Mozilla want to kill the themes?

[LoudNoise]

In my mind the really stupid thing about this is why Mozilla seems to want to kill off themes for no good reason. A couple of the machines at work are not running themes. When I have to use these machines I reflect on how ugly the default theme looks.

So did Mozilla screw up on the default theme? It depends on your opinion, I personally think yes. But it is a matter of taste. For all I know the default theme could be the pentacle of browser interface design. The Seattle main library could also deserve all the architecture awards it got too. In both cases I have to disagree. I would suspect no one would care.

I use and like Silvermel as a theme. I don't particularly like NASA Night Launch. 192,000+ folks agree with me about Silvermel and damn near 500,000 don't agree with me about NNL. Both are impressive numbers. In just the numbers above there are at least 600,000 plus people who don't seem to like to the default theme.

Again, this is all a matter of taste. Thr fact that I really like Silvermel is no more significant to the world at large then the fact I like Fords at the moment.

This comes back to AMO in a very straightforward way. Mozilla has no reason whatsoever to take my tastes into account when they develop the default theme – I would never suggest that they should. The thing that pisses me off is that they are going out of their way to make sure I cannot find something that is more appealing to me. They are doing this for no good reason whatsoever other then the fact they want to promote personas for one reason or another.

And they are doing it in way that shows a great deal of contempt: "And I'll just sneak that one past everyone …" Chris Van Wiemeersch didn't sneak it past anyone since David caught it within a couple of hours of the bug landing . Chris was assuming that theme folks are stupid and Mozilla would have enough time with the change to say that the change has been accepted and won't be changed. That didn't happen. I would suspect it will be tried again.

So why is this stupid? Mainly because there isn't the slightest reason for AMO to give personas preference over themes. They have Ken who is doing a great job of clearing Themes out of the waiting list at AMO -- I haven't seen a “once they approve it” bitch from any themer in Extension/Theme Releases in months.

Real Themes should be given their place at AMO. Looking only at the top five themes over 1.658.509 which is more then can be said about the Yahoo-less personas. There is also no reason not to do so. There would be not expense. The only thing bad about this is that AMO would end up looking like asses for trying to kill themes off in the first place. That too shall pass. It has before.

[jorgev]

You should keep in mind that all add-on usage stats include add-ons that are disabled. So, for example, Silvermel has ~32K active users who are actually using it. Same goes for all themes on AMO. So, the numbers aren't really that high. I believe the same applies for Personas, though I'm not entirely sure.

As for cvan's comment, it was meant as a joke. It'd be dumb to say on a public site that you're sneaking something past others. And it's obvious that people were going to notice that themes were moved to a different place.

[LoudNoise]

Sorry, I assumed that the numbers meant use. It seems more then a bit silly to list usage numbers based only on whether or not someone didn't go to the bother to uninstall it especially since you folks seem to have the real numbers around. If I wasn't aware of this you can be sure that the average user isn't either.

Assuming the same holds true for personas I assume that Yahoo's Million + users is equal gibberish. As for cvan's comment well, dumber things have been said publicly in bugzilla.

As for the rest of my post my points still hold true. There are a ton of folks out there who like themes. From my experience here the support burden is considerably less then with extensions and certainly considerably less then those personas that change search engines or install crapware like superfish.

There simply is no reason not to give Themes equal footing to personas. They don't cost Mozilla anything, at least a large number of folks like them and they cause next to no bitching from folks except when they go away. To use a favorite catch phrase from a few years back you should make them discoverable.

[jivko]

So they've moved the link and that's it. Is this what we want hmmm.... I don't think so. Meanwhile theme weekly downloads dropped by 1/2. If this continues I don't see any point of full theme development.

[dkgo]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831835

[malliz]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831835#c2

In fact, the spec sheet wrote that we wanted to deemphasize full themes

Anyone from Mozilla like to explain why the spec was written in this manner?

