In order for us to get Firefox developers to consider any of our ideas to better address the needs of themers, themes in general need a larger user base. Even though, the public stats for the most popular users show over 300,000 users, the truth is, this only is the number of users who have the theme installed. It is not the number that are using it. The number of users who actually have a given theme enabled is much lower.
Here are the stats of the most popular themes that make their stats public:
Code: Select all
Addon Name: reported users, userEnabled
--Pg 1--
Noia 2: ~233k, ~40k
Silvermel: ~210k, ~53k
A Blue Fox Theme: ~165k, ~30k
Noia 4: ~147k, ~55k
Office Black: ~146k, ~32k
Walnut for Firefox: ~130k, ~31k
--Pg 2--
Walnut for Firefox: ~101k, ~14k
Classic Compact: ~84k, ~24k
Purple Fox Christmas
special: ~81k, ~12k
AvantGarde: ~73k, ~7k
--Pg 3--
PitchDark for Fx: ~60k, ~6k
Green Fox Lava RC2: ~50k, ~7k
Qute: ~48k, ~8k
Black Steel: ~44k, ~10k
--Pg 4--
Strata RELOADED: ~40k, ~8k
Walnut2 for Firefox: ~36k, ~11k
BlackX: ~32k, ~2k
Littlefox: ~31k, ~9k
Based on this, there may be only a few million users who are actively using a custom theme. This would be less than 1% of the overall Firefox user base. In order to change this we need to make themes more appealing to users, and we need personas and themes to work together (
bug 520124).
If a competent coder helped contribute code to bug 520124 it could be delivered within a couple versions of Firefox. To make themes more appealing, the overall quality of themes also needs to be improved. Many developers here on MozilliaZine produce excellent quality themes, but there are also a lot of really sloppy themes on AMO. Bad themes cause bad user experiences which in turn and gives all themes a bad reputation.
A major part of improving the quality of all themes is better testing. I'm working on this by trying to develop more through theme testing checklist for AMO Editors. The idea is not to reject themes because of issues, but rather to provide developers with more useful constructive feedback to improve theme quality over time. The intention of the checklist will be to systematically test as many parts of the UI as possible to make sure something didn't get missed. Once it is completed (or mostly completed) I will post the checklist here on MozillaZine for themers to use while QCing their own themes.
Another part of improving theme experience is for themers to do our level best to support extensions, even when the extension is to blame for compatibility issues, because regardless of who is at fault for the compatibility issues themes take the blame.