Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

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

Post by patrickjdempsey »

malliz wrote:Many of them seem more interested in keeping their own favorite theme..... same old same old
Are you surprised? Mozilla's "confused messaging" has let some people continue to think there's some kind of chance that currently available Complete Themes could be mildly hacked to work in the new UI. Mozilla needs to be HONEST and let people know that that is not even remotely a possibility. Even if they wanted to, it is a basic technological impossibility that a current Complete Theme could be made to work with an HTML-based interface without a complete and total line-for-line rewrite. And I'm sorry if my language offends people, but for me the fact that Mozilla refuses to come clean on this issue is nothing short of LYING to save face.

They are also being rather meek in letting extension developers know what's really going to happen with XUL extensions.... heck, addons compatibility notes for Firefox 44 include changes to XPCOM. Why in the heck is Mozilla even bothering to tweak XPCOM when it's going to be completely ripped out? The only sensible explanation is that either the developers don't really know what's happening, or they are just chugging along doing their jobs so they appear to be useful so they won't get canned. Which I honestly think has been a big part of what's been happening with all of the useless constant changes we've been seeing over the last few years... developers just trying to appear useful so they don't get kicked to the curb. What a bureaucratic nightmare.
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

viewtopic.php?p=14402459#p14402459

Here, Ed, looks like your stuff will be OK. I've always known I could scale down very large icons down to smaller sizes, without much problem.

What I didn't know exactly was how to tackle the rest of the UI. So..I did a proof of concept on it -

Image

Not pretty, but it tells me what I wanted to know - Icons/images can only be scaled down (much too fuzzy otherwise), but you can get away with scaling up the rest of the UI. Good.

Btw that was 3 lines of .css to do that.

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

As for the subject in hand, I already know as well as Mozilla do, exactly what they are going to do after Complete Themes are whacked, so what's the point of this token reach-around stuff. Just get on with it already!
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ehume
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by ehume »

Three lines of css? Amazing! What were those three lines?

So, basically, I can make 64px icons and scale them down. Interesting. I had to rebuild icons to make them larger. Good thing most of the originals were svg. They started in Sodipodi. I migrated them to Inkscape.

So what did you mean when you said my stuff will be OK? We expect all this complete theme stuff to die -- Yes?
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Frank Lion
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

ehume wrote: We expect all this complete theme stuff to die -- Yes?
I'm 100% certain of that. In a 'Type=4 .jars will soon vanish off AMO' type way.
ehume wrote: So what did you mean when you said my stuff will be OK?
What I meant was until XUL gets totally whacked in 12 - 18 months (as it will) I could assist you in bringing back your 4(?) large icon themes, for the visually impaired, as one single extension .xpi.

I'm not just a pretty face, you know. I can do things ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeJj9k851R0
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

This is my regular 12 day update report on this subject - That 'Discourse' thread is going nowhere fast, Benjamin has done such a good job of 'sensible moderation' on the original bug that not one comment has been added since and there is still no date given for the whacking of Complete Themes.

End of sit rep. My next report is due on Christmas Day, so I have the feeling that I might well scrub that one. :)

I did find this gem though, tucked away in Bookmarks, something of historical interest only -
Frank Lion wrote:I would ask, therefore, that either this bug is fixed or else that AMO confirm here that this 10% is the position, for whatever reason. Otherwise, at sometime in the future, I suspect that someone at Mozilla will be waving about a totally meaningless set of figures to support a position that third party Firefox Themes are not in great demand by Firefox users.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384084

That was on the very earliest sign of things to come and a few months before the big Cameron Nicks bug on that.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by tonymec »

Frank Lion wrote:This is my regular 12 day update report on this subject - That 'Discourse' thread is going nowhere fast, Benjamin has done such a good job of 'sensible moderation' on the original bug that not one comment has been added since and there is still no date given for the whacking of Complete Themes.

