Splash Screens ("Startup Screens")

Here's how to change the mozilla startup-screen -- Robert Kaiser helped out with a Windows hint and Ismail Donmez sent a brief instruction how to change the splash screen on linux builds. As usual the latter is a little tougher, so here's how to do it for the hardboiled (Microsoft Windows "instructions" and some nice splash screens below):

You'll find:

Change Splash Screen on Linux

From: ismail donmez
Subject: mozilla splash screen on linux
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002

If you want to change the splash screen on linux you gotta build rpm
source, go to mozillla/xpfe/bootstrap and change splash.xpm

If it fails to compile open splash.xpm with an editor and check 
if the header is splash[ ] instead of splash_xpm[ ].
If not change and save it, recompile.

I did not try it for myself, so I guess you have to rely on Ismail in this case
(though this sounds quite reasonable to me). :-)

Thanks a lot for sending this in!

Change Splash Screen on Microsoft Windows

From: Robert Kaiser
Newsgroups: netscape.public.dev.xul, netscape.public.dev.skins
Subject: Re: New splash screen?
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001

(...) If you place a file called mozilla.bmp in the same directory as
mozilla.exe in windows, this file will be used. A splash screen
is usually not a part of a theme, because you can't have more than
one splash screen installed (Mozilla doesn't know installed themes
at lauch, where it has to load the splash).(...)

(Thanks to Robert Kaiser for this information!)

Change Splash Screen on MacOS X

From: William Davis
Subject: Mac splash screen installer
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002

A Very nice splash screen installer can be found here:

http://homepage.mac.com/malletandbare/products/csi/

[Note 2003-03-01: the new URL is http://malletandbare.free.fr/products/csi/]

It works with Netscap, Mozilla, IE and OmniWeb. I used
to install one of you cool spash screen and it works
great. For OS X only.

Hope this helps.
(...)

I don't have a chance to give this one a try, but the homepage of this tool looks reasonable to me. All you need to do is download it, grab your favorite splash screens from this site and figure out if you need to do some graphics-format conversions.

Hav fun with this nifty tool and thanks a lot for sending this hint!

Credits for the splash screen designers

Filename(s) Designer Homepage Note
bakandoo_* Bakandoo hand_on.tripod.co.jp Thanks to Gashu (http://gashu.org) for the link!
bryce_* Bryce Anderson members.tripod.com/~Idafab/ "I celebrated the release of Mozilla 1.0 by getting drunk and churning out a Mozilla splash screen that didn't seem to suck. (...)"
slater_* Slater www.slater.ch/moz Nice and clean - still my favorites
palimondo_* Pavol "Palimondo" Vaškovic www.pali.sk/mozilla/ Many nice variations of basically two different designs
marshy_* David Marshy www.marshy.com Two nice and clean splash screens
grayrest_* "Ratman" Sharu's Page A whole set of splash screens inspired by grayrest's nice icons for mozilla
johan_* Johan Josefsson Johan's Page Two very nice and clear screen from Johan, I especially like the one to go with the orbit-theme
dudeman_* "Dudeman" spidey.ath.cx/mozsplash/  
jaco_* "Jaco" mozillart.tripod.com  
chrome_* Well, yes, actually those are the ones I did :-)
various_* My apologies -- I pulled those out of the newsgroups, from bugzilla or wherever I stumbled across a splash screen. If you've done one (or more) of them of if you know who did: Let me know and I'll put it up here!

Now, what is all that voting stuff about?

Let's start with what it is not about: This is not meant to convice the excellent mozilla UI people to change the current splash screen -- though I think it wouldn't do any harm if they did. :-)

I just collected some of the splash screens floating around the web and put them up in one place --- to build a voting facility around that was fairly easy, as it was already there (for the fun pictures).

Everytime you visit the splash screen page, the site brings up a random image and let's you vote on it. Voting takes you directly to the next (random) image.

You need to have cookies enabled, because you get a temporary cookie (session only) to make sure the site doesn't leave splash screens out while you walk through them. So in theory you should be able to vote on all of them, see every screen once and know that you're done if you don't get the voting controls anymore.

I did not try to figure out sophisticated anti-cheating techniques (as they most probably wouldn't work anyway), so please play fair and don't vote multiple times!

And what the hell is wrong with that cute green lizard?

Well, glad you asked :-)

We had about a gazillion friendly discussions on that, so let me just quote from some of them:

Here's the short version:

> I still love this one. attached. it rocks. [green lizard attached as .bmp]

No, it doesn't. It violates Netscape's copyright.
I wonder if it is really THAT difficult:

RED. RED. RED. Not Green. RED.
And it's a DINOSAUR. Not a lizard. A DINOSAUR.

Mozilla --> red dinosaur
Netscape --> green lizard

RED. Not green. Dinosaur. Not Lizard.

If this is not sufficient for you, try this one:

> but it's gonna take a little more than your simple repetition 
> to convince me of your point of view.  (who's calling who "dumb"?)

Actually I wasn't calling you "dumb", I was calling you "a little dumber
than the rest". 

> Maybe you'd care to make an argument, or would that be too taxing? 

I'll try. Here we go:

Dinosaur = Mozilla
Lizard = Netscape

Dinosaur = Red
Lizard = Green

Now that I see it written down I must admit it's a quite complex
situation, so no shame on you if you still can't figure out why a "green
lizard" for the "mozilla browser" does not rock.

> Mozilla IS the Green Lizard.  It's his name!

*sigh*

When the mozilla project (www.mozilla.org) started (1998) they indeed
used the green netscape lizard (which was created in 1994 by Dave Titus)
as part of their artwork, amazingly enough the whole site used to look
quite like "developer.netscape.com" at that time (weird, isn't it?).

IIRC it was Jamie Zawinski who was moving away from the "green lizard"
-- helping to launch the "red dinosaur" -- which might be considered a
smart move as Netscape (or, AOLTW if you want to put it that way) holds
the copyright to "the green lizard" (this is approved by Mitchell Baker).

So using the "green lizard" for the "mozilla browser" does not only
"not rock", it's a copyright infringement as well. 

> The red dinosaur design 
> sucks.  He has no attitude or personality
> [blahblahblah ...]

So why not go a file a bug (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org)?
Chances are that we see it duped within a couple of minutes, though.

> And watch who you call dumb,

It was "dumber", remember?

> I probably have twice the GPA you've got, 
> in a harder major, if you even went to college.  ass.

Yeah, sure, I'm probably god. And probably I'm not, so what?

Nice language, btw. Do your parents know that you're abusing their
computer to curse at adults? :-)

And learn how to quote, please.

/tdk

Just in case you forgot while reading all the way down:

RED. RED. RED. Not Green. RED.
And it's a DINOSAUR. Not a lizard. A DINOSAUR.

RED. Not green. Dinosaur. Not Lizard.

So, I'll leave it up to you to decide why there are (almost) no green lizards up here. Saying "almost": There's that small modification of the splash screen that's currently shipped with mozilla. Probably not a masterpiece of art, but I think it's a pretty funny idea, so that's why it's in the collection. :-)