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I've always wanted to get the old-timey Netscape "N" throbber working in Firefox, just for some of that retro feel. I found an old copy of the "N" throbber in my files and updated it for use with Firefox. Here are <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=213219">some instructions</a> for changing your throbber. And here is an archive with <a href="http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/throbber/oldschool-throbber.tar.gz">the necessary files</a> for that 90s feel. (Soul Asylum MP3s not included.) The <a href="http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/throbber/src/throbnet.gif">original throbber</a> was 16 colors (EGA) and 30x30, but Firefox uses 16x16, 20x20, and 24x24 throbbers. Scaling the old dithered throbber looked awful, so I converted the GIF up to RGB, replaced the dithering with a solid color and made resized versions. However, the original GIF had an EGA palette, so converting the resized GIFs looked awful -- what I needed were more shades of the colors used in the image. With a limited palette, I could get several shades of each color within the 8-bit limit (DOOM used a similar trick). So, I stretched and blurred the RGB image and converted it back to 8-bit to make a reasonable indexed colormap (here are my <a href="http://tastytronic.net/~pedro/throbber/src/">source files</a>). Then, I applied that map to my resized GIFs. Now you can party like its 1995!
What I should have done was just directly convert the 30x30 16-color GIF to RGB, shrink it to the new sizes in RGB mode, and then apply a best-fit 256 color palette.
The reason I built directly off the original is that I wanted i