End of sit rep. My next report is due on Christmas Day, so I have the feeling that I might well scrub that one. :)

I did find this gem though, tucked away in Bookmarks, something of historical interest only -
Frank Lion wrote:I would ask, therefore, that either this bug is fixed or else that AMO confirm here that this 10% is the position, for whatever reason. Otherwise, at sometime in the future, I suspect that someone at Mozilla will be waving about a totally meaningless set of figures to support a position that third party Firefox Themes are not in great demand by Firefox users.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384084

That was on the very earliest sign of things to come and a few months before the big Cameron Nicks bug on that.
Or for a more precise URL: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384084#c42
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by tonymec »

P.S. IMHO Frank Lion's comment above is of more than "only" historical interest. I have added the first restricted-mode comment (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.c ... 222546#c79): I have the required privileges, I am not working for Mozilla so they can't fire me, and I feel that my position as a community member is serious enough that Gerv (or someone) will think twice before banning me from Bugzilla. At most someone might fold my comment away, declaring it "off-topic", but I don't think it is.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

tonymec wrote:P.S. IMHO Frank Lion's comment above is of more than "only" historical interest. I have added the first restricted-mode comment
Hi Tony, thanks for your interest and concern, but really this is 'water under the bridge' stuff now.

Thanks to Mozilla's continued efforts, some of which are mentioned here -

viewtopic.php?p=14396021#p14396021
viewtopic.php?p=14416163#p14416163

...there are indeed now very few Firefox users interested in Complete Themes, which is their loss.

I linked to the general bug, as I believe in putting things in context. But, if it's precise URLs you want, then this is the one for you - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384084#c45 as it is that comment that leads to the really farcical bug that showed what a rigged game was being played there. Mike Morgan is actually a good guy but, well, see my sig on that one. Fligtar was (and is) a nobody and to act so cocky suggests to me that he was working under direct orders from 'central command'.

Certainly around that time (I can't speak for Cameron, but he too packed it in) I figured that if this Mozilla 'Open Source community project' actually had no more to offer than back-stabbing, covert politics, taking credit for other's actions, infighting, etc. then I might just as well return to real life, where at least I am/was very well paid to deal with that nonsense. So in 2008, I did precisely that.

Since then, when I was called upon by others, to string a few sentences together, I've made the odd appearance, but that's all.

At the start of 2014, I was confined to home for 6 weeks with a pretty bad cold that went on and on. Mentally alert, but extremely bored, I then made 4 Firefox themes in around 2 weeks (using my new template, etc). My interest in Firefox was zero by then and, to be honest, I would have themed a dog's backside (tartan or plaid style would work well there, I reckon) at the time, just to relieve the boredom.

So, to sum up, yes, I did make, fairly good, public Firefox themes from 2006 to 2008, at which point I stopped and that remains the case. So, Tony, don't put yourself on our account, because most of us just don't care about this stuff any more. ;)

Users, however, I never let down. It's how I am.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by tonymec »

A cold that lasted for six weeks and kept you home for the duration! I certainly wouldn't want that.

It isn't just on "your" account, whoever your "we" be. I've seen somewhere that "only very few" users use as many as 10 add-ons, well I had more than 50 last I counted, so I daresay I have some investment in XUL if only as a user. My favourite theme is also one that didn't come with the browser (EarlyBlue, by KaiRo); and finally, I still believe in SeaMonkey. So there are times when all this looks to me like a deliberate campaign by MoCo to kill Thunderbird and SeaMonkey as fast and as permanently as possible, and without being seen doing so, while making Firefox a kind of second-rate Chromium, which IMHO is totally mistaken. But the dreadnought is in motion, and I suppose I'm not going to stop it, neither alone nor with however many people I can rally. So much the worse: Mozilla was a great idea, but it is losing, or maybe has already lost, its soul.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

It's been on the way out a long time. The clue for me was when they put out press defiantly claiming they weren't copying Chrome and were tired of users saying that during Firefox 4.0 development... when they had bugs named "Chrome parity" and e10s development was really just getting started. To me the only thing worse than a copycat is a liar.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by tonymec »

patrickjdempsey wrote:It's been on the way out a long time. The clue for me was when they put out press defiantly claiming they weren't copying Chrome and were tired of users saying that during Firefox 4.0 development... when they had bugs named "Chrome parity" and e10s development was really just getting started. To me the only thing worse than a copycat is a liar.
It's one thing to have bugs with [Chrome-parity] in the Whiteboard; removing working features because of them is something else entirely. I have myself from time to time reported bugs where I put [parity-Konqueror] (or, for ChatZilla, [parity-Konversation]) in the Whiteboard; but reporting such a bug doesn't mean that it won't get a WONTFIX — hopefully with a comment explaining why.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by patrickjdempsey »

