RetroBar VS firefox-scripts

Whenever I set up a new computer for older family members, despite it being windows 11, I always install open shell[1] and retro bar[2]. Between the two, I've made the operating system look very close to Windows XP visually, and they always appreciate it.

[1] https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

[2] https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar

https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar replicates all old taskbar and I have been using it for a long time now. Works perfectly on Windows 10.

I wanted that toolbar for a very long time, didn't know it now exists. Thanks for recommending. I have switched to https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar/ for a very a while now but this is very intriguing.

Classic taskbar

Gibt's auch in OpenSource: https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar

not sure if this is the right place to post but windows 11 was restricted and the description says that anything that has the microsoft windows xp look and feel is welcome here so here i go. this here is a guide on how to make windows 11 (and maybe 10, didnt test it on that) look like windows xp, but slightly more modern. first get retrobar, from here. then once youve done that run the setup (it might ask you to install dotnet, so do that.) then run it. now right click your taskbar and click on properties. then youre gonna leave everything the same except for the theme, wich youll set to windows xp royale. once youve done that click ok. now you need openshell. you can get it right here. then install that and go launch "open shell menu settings." now in start menu style set it to classic with 2 collumns then click select skin (right under the option i just told you to click) and set it to windows aero, and have the options like this. no icons in second column on, show user picture on, show username on, center usernname optional but i reccoment off, small icons on, large font off, reduce glass color off, and finally, white sub menu's on. then click ok. now get the dark theme bliss from my google drive over here, and set it as your wallpaper, you dont have to, but it makes it look better. then get the recycle bin icon somewhere on the interwebs and go to settings>personalisation>themes>desktop icon settings. then set the empty bin to an empty windows xp bin ico file. and set the full one to the same one, or if you have time (and disk space) to waste, set it to a full version of it. now youre done! ill try to figure out how to change the windows 11 logo in about windows and give an update once i get that done. thats it for now, bye!

It's a bit complicated, but I mainly used some 3rd-party tools like Winaero Tweaker, WinClassic's SimpleThemeTray, RetroBar, and OpenShell to achieve this effect. As for the icons, I used a fresh Windows XP install for this, which someone extracted all the icons from said fresh install and put them on the Internet Archive. :)

RetroBar (Windows 9x/XP like status bar)

For a long time, I've been making use of a MacOS-esque scrollbar I found online. I'm using XiaoXiaoFlood's loader script, and I've made the necessary changes to the files mentioned here to make it able to load .js and .uc.js files again. I've also modified the script a fair bit, though reverted most as it didn't work. Currently, I'm using this one, which has simply commented out the things that rely on Services. Though, even if I add it with something like const Services = globalThis.Services || ChromeUtils.import("resource://gre/modules/Services.jsm").Services; it doesn't make much of a difference. I've also tried using a userChrome.xml file, but that doesn't do much anymore. Was around 72/75 where that stopped working right?

Though for the full value I personally really also need some sort of interface that can show individual page visits in order to answer the question "What other pages did I visit at that point in time?" (sometimes I don't remember the right keywords to find a certain page again, but only some other page I visited during the same browsing session). The built-in history view is only of limited value here, because it always only shows the most-recent visit, so as soon as you visit a page again, it moves to the front of the list again and loses its original place and history context.

As usual, there used to be an add-on for that, which was subsequently broken by the move to webextensions (and even if somebody wanted to rewrite it, the webextension API doesn't cater for its full functionality). Thankfully some kind soul has maintained a version hacked to still work even on a current Firefox (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/tree/master...).

This is what you're looking for.

Heads up though, it doesn't work for most tooltips. For that, I found the only way to change them is to use the above code in an agentsheet (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts, see the "StyloaiX" section)

Bootstrapped extensions are supported (really, xiaoxiaoflood is the only one who maintains any popular ones).

depending on your needs existing extensions may work for you, though the ContentScript based implementations have issues, if that's not enough you can use https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts as it allows you to run the code in the browser UI, unfortunately there's no easy to use extension (and sadly FireGestures require update to work, even with loader injected into Quantum) so you may need to work with the code a bit (or more)

do what exactly? inject code? there are many slightly different approaches, the most reliable seems to be https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts and using an approach like that forks can add extra configs to the UI making users' lives easier

Not in the foreseeable future, but maybe achievable with userChromeJS.