Hi,
this is a follow up to Bug 522571 -  Link from themes manager to
personas gallery
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=522571

The developer want the diccussion here.
Ok, here we go again ;-)

 > It is intended to have a page that is primarily personas, as you said.

Hi,

Why, please tell me why ;-)

I think a lot of themer are interested to know, why their stuff should
be hidden and why this limited background image change system should be
highlighted. Why?

Is it then as well intended to hide the normal extensions, when Jetpack
is later a part of the default installation?

And when you are still on the way to tell some reasons.
Why works Personas on 3.6 by default only with the default themes. Is it
still intended to change it with 3.7 or later. Why works the Personas
1.4 extension still only on Mac OS X only with the default theme and why
is there absolutely no progress in the last months to improve the
situation.

By the way,
i know a lot of themer, who think Mozilla want to kill the old theme
system. Some words as well about it would be very nice. It is hard to
find an example that something else is intended. This theme page
primarily for Personas is then only one example more.

Cheers

Hi Aronnax,

I'll try to answer your questions in order; you asked many.

We believe that Personas are a better user experience than XPI Themes.
While not as robust or powerful, they are quick and easy for users to
install, can be activated without requiring a restart, and are simple to
create. Although not very old, the Personas Add-on has been downloaded
by more than 10M people and is very popular.

For that reason, we will be promoting Personas as a new, different type
of theme that requires less commitment to install and use. They will be
displayed on the first run page for Firefox 3.6 users, and the link in
the Themes panel will go to the Personas gallery.

Personas are still themes, though, just a different type. We hope to add
more capability (ability to change the appearance of buttons, work with
other XPI themes, etc) over time. XPI themes will eventually be
installed like extensions, which better represents their capability and
function; an XPI theme can totally change the "face" of the browser, not
just the skin.

We do not have any plans to remove support for XPI themes. We expect
that most users will prefer to use Persona-style themes and will be
investing in making those the preferred mechanism for quickly changing
the appearance of the browser. However it would be foolish and against
our values to remove the capability to customize the full appearance of
the browser.

I hope this helps,
mike

On 11/19/2009 6:31 PM, Aronnax wrote:

Hi Mike,

thank you very much for answering here and clarifying things. I'm sure
the theme developers community, like me, very appreciate to know that
third party themes or "old-style" themes will not be deprecated.

I think and have stated that Personas is a nice feature and the way it
works now (on the user's side) is almost perfect (technically it has
some problems to be solved). Easy to install, to manage, to try and
see the results "on the fly". Users have the opportunity to choose
which persona fits well with the theme they are using making the
customization an easy and nice experience. Many authors are making
efforts to support Personas and the reviews of my theme pointing this
support are very positive.

My concerns are about how the integration on Firefox is going to be
implemented.

I can see two constellations depending if Bug 520124 -  Enable to
activate a 'heavy weight theme' together with 'lwtheme':
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=520124 will be fixed or
not:

1) Personas will work with third-party themes:
In this case, IMHO, it would be much better to have it where it is
now: on the menu. Independently of which theme are in use at the
moment, for the user is a lot easier to just click on the menu and see
immediately which effect a persona will have on the browser. The
persona's change on mouse over in the sub-menus is simply amazing! And
without needing to visit a site to get it..
The menu is also a lot more "discoverable" than the Addons Manager (I
know a couple people that has never opened the Addons Manager, but for
sure have opened the menus...).
In this constellation, although, I can't see how Personas would
implement buttons changes. This would not work with third party themes
at all...

2) Personas will only work with the default theme:
In this case I can imagine it as a feature from the default theme,
making sense to be listed at the Addons Manager as sub-items from the
default theme (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529729).
In this constellation I can imagine that Personas could very well
offer the ability to change buttons. In this case, the Personas
extension could be further offered to be used with third-party themes.

I personally prefer the first option...

Actually I don't agree that Personas is a better user experience than
XPI Themes. For me it's more a different user experience (with the
same target), a kind of complement customization. The user choose the
preferred theme and "change" its background.
So, I can't see why compare one against another. They can live
together without (too much) problems just like they do now. This
document: https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Using+themes+with+Firefox
explains very well the differences from Personas and "full themes"
without any discrimination or treating Personas as a better user
experience as themes...

Sorry, but I think that, in the way it is being implemented so far, it
is more difficult to use both, Personas and third party themes.
Just my two cents.

Hi,
thanks but i think it it helps only to start a new discussion.

