Another default theme coming

[Hybrid]

this new theme SUCKS.

I'm sorry but I can't find a diplomatic way to say the following.

What a foolish, short-sighted choice on the part of the devs. For the sake of uniform look and feel, you sacrifice the uniqueness of each platform. Does MS Office look the same on Windows as it does on Mac? NO. Why? because they don't look at all alike. You are trying to ram a square peg into a round hole.

But it doesn't matter seeing as how we all know that this open-source initiative is not as open as we'd like it to be.

Right on. I completely agree. Why even consider cross platform similarity, what do icons have to do with anything relevant to program functionality? Is making all platform icons the same create any type of benefit? I just fail to see any benefits to taking this initiative. I understand Arvid's reluctance to allow modifications to his theme being an artist myself, but I also understand Ben's position regarding the development of his software. Certainly a more mutual agreement could have been made, but I wasnt there and dont know how flexible Arvid was willing to be.

I understand from that standpoint why Ben needed to look for alternatives . If the two cannot resolve their differences then Arvid can (hopefully) make his theme available as an extension as this would please the loyal users of Qute.

To Ben I offer some criticism. This new theme is a step back graphically to what can be achieved today. In 1995 this would have been revolutionary but by todays standards, its sterile and quite plain. I urge you to push forward and make Firefox more then a cross platform, 3rd party, second rate alternative to IE. I urge you to destroy IE and a major factor is appearance. To many Windows applications dont have elegant GUIs and as a graphical artist speaking, the look and feel of a program is an overlooked factor in its sucess. Please dont deviate from that wether or not the Qute theme is used. I am just so frustrated and sick of seing ugly Windows program after program. Can we get some graphic design people in the house already? I speak for he masses that dont care about installing extensions or monkeying with settings, the ones that want everything out of the box, I have no problem changing the them no matter what kind of icons you use, I am just offering insight from people that dont know much about computers and if you want to attract them, you will need to do better then this.

[Lost User 12174]

Qute can be just a little too cute.
I'm looking forward to seeing this new winstripe theme.

[tmeader]

The majority of people are not going to begin adopting Firefox until a 1.0 release. That's just how it is. Admittedly, we can evangelize all we want before then, and switch people over one person at a time, but for big shifts, for example businesses, not one is going to touch a product labeled 0.9 (as well they shouldn't). That being the case 1.0 is set (tentatively mind you) for LATE summer (read... September). Anyone who thinks that Winstripe will not improve at all in the next 3-3.5 months is fooling themselves. It is unfair to be bashing Winstripe so heavily at this early a timeframe.

[esavior]

I made a new thread where you guys can post suggestions on improving Winstripe. DO NOT TALK ABOUT QUTE THERE! This is only for suggestions on improving the new theme. If you have already made a post about a specific improvement on here please repost it there because I am sure it was lost in the flames. Also if you plan on posting there be specific about what can be improved and maybe say how it can be improved. Thanks.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=565391

[wget]

The comparison between the license restrictions on the official Firefox art and Qute are a bit of dead end. It's about who they affect, not just openness in general.

I'd seriously like to hear what someone like RMS or the Debian guys would say to this. Anyone know if any of the prominent figures in the OSS community have said anything about the Firefox branding?

I'm not going to be goaded into sticking up for the artwork decision (which I was personally against anyway). There's tri-licensed artwork in cvs already. Your point is invalid.

Oddly enough I'm for the decision to close-source the artwork and I don't find Winstripe particularly unattractive now that I see it in-browser.

That's beside the point though as we're talking principles here. You can't just arbitrarily decide that it's okay to include a close-sourced part just because you think it's easily replaceble.

Not sarcasm. It's practically identical to IE/Luna on XP.

Sorry, don't see the resemblance. I only see a lot of broken UI guidelines.

[...] do you think I'm going to the effort of lying about liking the theme to push my point?

How did you manage to infer that from my question?

Branding is an identity. A theme is an appearance.

Your point about the trademarking was spot on. I don't agree with the above though. The appearance is a crucial part of a brand's identity. A SONY[1] stereo is more than the brand on its front.

[1] I think SONY sucks but its brand works for this analogy.

...

I like what you did what the allcaps shouting and the extra markup.

[neuro]

After wading through 28 [1] pages of discussion (if you can call some of the posts that) and finally getting round to setting up my mz forum account, I've made some observations.

• Many users feel that they have a divine right to attempt to overturn decisions made by core developers because they don't agree with them, even if they've done nothing more than perhaps test daily builds. [2]
• Arvid appears [3] to have had no intention of applying an open licence to Qute until it was clear it wasn't going to be included with Fx by default.
• Ben should have increased the level of communication with Arvid, given that his theme was previously the default and that the situation was due to change, but given the pressures on any developer I can understand the mistake, if not condone it. Clearly Arvid could have done the same in talking to Ben.
• The Mozilla Foundation should have been doing due diligence on components such as Qute with respect to their suitability for inclusion in a primarily open source product.
• While I prefer Qute to the previews of Winstripe thus presented, I and others should delay judgement until seeing it included in the final, complete, gold build of Firefox 1.0 - until then, all undue criticism that is not of a constructive nature is folly at best.
• While Arvid appears to be more conducive to discussing the continued inclusion of Qute in Fx0.9 onwards, this may still negate the possibility of Qute appearing as a standalone theme with either an open or closed redistribution licence. Feel free to prove me wrong however, Arvid
• Most critically, I will wager the greatest proportion of Firefox 0.9/1.0 users will spend time looking at the content presented to them by the web browser, not at the web browser itself, if you see what I mean.

This post will no doubt get lost in the flotsam, but I thought I'd make my meagre observations nonetheless.

