Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

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patrickjdempsey
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Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by patrickjdempsey »

After hacking at the max compatibility number (it said 3.0b1 but Mozilla changed the way compatibility numbers work so I had to change it).... and it installs. Last code-edit date was August 21, 2011... which was roughly when I first considered moving over to SeaMonkey. ;)

This theme I had limited to the /navigator/, /global/ and /mozapps/ skins because I don't use the other components and although I started replacing some buttons I could never fully test them so I stopped. This theme is not very adventurous. Basically I copied my Stratini images into SeaMonkey image files in /navigator/, and directly copied CSS for specific features like tabs from /browser/. Since the /global/ and /mozapps/ folders are (I think) identical between Firefox and SeaMonkey, I believe I just copied them over whole cloth without changes.

I'm surprised by a few things about this theme:

1. I cannot find ANYTHING in the SeaMonkey-specific parts of this theme that are broken. Nothing. In over 2 years, nothing in the primary UI of SeaMonkey has changed enough to break this (rather feeble attempt) at a theme.

2. Some CSS is broken. Mostly, there's some CSS that I had relied on pretty heavily in 2011 that Mozilla had prefixed but has now unprefixed, deprecated, and stripped-out support for. This includes at the minimum: -moz-border-radius, and -moz-box-shadow... both of which I used everywhere.

3. The Addons Manager is a mess. I did some heavy hacking to the Addons Manager in Stratini so I'm not sure if even my final build is still compatible in Firefox.

My final build of Stratini is from March of 2012. I'll be curious how many of the changes from August 2011 happened before March 2012. I'll just have to drop sections from my final build of Stratini (Which is now over a year and a half old) into this and see what happens. ;)
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Crazy... loading the final build fixed almost everything. Surreal.
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mcdavis
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Re: Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by mcdavis »

patrickjdempsey wrote:What my avatar is about: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamon ... n/sea-fox/


That's a gorgeous fluid avatar/icon.
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SnoutSpout
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Re: Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by SnoutSpout »

patrickjdempsey wrote:1. I cannot find ANYTHING in the SeaMonkey-specific parts of this theme that are broken. Nothing. In over 2 years, nothing in the primary UI of SeaMonkey has changed enough to break this (rather feeble attempt) at a theme.

It's a bit of an irony that the rapid release model saved SM by establishing it as a niche browser that had a unique position in the Gecko ecosystem. The UI is essentially a Fx2.x era interface with the non-instrusive helpful bits of 3.6-4.x stirred into the mix. In addition, SeaMonkey is also community-run, and the userbase is more leery of change for change's sake than their counterparts on the Fx side of things.

I find it a pity the theming scene for SM is such a devastated wasteland, even beyond the sorry state of Firefox's. It basically never recovered when Firefox hit 2.x and most of the themers who switched over to coding for Firefox were lost to attrition over the years for reasons you're all too horribly familiar with.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by patrickjdempsey »

SeaMonkey theming isn't helped by a wonky internal structure borrowed from Netscape, and difficult-to-test components. If I do pursue this further than just curiosity I would have to build a totally custom structure that doesn't make my ears bleed. I had started to do that with Stratini in Firefox anyway because after Firefox 4.0 the developers really started abusing the browser.css file and it became impossible to find things that need regular tweaking like tabs.

And thanks mcdavis! Just something I put together for fun. :)
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Re: Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by patrickjdempsey »

So I've been playing with this more. SeaMonkey is quite a bit different than Firefox in that the /global/ skin actually does MOST of the work. So I've limited the theme for now to *just* the global skin. Had to change a bunch of lines where I had references to things in the browser skin and now it runs very smoothly indeed. I migrated code in the browser skin for things like #navigator-toolbox and main toolbars into toolbox.css. I'm also thinking about migrating tabrowser-tab code into tabbox.css. Things like the urlbar dropmarker are now styled only by dropmarker.css. It's actually really very impressive how much can be done in global in SeaMonkey... and of course it all works equally well in all components.
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Philip Chee
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Re: Just loaded a partially-built SeaMonkey theme from 2011

Post by Philip Chee »

patrickjdempsey wrote:So I've been playing with this more. SeaMonkey is quite a bit different than Firefox in that the /global/ skin actually does MOST of the work. So I've limited the theme for now to *just* the global skin. Had to change a bunch of lines where I had references to things in the browser skin and now it runs very smoothly indeed. I migrated code in the browser skin for things like #navigator-toolbox and main toolbars into toolbox.css. I'm also thinking about migrating tabrowser-tab code into tabbox.css. Things like the urlbar dropmarker are now styled only by dropmarker.css. It's actually really very impressive how much can be done in global in SeaMonkey... and of course it all works equally well in all components.

Neil says that:
Neil wrote:you need to check out /communicator/ as well, there are a few odds and ends in there too.

Phil
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