tabs.

Classic Theme Restorer 1.1.8 is available now as a free add-on for Firefox 29 or later. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux.