There are a lot of zen browser skins out there but none of them give me all the things I want exactly. And some skins just break fundamental functionalities of the browser due to them not being maintained anymore. So I tried (almost) all of them and gathered bits and pieces from each that I liked along with some of my own redesigns to create BlackGlass.
As the name suggests, this theme is designed and maintained to only work with a certain layout and look a certain way. Transparent with dark overlays (sorry light mode fans) with the unified sidebar mode on the right. No other configuration is guaranteed to look good. My goal is to keep the tweaks as minimal as possible (most of them are transparency related) so that it is easy for me to maintain with the changes Zen devs decide to push out. I may add some settings toggles through Sine mods in the future (if I feel like it)
This is not a complete skin. I personally use (well-maintained) zen mods and feel that it's unnecessary to bake them into my skin when it already exists as a standalone. So if you want the complete look, you'll have to install and configure the following mods-
- Transparent Zen
- Zen Internet (for transparent websites)
- No Top Sites
- Better CtrlTab Panel
- Bookmark Toolbar Tweaks
- Quietify (nice media playing indicator)
- Superpins
- hide-scrollbars
- Install Sine
- Go to the mods tab in your browser's settings
- In the box under "or, add your own locally from a GitHub repo.", type in
SARRAF-5757/BlackGlassand hit install - Get mods mentioned in the Dependencies Section, especially Transparent zen and apply the following settings in the mod settings page (the empty tab image I used is this)
- Enjoy!
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Transparent sidebar in compact mode(the Transparent Zen mod mentioned earlier recently added this) - No-border mod in compact mode
- Glance buttons on the right
- Auto hiding top section (above the URL bar)
- Refine transparent settings page(s)
- Redesign the Ctrl-Tab panel (the mod's design is kinda ugly)
- Add Sine config support (everything below will be implemented after config support is added, giving the user a choice)
- Hide back-forward buttons to remove mod dependency
- Bake no top sites into BlackGlass
- Publish on Sine
I would've loved to give credits in the actual code to indicate which part is taken from which skin but it's so thoroughly mixed up that I honestly can't track it down anymore. But the tab styling was inspired by Nebula, pdf viewer from Natsumi, transparent sidebar in compact mode (not implemented yet) from Arc 2.0, and some more bits and pieces from ZenZero, Neo Zen.