I agree with some that a move from the more radical looking (compared to IE) Qute theme to a "safer" theme, which Winstripe looks like it will be, seems a strange decision considering Qute's popularity and usability - Arvid's assertions over his IP aside. I also agree that some of the user interface art produced today by theme builders or even graphic artists and website designers in general is tremendous, and a huge improvement over years past, especially in Windows-land, and in light of that Winstripe initially appears to take some steps backwards from where we are now.

However, I think Winstripe in it's finished form will be a pleasant compromise between the IE/XP icon set and Qute. Yet again, I think it's best for all to just wait and see, since Winstripe is so clearly still a work-in-progress - as is Firefox itself, remember.

Gnomestripe, on the other hand, needs to have it's position made much clearer. I personally would be more concerned with pissing off scads of KDE users with very Gnomish icons (Should also be wary of distros such as Red Hat, which further modify the stock look of both Gnome and KDE)

[1] Jings, in the space of typing away, another page gets added. What a thread ...

I'd seriously like to hear what someone like RMS or the Debian guys would say to this. Anyone know if any of the prominent figures in the OSS community have said anything about the Firefox branding?

Last I heard, rms wants to liberate code, not graphics, although gnu.org does link to open licences such as the Free Art License, but I think it's fair that the branding protection (which this thread isn't about) is a fair action on behalf of the Foundation, and rms et al shouldn't really have too much of a problem with it.

Branding is an identity. A theme is an appearance.

I agree with wget here, the default theme is all part of the branding - what do you think you'll see scattered across the press when review screenshots get published - Classic? The default theme is just as much a part of the branding as the logo and website. Mr Hicks? Calling Mr. Hicks?

[2] Not to denigrate those who test and report back, as such feedback always has it's uses.
[3] Of course I have no clue what is going on in Arvid's or Ben's minds, but given the messages posted thusly I can at least posit.

[w3bst3r]

Just scrap it, it's the ugliest shit ever made, looks like the works of a 5 year old half retarded kid

[esavior]

To answer wgets question, debian-legal actually had a large discussion on it http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/20 ... 00006.html

And while they did have problems with the artwork the discussion suddenly stoped, I can only assumed it was taken care of behind closed doors.

[FlashBanG]

I for one, would like to congratulate Kevin on the work done on the new theme.. Although my preference right now is Qute, I am willing to give Winstripe a try.

If it grows on me, i'll stick with it. If not, i'll switch to Qute, as Arvid has graciously repackaged Qute as a standalone theme.

A Suggestion to Kevin and the other winstripe developers..

How about adding some more 3-D look to it? I'm not sure how easy to do this is, but it seems like this would make it "fit in" with XP more.. right now, this resembles an OS-X interface more..

[Thumper's Evil Twin]

I'd seriously like to hear what someone like RMS or the Debian guys would say to this. Anyone know if any of the prominent figures in the OSS community have said anything about the Firefox branding?

Debian's stance is to avoid the copyrighted art. All Debian builds use the tri-license art. Stallman's still lukewarm about the tri-license in the first place, never mind full copyright.

- Chris

[infernux]

infact suse and fedora both default to KDE when you install

WRONG!! Fedora isn't shipping KDE as a default and most liklly will never do so...

I also would like to know how much is gnomestripe going to be tied to gnome? I mean is it going to get to the point where its going to look really random under KDE, and great under gnome? I know Mozilla and Gnome are buddies now but please dont forget that some of us use KDE

Since when do KDE users give a sh*t on Mozilla? There was a time when Mozilla.org wanted to cooperate with KDE but KDE prefered to piss the Mozilla developers off because the "can do better" (KHTML/Konqueror)

To the rest: please people, grow up. This is really not the worst thing to happen. Nevertheless, it's funny to read thet some are really threatening with forks because auf this theme change... And I bet most people who protest in this thread that there is now democracy havn't read a single line of Mozilla source code yet

[Quark]

...

Go. Away.

[esavior]

You are correct about fedora infernux. I went back and checked later on and relized it was gnome. I have always been a KDE user and yet I care about firefox. I fail to see the logic in that if KDE did not want to work with mozilla, mozilla should ignore half of the linux users. I am not really willing to make a debate on which one is more popular so lets just say equal popularity. Though I am sure there is a million crystal themes out there, so it would be pretty easy to get firefox to look nice with KDE About forking, people were just overreacting, I can not think of a serious organization that would fork the code base and keep fx cross platform.

Edit: thumpers right, screw was a bit uncalled for.

[infernux]

Although the excuse about having similar themes across OS' is completely false as Winstripe doesn't come close to looking like Pinstripe. Maybe one or two icons here and there, but the theme as a whole looks as different from Pinstripe as Qute does.

This is no "excuse", the basic icons _are_ the same. The *stripe themes fit much, MUCH better together than Qute does.

The other question is teh following: does Firebird need similar icons on all supported platforms? I think, for the project itself, this is the best thing they can do. This way if you are used to Firefox/Win and see Firefox on a Mac you will say "hey, that's Firefox!" Personally I would have liked the "best integration with host OS aproach better, OSX hast perfect icons, windows could stay "qute" i don't care... If only they would ship the Linux builds with a theme that inherits icons from the currently active GTK theme, NOW THAT WOULD ROCK!!

[Thumper's Evil Twin]

I fail to see the logic in that if KDE did not want to work with mozilla, mozilla should screw half of the linux users.

Nobody's "screwing" anyone. I do wish people would stop using such vulgar, over-the-top language. For Mozilla to mature on Linux it needed to establish a closer relationship with the toolkit being used and nobody stepped up to maintain the Qt port. Please stop turning everything into a battle.

- Chris