Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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

Post by malliz »

Frank Lion wrote:
malliz wrote:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222546#c78
Just shows how out of touch he is. As far as I know most of the real themers still hang out here but maybe that's what he wants

One thing for sure, damn few themers would have 'core Mozilla community (people with editbugs)' editbug rights, so that's going to be a pretty incestuous discussion there.



Very few members of MZ at all I would think maybe Alice and a couple of others. Looks like they got what they wanted that is to make an announcement cause a fuss and then shut down debate.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by -Px- »

Frank Lion wrote:
malliz wrote:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222546#c78
Just shows how out of touch he is. As far as I know most of the real themers still hang out here but maybe that's what he wants

One thing for sure, damn few themers would have 'core Mozilla community (people with editbugs)' editbug rights, so that's going to be a pretty incestuous discussion there.

I'm going to wait for a couple of weeks, and ask Kev there, did he find any theme developer, who is happy about incoming changes :D
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by maxdamage »

patrickjdempsey wrote:Back when Mozilla was still promoting Australis they built this mockup site, which apparently gave them confidence that a full HTML theme will work:
https://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/ ... dows8.html

The animations are slow and cludgy (and for a long time most of this website didn't even WORK on Firefox, only in other browsers... figure that one out). And this isn't even a real UI yet, nothing is resizable or customizable, and just to get this fake UI we are talking about somewhere between 2000 and 3000 lines of CSS.


Tried that out in Firefox v28.0 and found it to be rather average.Reading this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222546#c78 I am not surprised at the discourse it has caused! ;) I am surprised that Mozilla has survived to this day with that attitude.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

maxdamage wrote:Tried that out in Firefox v28.0 and found it to be rather average.


Like I said:
patrickjdempsey wrote:The animations are slow and cludgy (and for a long time most of this website didn't even WORK on Firefox,


Ironically it was supposed to show the future of Firefox but didn't really work for actual Firefox users at the time. Brilliant, that. And it makes you wonder what browser the Mozilla deciders were actually using.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

-Px- wrote:I'm going to wait for a couple of weeks, and ask Kev there, did he find any theme developer, who is happy about incoming changes :D

You might want to not leave it as long as that, Mozilla employees tend to have a pretty short shelf life these days.

They only have to find out that he once made a donation to a 'Homes for Retired Firefighters' charity and they'll have the poor slob out of there the next day as a suspected arsonist!

:P



patrickjdempsey wrote:And it makes you wonder what browser the Mozilla deciders were actually using.

You'll never find a paid employee of any slush fund known as a charity or 'non-profit' using anything other than a top-end Mac. So, the answer is Safari, so goody, in this case. ;)
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by grrmoz »

I've been using firefox before it was even called firefox, and this news could very well be the last straw. Ever since ff 4.x the browser has been getting worse and worse. It all started when someone at the company decided the best thing to do was to make ff less unique and more of a chrome clone. they added a bunch of useless features nobody ever asked for. they made the default theme more like chrome. they even adopted the dumb new version numbers for every minor release. but I begrudgingly kept using it, while at the same time becoming less and less happy with the direction the company was going.

then, the big change came along, I think it was ff v30? It was when they basically ruined most of the classic themes I used to love, and started to take away the flexibility that separated it from the other crappy browsers out there. Afterward, people had to resort to using an extension JUST to get most themes to look like they used to. I almost called it quits then and there, after over a decade. But what of the alternative? I DETEST chrome with a passion. I detest how they lock you into one theme with hardly any flexibility, that bare, spartan ui. I detest the laughable attempts that they call 'themes'. Theres a lot of other stuff I dislike, but basically what the hell happened mozilla? you guys used to be about options. about flexibility. THAT is what I loved about it. Now? they keep cutting back on the the reasons why we chose FF over other browsers, and for what?
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by James »

grrmoz wrote:...but basically what the hell happened mozilla? you guys used to be about options. about flexibility. THAT is what I loved about it. Now? they keep cutting back on the the reasons why we chose FF over other browsers, and for what?

mozillaZine is not a part of nor run by mozilla.org as you can see on bottom of right sidebar and at http://www.mozillazine.org/about/
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I can only guess that the crickets and tumbleweeds blowing through this "discussion" are a sign of very aggressive moderation:
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org ... hemes/5306

The OP appears to be something of a backpedal here. So Mozilla is going to recreate Complete Themes in HTML? I somehow very seriously doubt they would go through all of the effort to restore something that they've literally spent a decade trying to get rid of. But hey, maybe I'm wrong... maybe they figure since they ARE killing off real extensions they will have to throw the users some kind of bone. Although frankly, I don't think I would bother even if they did. HTML is a royal pain in the behind to make act like XUL and to even do some of the most simple things we take for granted requires complicated JS interactions to make work.

