Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

[Frank Lion]

^ Have to ask, are you Max Dark who created those beautiful Noirish Win OS skins for chrome?

Unlikely, but I suppose possible. Those skins are by Max Müller.

[maxdamage]

^ Have to ask, are you Max Dark who created those beautiful Noirish Win OS skins for chrome?

Sorry but no.Just a semi-clueless guy just slowly learning how to fix a theme and at the same time manage to do some changes\adds to the theme.That is all.

[grrmoz]

now I've read they are getting rid of personas.

[WaltS48]

now I've read they are getting rid of personas.

Read again, it is the authentication system for the web called Persona.

[grrmoz]

oops. that explains why i was confused when reading the article. i thought persona/s were the same

[patrickjdempsey]

Nope. They rebranded Personas with the very clever and original name of... "Themes". Just in case the whole situation wasn't confusing enough.

[tonymec]

Yeah, and if you need to distinguish between XPI (formerly jar) themes and background themes, the official terminology AFAIK is "lightweight themes" and "complete themes". As if they couldn't adopt one terminology and stick to it.

Similarly they decided that Trunk was to be rechristened Nightly, so nowadays the two newest branches of Firefox are published as Nightly nightlies and Aurora nightlies, plus tinderbox-builds of both kinds, but remember that the building system is not called Tinderbox anymore…

[Frank Lion]

Anyone any idea what's going on with this stuff, because I haven't?

We get a bug in November telling us our themes are being whacked, then a 'discussion' thread about some vague replacement, that hasn't had a new comment in a month. Now what? It's the self-centred selfishness of these Mozilla guys that irritates me. Complete Theme authors, writing them in the conventional way, are expected to continue spending 50 hours a month on this stuff, like performing dogs in a circus, just so Mozilla can pull the rug out from under their feet at any time and any place of their choosing?

This utter crap about openness and yet, when push comes to shove, it's like dealing with Lodge 94041 (Autistic division) of the Freemasons!

[LoudNoise]

None of which is out of character for Mozilla.

[WaltS48]

I believe the proper method to stay informed is to add yourself to the CC list of the bug report, or follow the lack of discussion at Planning the Future of Complete Themes - Add-ons / Themes - Mozilla Discourse

Those that have made comments in the bug will automatically get bug mail when there is a change.

[Frank Lion]

I believe the proper method.

I don't reckon anyone posting on this thread joined here yesterday. I also reckon that includes me.

There has always been a 'behind the scenes' info system here and it was to this I was referring to

[patrickjdempsey]

All of that is assuming they won't do it in secret like they've done pretty much all of the decision making for the last few years. I'd guess when this moves again they'll do it in a secret bug and won't reuse that one. They've been using that tactic for awhile now to avoid alerting angry users / trolls / whatever so they can do the work in peace. Remember that removing support for Themes simply requires disabling a few things in the Addons Manager. It's not a huge sea-change kind of thing like will happen when they get around to actually removing the entire theming system and build a non-XUL theme. For all we know, it's already been done in some development branch somewhere just waiting to push.

[smsmith]

For all we know, it's already been done in some development branch somewhere just waiting to push.

This is what I am thinking, except nothing as nefarious as the work already being done.

[Frank Lion]

All of that is assuming they won't do it in secret like they've done pretty much all of the decision making for the last few years.

True, but it was worth asking. After all, when I suggested to you guys back in Firefox 4 that Complete Themes would one day, sooner, end...where do you think that came from? This stuff goes way back, but it's OK for me to speak of it now as, like I said before, 'my guys' have all now gone. I don't mean they got whacked, this ain't The Godfather, just that they've all now gone to horizons new.

For all I know, someone else might have heard something about this latest situation. I just wish, whatever these devs up to, they would get a move on.

[tonymec]

FWIW, I've (re)discovered a metabug, opened in 2001 but still NEW (sic), with as Subject: More power to the user. Too bad it has "useragent" as an alias, otherwise I might dream about someone setting it to "block" recent bugs whose aim it is to remove power from the user.

Of course, as we say in French, "j'dis ça j'dis rien…" (wfw: "I say that I say nothing" meaning I won't take responsibility if anyone follows my ill-advised suggestion above )