Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Discuss application theming and theme development.
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dkgo
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Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by dkgo »

Bug 1222546 - Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222546
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LoudNoise
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by LoudNoise »

bug wrote:As part of Firefox great-or-dead, we've decided to stop support for "heavyweight" themes


They decided to go for dead. It is a business decision.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

No great loss. I've already proved the point I made here - viewtopic.php?p=13161095#p13161095

- i.e. that it was possible to theme the entire 'unthemeable' mighty Australis UI in 3 days or less per theme and that they wouldn't constantly break and would only take a few ( about 2 -3 in total for all 4 themes ) hours per month to maintain and produced 4 themes for Firefox that have done precisely that.

My job was done and I've long moved onto other things now. I say 'no great loss' because the present day bloated mess that is called Firefox today bears no resemblance, in intent or direction, to the Firefox browser that I first started using in 2004.

December the 1st works for me, I did the updates for FF44 a while back and this saves me having to do updates for FF45.

Always an upside to everything. :)



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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Well, it's not like I didn't try to warn folks that Themes would likely be the first major feature on the chopping block, well in advance of the merge to Servo. It begins.
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roytam1
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by roytam1 »

As I said when Firefox changes versioning like chrome in 4.0, keep making Firefox like chrome and losing its uniqueness is a total failure, but sadly mozilla goes this dead path and doesn't even look back.
I am the bone of my firefox.Source is my body,and library is my blood.I've created over a thousand of builds.Unaware of notice.Nor aware of warning.With stood pain to create binaries.Waiting for one's download.I have no regrets.This is the only path.My whole life was "Unlimited build works"
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by mightyglydd »

Meanwhile 'Live from MozFest 2015' things are going swimmingly !

https://www.theguardian.com/info/develo ... zfest-2015
Mozilla’s Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker has just addressed the crowd. Emphasising the message that Mozilla is ‘more than just a browser.’

No your Majesty, every six weeks it becomes less than the browser it once was.
One of the themes this year is Don’t Feed The Trolls

Don't think I've tried that one..
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

mightyglydd wrote:Meanwhile 'Live from MozFest 2015' things are going swimmingly !

https://www.theguardian.com/info/develo ... zfest-2015


Just by the O2 Centre lies the rather lesser known Ravensbourne College (with alumni including David Bowie) the huge and striking venue for this year’s Mozilla Festival, known affectionately as Mozfest

Hmm, nope. David Bowie went to the very small Bromley Art College in Rookery Lane, Bromley which was a college for 16 - 18 year olds then. That moved to Chislehurst in the 70's and much later became part of Sussex University and offered university degree courses. It's present resting place in Greenwich only happened about 5 years back.

People forget that some of us do actually live in S.E. England and know these things. ;)
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mightyglydd
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by mightyglydd »

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23MozFest
We empower users to be the masters of their own domain......In the end, we are human beings
](*,)

Here we see Mozillans rejoicing as their leader announces the end of those pesky Themes

Image

@On a serious note how about a Poll (remember those?) on this: Should Mozilla remove support for heavyweight themes.... Yes/No ?
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

mightyglydd wrote:
One of the themes this year is Don’t Feed The Trolls

Don't think I've tried that one..


That's the one where when people are really upset with your entire development strategy instead of engaging them and trying to figure out why they are so upset, you label all of your critics as "trolls" and free yourself from all criticism. That way you get to play the victim and the victorious hero all the while crapping all over your biggest supporters and leaving millions of people without a decent alternative to big money.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

mightyglydd wrote:Here we see Mozillans rejoicing as their leader announces the end of those pesky Themes

Yep, those pesky themes that users didn't want -

Image

That is a pic of the figures for one of mine in 2007, 6 months after it came out. (an AMO bug means you add on the download figures of the top Incomplete - No Files version)

That weekly download figure was a bit of a one-off high spot, but, yeah, top themes in those days were getting 100,000 - 300,000 downloads a week.

Extension writers didn't like it much (quite a few devs were also extension writers) as their figures were far lower and we were getting all the glory. Then came Personas, which people just weren't buying into and themes were still burying them.

Mozilla's solution? - they froze the all the counter figures for 2 months in late 2007 and when they came back, the extension download figures were as expected like before and the theme figures were 10% of what they were across the board.

At AMO, they even tried to deny/dispute the previous theme figures, until we showed them the screenshots (they had forgotten that arty types who make themes always do screenshots, instead of geeky copy 'n paste) They had no answers, but just did a 'because I say so' on us. This was the guy btw

Cameron Nicks of Shift fame packed it in and I left AMO in 2008. Since then, I've been told, there have been a few more less drastic 'downward adjustments' on theme figures and, of course, the continual hiding of where they are and devs bad mouthing Complete Themes ever since.

For what? Just so that their Personas could take off because users had no other option? Instead of creating or competing on a level playing field, they chose to deliberately destroy one of their main competitive edges over other browsers. As the skill level in producing Personas is near zero, then pretty obviously, Chrome and all the other browsers immediately also brought out their versions of it.

N.B. My old pals at Mozilla have all now left and this new bunch are already pretty well aware of what I think of them, which does give me a certain freedom to express myself freely here. :)
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ehume
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by ehume »

Vivaldi has arrived in the nick of time.
Firefox: Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I suppose promoting Personas was a sort of interim goal. But I've always figured Personas was going to be Mozilla's ultimate exit strategy for Themes. I still maintain that Mozilla could have done themselves and everyone else a HUGE favor by taking the few hours (in actual working time, several months in Mozilla development time) to restructure Themes so that the basic browser skin only included the most basic instructions for the primary UI, and promoted browser-only themes as a reasonable alternative to Complete Themes. Such a concept would even work in Servo because all you are talking about is one CSS file and a handful of images. The only reason I can even imagine why the would refuse to consider that is because they have been so single-mindedly obsessed with the idea of canning Themes altogether that they didn't want to try something that would make Themes easier and more popular. It's not like they didn't completely restructure the back-end of the default theme at least 5 times since Firefox 2.0... they've done it every year-and-a-half like it's on the calendar. And it's not like I'm talking crazy-talk here... SeaMonkey is actually pretty close to this model... and so was Firefox prior to the first great UI bloat of 3.0.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

ehume wrote:Vivaldi has arrived in the nick of time.

Which is actually quite a good trick considering he's been dead since 1741.

Old Heathen Chinee proverb - 'Put not your trust in long deceased Italian Baroque composers bearing promises of rescue from anything in the future called Firefox'

Wise words.
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maxdamage
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by maxdamage »

How can themes be bugs? Mozilla is the bug.... Maybe someone should list Mozilla as a bug in bug report? ;) I tried a number of personas for Firefox but they sucked MAJOR!!!! Stayed with themes ever since...
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Replace the word "bug" with the word "ticket" if that helps. It's just a generic term for any kind of issue/work/changes being tracked on Bugzilla. Although certainly there are people within Mozilla who have considered Themes to be a "bug" as in something bad and broken for a long long long time. I suspect some of those folks were upset about the continuation of themes support and toolbar customization way back when Firefox split from the Mozilla Suite.
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