[Frank Lion]

So, for example, Silvermel has ~32K active users who are actually using it.

Those are the Whole Galaxy Enabled Active Daily User figures.

When you look at the Earth only figures on AMO it turns out that only Sharebird, Loudnoise and a penguin stuck in the Arctic are the only ones actually using Silvermel.

Otherwise, at sometime in the future, I suspect that someone at Mozilla will be waving about a totally meaningless set of figures to support a position that third party Firefox Themes are not in great demand by Firefox users.

We do care about themers.

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

Deprecation of old-style themes - In conjunction with extensions 2.0 work, push to make this (Personas) the primary avenue for visual experience customization.

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

Personas has 100k users, using 50+ personas created by a community of developers. As well, there has been signficant interest from various potential partners in providing content via this channel.

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

Heavy weight themes are less secure than Personas. If you want to argue with the people that designed these systems and know that HWTs are less secure, feel free to do it. But it doesn't make your arguments more credible.

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

I'll re-iterate that I think 3rd party old-style themes are an outdated technology not worth advocating.

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

Current Themes will still exist. Greg had a plan to de-emphasize them. We should do that.

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

And I'll just sneak that one past everyone

but we don't want to damage full themes or bury you on the site.

In fact, the spec sheet wrote that we wanted to deemphasize full themes.

Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun
Must separate Constance from the nun
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye

~ Sir Walter Scott




https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402796#c5
viewtopic.php?p=3151237#p3151237
viewtopic.php?p=8428425#p8428425
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mconnor/PersonasUplift
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr ... PZxsNDgvNA[1-25-false]
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/arch ... oking.html
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=822486
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831835#c2

[LoudNoise]

The last two posts in the bug seem to be a bit encouraging. If they are looking for a rough layout David's suggestion would be a good place to start as the landing page. It brings full themes above the fold and shows enough of an image to give a good idea of the look of a full theme.




viewtopic.php?p=12602405#p12602405

[David.Vincent]

I have posted my suggestion here : https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831835

[LoudNoise]

Bram Pitoyo's images are kinda of interesting. They are only showing a small section of a full theme and I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone would think that showing a page filled with Chrome editing would be a good idea.

[jorgev]

In fact, the spec sheet wrote that we wanted to deemphasize full themes

Anyone from Mozilla like to explain why the spec was written in this manner?

I don't know why it was written that way. I don't recall being asked about this design, but maybe it wasn't a high priority since it was a very long term thing (back when it was decided that Personas wouldn't be called Personas anymore).

[LoudNoise]

https://bug831835.bugzilla.mozilla.org/ ... ?id=704411

My problem with Bram's examples is that the page is unbalanced. Personas have the example under the text. "Complete" Themes have the text flushed left and an example of complete themes flushed right. It looks hurried.

[LoudNoise]

The funny thing about this is that if Mozilla hadn't stolen the term Personas from AMO none of us would have had to suffer three pages of this nonsense.

[sekular]

They have been trying to move away from themes since they introduced personas. I recently read that personas were causing instability issues when people used high resolution images. But I might be wrong about that. I understand that a lot of the themes are buggy. In my opinion a lot of the themes are absolutely terrible. I am surprised that some of them actually exist considering they look so ugly. Of course completely subjective opinion. But from a development perspective, it takes a lot of time to update themes when rapid release cycle and a lot of the themes are probably buggy, well at least not 100% perfect like the default theme. But i think there are some good themes and that is what makes firefox so great, the addons and the themes. Maybe mozilla should take on some of the themes and make them 100% perfect, well at least clearly state themes that are official and have a variety of them. Then have the non official themes. At the moment there is only the default theme.

[Ngamer01]

The funny thing about this is that if Mozilla hadn't stolen the term Personas from AMO none of us would have had to suffer three pages of this nonsense.

You can't be surprised when you have things like the Themes RSS being missing/broken for over two years now:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=569956

EDIT - Because I got ninja'd, edited in who I'm quoting.