Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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

Post by JohnST »

patrickjdempsey wrote:It's really annoying when a bug you are a member of starts getting spammed...

Your off topic post in this thread is of cause not spam and not annoying.
patrickjdempsey wrote:and then on top of the spam all of the members start removing themselves from the list, creating even MORE spam.

Maybe this Bugzilla Documentation also works for you:
User Guide wrote:Once logged in, you can customize various aspects of Bugzilla via the "Preferences" link in the page footer. [...] For example, if you didn't want to receive mail when someone added themselves to the CC list, you could uncheck all the boxes in the CC Field Changes line.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

JohnST wrote:
patrickjdempsey wrote:It's really annoying when a bug you are a member of starts getting spammed...

Your off topic post in this thread is of cause not spam and not annoying.

Nope.

Especially as this thread is in the Theme Development forum and Pat is a Theme Dev. Which kinda means he can do or say anything he likes here. See? :)
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rsx11m
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by rsx11m »

It's not off-topic given that the entire thread went slightly off-topic, discussing the quirks of bugzilla.
Thus, considering the nesting, patrick's comment was entrely on-topic. 8-)

There used to be a checkbox in the bugzilla preferences where you can avoid being auto-cc'ed on a bug when you comment, but it appears they've rearranged the preferences and I can't find it any more. :doubt:
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

Incidentally, I noticed that a link to this thread was posted in this bug under discussion and indeed a mention of 'my contribution' to it here.

Seriously guys, don't be fooled by the easy-going conversational writing style that I use, with its many comma splices and unneeded paragraphs. I never write off the top of my head and if ever I write anything even vaguely controversial, it's because I know damn well it's because I can back it up. In this case, with dozens of screenshots and not just one.

It was just that which stumped them on the Cameron Nicks bug. I'm not daft, I'm not going to fall into 'You say this, I say that, let's agree to disagree' type situations because all the data has suddenly vanished, am I? I am going to have, in this case, screenshotted every single point that I want to make well beforehand, aren't I? ;)

I'm just gently reminding people that if they ever want to even slightly suggest that I go around 'making things up', then they are going to regret doing so.

****************************



As for this current bug under discussion - this pleading there to be allowed to theme that declining platform is not only undignified and unseemly, but pretty pointless.

I want you all to read again the very first Comment there and then return and let me spell it out.

Description Benjamin Smedberg [:bsmedberg] 2015-11-06 11:09:50 PST

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.

This bug tracks creating a specific product plan for themes. Expected due date 1-Dec.


Get it yet? Who do you think Benjamin is? Who do you think the 'we' refers to ? How does the 'or we may extend lightweight themes' in any way tally with the line that is trying to be pushed there of reducing the scope of Complete Themes and making them easier to make?

Seriously, man up, grow a pair and stop with the pleading for something that is not going to happen.
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I wonder for how many of them this bug is the first time they've heard of any of this? Alfred is acting shocked. Mozilla is completely removing support for anything and everything XUL and canning Gecko. Themes, Extensions, userChrome, everything. That means even IF they do some kind of lightweight theming, it will be a whole new thing in HTML and not anything resembling what exists today.
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malliz
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by malliz »

Frank Lion wrote:
Description Benjamin Smedberg [:bsmedberg] 2015-11-06 11:09:50 PST

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.

This bug tracks creating a specific product plan for themes. Expected due date 1-Dec.



I think the "May" is most important. Usually with Mozilla it means "a cellophane cat in hells chance"
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mcdavis
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by mcdavis »

If only they'd settled on a program called "Enabling Greatness." I don't suppose that occurred to anyone in planning.

Anyone have a picture of the view from under the bus? Seriously, I need one. I've websearched for it and didn't come up with anything. I could try stopping the school bus as it goes past in the morning and asking them to hold still while I lay underneath for a snapshot, but that would probably lead to unintended consequences.

I could also use a water-level view of a departing lifeboat. I haven't tried yet, but I bet I could find something to screenshot in Titanic. (Distant ship-smoke on the horizon.)
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patrickjdempsey
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

I think it's been pretty clear since about 2010 that the folks steering the ship don't have ANY idea what makes it great or why people choose it over others. They decided to take the stance that because a minority of people complain about *ANY* change, that means any complaints from anyone is just trolling. Even going so far as publicly labeling complainers as trolls. Now when a company has taken to public derision and calling names to people are actually long-time supporters!, that means something is REALLY wrong with the internal culture in that company. How could people who have so much disdain for the core users of their product and indeed for the core features of the product have any clue how to make that product better?
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

If there was an solution to providing simplicity in developing new theme, consistency in l&f and flexibility of positioning interface elements for theme designer and/or end users – I'd love to see it.


I'd love to see world peace.

Well, so long as I didn't have to do much, just maybe press a 'world peace' button or something to make it happen. I'd love to see it though.
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ehume
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by ehume »

I appreciate your contributions, Frank. When my partial fix for bitrot was rejected earlier this year I was contemplating shifting all my themes over to your model. I can no longer maintain the old themes, since my main activity is reviewing hardware now.

So the devs are pulling all XUL out. Everything will be in HTML now. I wonder how that will look. Well, I doing the rewrite I can restart and do a single base theme, make some new decisions on the look. I have too many people who like how they look. My only questions will be: What will the new theming landscape look like and how do I make a theme on it?

They may make it simple so I don't have to relearn CSS.

Frank: please send me an email when the devs post a new theme. Tell me what you are going to do and how you will do it. I'll admit I will be copying.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

ehume wrote:I appreciate your contributions, Frank.

No problem, Ed.

ehume wrote:Everything will be in HTML now. I wonder how that will look.

From a true themer's point of view, it will look crap. I've coded in it.

Turning to more practical matters, don't worry about your large icon stuff for your users. I can fix that.

Interestingly, as a btw, I noticed in 42a that Dao (who once coded to take into account the needs of themers) was gleefully coding a max-width on buttons in default and I coded my stuff to counter that. That was backed out, but I noticed him doing a global max-width on some other buttons in 44 (just because 1 single ext. dev was using 32x32) and I've already countered that in my stuff.

In your case, after the Type=4 whack, you'd do an .xpi using just your 64 pngs and use my stuff to stop any of them being max-widthed down to 16. You can keep your 4 row Toolbar.png with states and existing -moz-image-regions. I can do all that fine.

You then use css3 transform scale to provide the smaller buttons sizes and use your existing -moz-image-regions for them. If necessary, I can use .svg filters to sharpen those scaled downs but I don't think that will be needed. Finally, you do an options window that gives your users the option to select any of the 4 icon sizes that suits them. I've done option windows, but that's not my field, so someone else had better do that for you. Your visually impaired users will then be OK for 12 - 18 months..until they whack extensions.

ehume wrote:...when the devs post a new theme. Tell me what you are going to do

I'll tell you now, you know my history in theming here. Do you really think I would carry on theming for Firefox after my brother and sister themers have just had their Type=4 Complete Themes whacked? No.

There are other platforms I can theme (including Webkit) and I'll leave it at that.

Nice to see you around again, Ed.

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

Post by patrickjdempsey »

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.
Last edited by patrickjdempsey on November 12th, 2015, 8:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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ehume
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by ehume »

Thanks, Frank. This sounds a lot more doable.

Yeah, some of us have moved on. Like this.
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malliz
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by malliz »

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.c ... 222546#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
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

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.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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