Now is supposedly axe time, but I don't see any movement anywhere (unless there's a hidden bug where the work is being done?). I'm guessing that Mozilla is so flabbergasted about the negative reaction to this news that they are busy trying to do damage control. Smedburg's last posts on Discourse suggest that the people actually in charge of doing this don't even understand how to implement something like this, let alone understand the technological limitations. And this is a critical problem. It's actually the same exact problem they had with Australis and is why the default theme has grown from being a mostly human-readable walk in the park in Firefox 3.x to being an absolute nightmare of nonsense code in the current releases.

There was actually a philosophy at work in much of the design of Firefox 3.x that was really novel: use the design of the UI to show off the strong-points of modern CSS and XUL code. So that means approaching the design from a stand-point of understanding the code limitations first, and designing around that. They ditched using images for drawing tabs, buttons, the urlbar and searchbar, and toolbar button surrounds for a 100% CSS solution. That approach is actually THE CLOSEST *any* project has ever come to using web technologies for drawing a user interface. And it's an approach that created a huge amount of customization possibilities and brought Mozilla the fastest growth it ever saw and the biggest chunk of market share it will ever see. The post-Australis Firefox has largely been a return to the non-friendly methods of pre-3.x Firefox... ignoring the good parts of CSS and forcing it to do things it's not good at. Thus why the structure and styling of tabs went from a simple affair that was just as good at following OS styles as custom user restyling and worked great with Personas... to a buggy, fragile, super-complicated mess that's not even compatible with the most basic concepts of customization like tab background colors or Personas.

While Mozilla is struggling with philosophical issues about theming, nobody seems to be worried about how a vertical document format bogged down with restrictions from the "semantic web" Nazi's governing the W3C is going to be turned into a flexible horizontal UI. Meanwhile, the Rust project has had an XML parser since last year, despite wide proclamations that Rust will never parse XUL.... there's no reason some other XML-based analog can't be developed with speed, simplicity, and customization in mind. Doing that however will take time... something Mozilla have chosen to pretend like they don't actually need to make any of this happen.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by Frank Lion »

patrickjdempsey wrote:Now is supposedly axe time, but I don't see any movement anywhere (unless there's a hidden bug where the work is being done?).
Yep, it's a puzzle. Why announce it and then do nothing, as it's pretty obvious that from the moment you announce it that people making conventional Complete Themes are going to ease up on maintenance. David Vincent reckoned 30 - 40 hours a month on his and speaking to others guys I reckon it more than that. No one in their right mind is going to spend 50 hours a month on something that is going to get whacked at any moment.

Hopefully they are not waiting until they have their 'replacement' in place! How could they when they have no idea what that is yet and everything they make takes them forever?

I know I may have sounded a bit glib, solution-wise, on that bug, but it really is a case of once you have taken away the impossible then whatever remains, however unlikely, is the solution.

You'll either end up with a tinting svg plus option box solution or maybe going down this route - http://www.hasbro.com/en-us/brands/play ... potatohead

It really is that simple. Either way, just whack Complete Themes as they are now and be done with it.
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by maxdamage »

Frank Lion wrote: No one in their right mind is going to spend 50 hours a month on something that is going to get whacked at any moment.
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That is why I only wanted to "fix"\"maintain" that theme as it works visually okay other than that I have been slowly trying to contact the original author to get permission to "fix"\"maintain" it.If the theme was messed up in v 25.0 onwards,etc... I would not have bothered to invest any time in trying to "fix"\"maintain" it.

Still it is worth fixing.I must be mad!
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Re: Product plan: remove support for heavyweight themes

Post by mightyglydd »

^ Have to ask, are you Max Dark who created those beautiful Noirish Win OS skins for chrome?
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