Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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

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Frank Lion wrote: . . .I wholeheartedly welcome the participation of any and all Mozilla employees here on this thread and look forward to having a productive and meaningful interchange of views with them.
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ehume
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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Frank Lion wrote:. . . there is a saying amongst barristers & QCs in the UK -

'Never ask a question, unless you already know the answer'
And here I thought it was an American legal saying. Goes to show me.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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A bit of historical insight from around six years ago
viewtopic.php?p=8435965#p8435965
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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What makes you think they'll really do it this time? Are they better at coding, perhaps?
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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ehume wrote:What makes you think they'll really do it this time? Are they better at coding, perhaps?
Better coders? looking at Mozilla code makes you realize how some of them have picked up some very bad habits but thats besides the point. Are themes going to come to an end? yes ......is something going to replace them ? You tell me
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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ehume wrote:What makes you think they'll really do it this time? Are they better at coding, perhaps?
Not better at coding, but the entire XUL framework is going away because Servo doesn't render XUL at all. It's not like keeping Themes and XUL extensions is even any kind of option at this point. Themes in their current form under the current plans are as Frank said, Dead Man Walking. There's really nothing left to "discuss" with Mozilla about that. Servo was specifically built to not render XUL. Whenever that decision was made by whoever made it is what brings us up to today. There's really no getting around it. The question is whether they'll bother to build a whole new theming system for the new UI and renderer.

The problem is, Mozilla employees and representatives have lied repeatedly to direct questions about all of this, and even when we were finally told that yes Themes would die when they switched to Servo, the impression was that would be many years into the future. And then boom, all of a sudden there's a 12 month expiration date, and then BOOM all of a sudden there's a two month expiration date on Themes and Tab Groups.

And even now, even after being caught in lies, even after throwing decades of hard work from the community down the toilet with no notice, even after moderating out the anger that people *rightly* are expressing, even now Mozilla is trying to tell people that it's an exaggeration and Themes will be a part of the new UI. Because it hasn't been enough to repeatedly screw us over again and again and again... now Mozilla even wants to shame us and make us look like fools by lying about their intentions. A brand new theming system would be nice, but it's not going to be any kind of continuation of the current system and old themes are not going to be compatible AT ALL. Doing that is a technological impossibility. Persecution complex? Bite me.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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I wouldn't use the term lies, they have been telegraphing this for years. Let's face it, they finally got a time line, which they will certainly miss, for Servo. Before that time line, they couldn't afford to be specific since everyone, theme and extension dev alike, would have left.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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I agree that they will probably miss the Servo timeline... but unplugging things that currently work is super easy. The point missed in all of this is that Mozilla probably (rightly) believes that building the new interface will take longer than almost anything else. This is the same team that brought us In-Content Preferences and even after sitting on it for over a year still didn't bother to fix basic broken things like the Home Page settings.

Which brings me back to the most baffling thing in all of this mess for me.... why isn't this entire effort being developed in a totally separate branch so that Mozilla can give addons developers time to build compatible addons and allow users to enjoy the Firefox they love right up to the time it's gone? Why repeat the mistake of Australis development when it clearly just ticked everyone off to have things constantly changing for 2 years? And why throw away all of that work so soon after they FINALLY finished it? It's not like doing all of this in Trunk is going to make it easier for Mozilla. If anything it will make it more difficult, and make every stumble into a public display that hurts user confidence and what's left of Mozilla's reputation. Or is this bunch so delusional they think they aren't going to run into problems and it's all just going to go gravy?
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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patrickjdempsey wrote:I agree that they will probably miss the Servo timeline...
Probably? My bet is it will be missed by years rather than months
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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Just wondering if Mozilla has "Reached out" to any of the themers here?
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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No one has reached out to me. As if they care about people who need things big to see them.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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"Reaching out" in Mozillaspeak usually means it was mentioned in some developer's blog somewhere that nobody knows/cares about, or some new private Bug on Bugzilla that nobody knows about. Not only is there no evidence that they've made any effort to contact Theme authors (AMO has a mailing list and I've gotten notifications about testing extensions for e10s), there isn't even an announcement about this on the official AMO blog despite the axe supposedly coming down at any moment. My guess is that it will appear as a line-item in the Addons compatibility for Firefox 45 page when that goes up next month.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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Yes I thought nothing would happen. Gets me what the hell all those posters here
https://discourse.mozilla-community.org ... hemes/5306
think is going to happen maybe a sudden campfire type love in with Mozilla devs on one side and Themers on the other weaving a magical new interface out of macrame and old socks :roll:
Many of them seem more interested in keeping their own favorite theme..... same old same old
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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Amusingly, I am asked to log into the discussion with my persona account :),
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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Not going there :shock:
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