It started when I discovered the useful DOM inspector that got included with Mozilla. It can, among other things, show the tree of elements that the Mozilla user interface consists of, giving some insight in how it works. After some experimentation with userChrome.css, a file to modify the look of this interface, I started to examine the skin file itself and replace some of the images. I already knew CSS well after previous attempts to design web pages.
Because Mozilla is so big, including a mail/news client and more, my modifications never got complete enough to make it worth distributing. Then Phoenix came, a browser based on Mozilla's rendering engine and user interface language (XUL), but with a better design and without the extra components. I eventually decided to make a more or less complete theme for this browser, starting out from what I had made for Mozilla.
It had some icons taken from Windows, and some more would be added. I was happy with it at that point, as I thought they looked better than the originals while I could spend time on making other stuff.
0.2 followed shortly upon the first as I was eager to fix the issues
The theme was not in its own package yet. To use it, you had to replace classic.jar. It didn't have a name. There was an annoying bug that made Page Info and Element Properties not work.
Two people helped making XPI installers, Luke and Bill Davenport. They called it Arvid's theme and Que, respectively. When I had figured out how to make such a package I put up 0.3 with the mentioned bug fixed. I think I named it Qute by this time, partly taken from Que, and a play on the word cute.
I collected a fairly big amount of improvements for this version.
Blake, one of the Phoenix developers posted that they thought about making Qute the default theme. For that however, the work had to be original, so I spent much time the following days on replacing the graphics taken from Windows, with quite good result.
The choice of making Qute the default made me very happy. I also know it is a good choice and a great improvement to Phoenix, making it a better browser.