Ever tried to create custom checkboxes in HTML? You can't. Someone forgot to give checkboxes a [checked] property so somehow the browser is able to style them through some hidden property. The only way to do it is to create a completely custom interface and use JS to add a [checked] property so you can style it. (Which is obviously verboten in a Theme) Even then, you can only use checkboxes and buttons inside of forms so they can't really be used as interface elements in the first place. Seriously, look it up some time, it will make your head hurt how many things in HTML are just flat out broken either by design or by oversight and nobody really seems bothered by it. There is a reason that Mozilla developed XUL, and as far as I can tell, it still stands.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

This part made me laugh -

Unfortunately, this intent was lost in the brevity of information supplied and the medium of communication.

As an organization, we didn’t meet our own standards of openness and discourse for a change of this magnitude, and we’ll continue to work to improve how we communicate to ensure we make our intentions clear with everyone from the start.


Yeah, how could Mozilla have ever have thought that if you write -

As part of Firefox great-or-dead, we've decided to stop support for "heavyweight" themes which can do arbitrary styling and replace chrome packages.

We may simply remove that support completely, or we may extend lightweight themes with some additional features such as changing colors or icons.


...that people would somehow bizarrely interpret that as meaning -

As part of Firefox great-or-dead, we've decided to stop support for "heavyweight" themes which can do arbitrary styling and replace chrome packages.

We may simply remove that support completely, or we may extend lightweight themes with some additional features such as changing colors or icons.


As for this 'we must try to do better in the future' stuff, change the record already. That line may have worked for some Southern States preacher caught with his pants round his ankles in the 1980's, but there really is a definable limit when these phrases become meaningless. Btw, drop the 'burn with fire' stuff as well, it makes you sound like children.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by grrmoz »

James wrote:mozillaZine is not a part of nor run by mozilla.org as you can see on bottom of right sidebar and at http://www.mozillazine.org/about/

oh i know :) was just venting.

patrickjdempsey wrote:I can only guess that the crickets and tumbleweeds blowing through this "discussion" are a sign of very aggressive moderation:
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org ... hemes/5306


I'm shocked they actually allowed my post on there. I thought for sure the mods there would not allow me to speak my mind. But I also think this isn't getting as much traction b/c they have been making an attempt over time to make the full themes less and less known. i remember the push for those personas, which were laughable compared to the real themes. seems like ever since personas, they de-emphasized the full themes. i never liked personas.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

It was going on to some degree before then, but definitely when they came up with the idea for Personas there was a real concerted effort that continues every single time they update AMO to make REAL THEMES go away. So I really have nothing more to say to those folks I haven't said before on bugs or even personally to Jorge when he came here asking what Mozilla could do to fix the "themes situation". I've been doing my part in these regards for years but nobody at Mozilla really seems to be interested in improving the situation. I even had suggestions for ways to handle the very real problem that often leads to users choosing to disable updates, of developers abandoning extensions and they've still done nothing about it. So I'm over it. I'm over believing anything Mozilla PR folks say in public that differs in any way from what developers say in bugs. And I'm over offering advice. Most of the bugs I've filed have devolved to me being angry anyway because of the callous two-faced Mozilla approach. The funny part to me is that they completely gave up any pretense of being "open" in their development about 3 years ago but they still get to prance around all smug about their "community involvement". What a load of horse fertilizer.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Ngamer01 »

That's network decay and executive meddling for you. As much as it saddens me since I've been with Firefox since the late 1.0 days, if Mozilla is hell-bent to make Firefox the Windows 8 of webbrowsers (or hell make it be the MTV of webbrowsers to use a different analogy) , we can only hope either the market makes a mercy killing and knocks Mozilla out of the race soon or the Mozilla Foundation wakes up, cleans house at Mozilla Corp., and stop the in-house rampart executive meddling and network decay that is continuously damaging their brands to this day.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

I'll explain why I was reading this page from 2009 another time - http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/08 ... eb-design/

But, meanwhile this bit made me laugh later on -
Black Estate is seen all over the Internet in dark web design showcases. It is indeed a beautiful design and worthy of all the attention. A great deal of white space is used throughout the design, and what makes this particular design unique is how the white space is used to outline certain elements so efficiently.

The logo has a lot of white space around it and is the first thing we see as visitors. We see the main content and bottle on the right next. As you see, white space is used perfectly to highlight the text on the bottle and the headline of the main content.
(btw in designer-speak, white space means blank space)

Yeah, I'm guessing Black Estate thinks differently in 2015 - http://www.blackestate.co.nz/

:)
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by LIMPET235 »

That "new" Black Estate site is crap.
Way too much "white space."

Who ever designed that should be buried alive.

&....It looks exactly the same in IE. Absolute rubbish.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

LIMPET235 wrote:That "new" Black Estate site is crap.

Who ever designed that should be buried alive..
Moral: Never let a geek relative design your website, unless your entire crop has just failed for the year then dig deep and shell out 20 bucks for a decent website template.

Incidentally, is it just me who thinks 'Free range pig's head terrine' is oddly out of place on a Drinks Menu?
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