KLB wrote:Would the average user care about some of these UI improvements? Probably not. The impact on theme development MUST be part of the equation. Millions of users actively use custom themes. I would not be at all surprised if there were tens of millions of Firefox users using custom themes.
I think Mozilla might be trying actively to
discourage the continued development of third-party themes. After all, in the latest iteration of the Firefox Add-ons web site (AMO), they've relegated all themes to a single menu option at the very bottom, with no labels or details, giving them a lower billing than things like dictionaries, language packs, and search tools. At the same time, they've been advertising Personas as more-or-less
the way to customize the appearance of your Firefox — and Personas leaves the toolbar buttons alone.
Mozilla obviously wants to build a strong and consistent visual identity for Firefox, and
I think they think third-party themes are getting in the way of that mission. When you open up Internet Explorer or Chrome or Safari on anyone's computer, you know exactly what it's going to look like. Not the case with Firefox. To all of us, of course, that's a great advantage for Firefox — we can morph the browser into virtually anything we want. Mozilla, on the other hand, might despise that.
Themes like mine have got to be the worst in their eyes. I thought other open source browsers such as Camino and Chromium generally looked
better than Firefox with its default theme, so that's why I adapted
their default toolbar images into my own themes and then spent hours adjusting the background colors, borders, metrics, and spacing, to make Firefox look better. Sometimes I don't feel respected by anybody because I used many toolbar icons from other open source projects instead of making my own, but even then, and even without ever having been featured or recommended on AMO (for obvious reasons), my themes have still received over 2 million downloads. If that can happen, the interest in themes among users at large must still be very great.
It's my guess that Mozilla might see that as a failure on their part to keep users within their desired visual identity. Perhaps it's Mozilla's goal to make enough improvements (or what they see as improvements) to the Firefox default theme so that the vast majority of users won't even want to replace it. In the meantime, third-party theme developers will grow more and more frustrated with all the changes they have to keep up with, and they'll eventually stop making their own themes. Two birds with one stone.
(Edit: Fixed a few small errors)