First of all:
Who is We? Who decide it? Who had talked for the theme system?

I can t remember only one Mozilla developer, who ever talks about his
theme experiences and i read now many years Mozilla blogs, discussions,
wikis and so on - not one. I have my doubt that many even care about
theme stuff and the few who cares works then probably only for the
default theme(s) ;-)
Another example: The first edition of the last redesign from
addons.mozilla.org had not even a theme listing. They removed the point
and added themes below Appearance together with tab stuff, new toolbars
and everything else. The themes were completely hidden and obviously
thought nobody that this is a problem.
A Mozilla guy for example, who has full time job to advertise Firefox,
compares theme systems from different browser talks then only about
Personas  - can t be true
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/08/29_vs_7000.html

I don t think that all these We, who obviously don t care about themes
stuff should alone decide, what happens with the theme system, behind
closed doors somewhere in Mountain View California.

----

Who cares about themes?
We have many many themes with 2 millions,  3 millions one (very old)
with 23 millions or the current most popular with 10 millions downloads ...
Personas on the other hand has after some years and a lot of advertising
in the last mounts only 10 millions.  Just for the record: 10 millions
are not a high number, when we consider the hype behind it and the
themes has nobody who hype them. They are actually more or less hidden.
  I think a lot of user still care , what happens with themes.

----

Mike Conner talks the first time many months ago about these themes
system changes leaves many questions open. Your post answer not really
these questions and added actually a few more. For example: How should
it works, when Personas change the buttons and a theme do the same. It
is exactly the reason, why Personas on Mac OS X works only with the
default theme.  Ok, stuff like this can be fixed, but who works now on a
concept to prevent bugs like this. Likely nobody. I think nobody cares -
only Personas counts now ;-)

-----

XPI themes will eventually be installed like extensions.
- It is then only logical to remove these extension-themes from the
theme selection of the Add-ons manager.
- They will be hidden somewhere in addons.mozilla.org. and many user
will not even know that these themes exist.
- Under this conditions will be many themes aborted  the theme
community will slowly die .. the documentation will die .. bugs will be,
sooner or later, fixed without a consideration of theme needs.

Without a doubt would it be the end of the current themes.

-----

"We believe that Personas are a better user experience than XPI Themes."
Without a restart is nice ;-) - naturally -  And? Is this all?

Personas can do some things better and themes can do other things much
better.
This will be never changed. Personas can have many new user and themes
have already much more   i still don't understand why themes should be
hidden.

-----

I think Mozilla treated currently themer like stupid fogs in a cooking
pot .. and slowly increase the temperature .. everyone knows what will
happen ;-)
Suggestions like the XPI extensions-themes are for example maybe
something for frogs, but surely nothing for the themes community.

Cheers

That's just rubbish. They're nothing alike. Themes are whole house
decorations and remodeling and Personas are just window blinds.

Personas all in all is just a vanity project. Bragging about millions of
downloads but not about how many of them are really in use.

Personas images can be previewed by just hovering the mouse over them.
Does this count as a download?

Do users continue to use the images or they revert back?

How frequently do they replace their images?

90% of Personas images are an usability nightmare, do you have seen a
rise in usability problems?

How will Personas images fit with the new interface that has a reduced
surface in v3.6 and then further reduced in v3.7? How will Personas
images be justified if users can hardly see them?

This is how i used them: in the personas web site I experimented with 20
to 30 of them, concluded that most of them are just rubbish and the
other make using Firefox more difficult I reverted back. This alone
counted as 20 to 30 downloads.

I understand the appeal. It's easy and faster to just to loose 30
minutes of time with that but, it's just not that rewarding. It isn't.
It's a fad.

On 2009-11-20 11:42:06 -0800, J M R <j...@jmr.eu> said:

They both do basically the same thing, they change how Firefox looks.
Whether you want a low impact aesthetic change or a complete reworking
of the UI is a personal choice. The fact that xpi style themes can in
fact do a little as a persona means that they are lumped in the same
boat in my head.

No. Personas do update checks the same as regular themes do so we will
be able to get good stats on how many are in use, not just how many
have been downloaded or previewed.

I've certainly seen more bug reports filed due to issues with xpi-style
themes than with personas, but that is only to be expected since the
xpi-style themes are such high impact it is easier to cause problems
with them.

An excellent question, but I imagine personas will evolve to support
small areas pretty easily, they are after all just images. As for
justification, well we will have the usage stats to indicate if users
are no longer finding the feature compelling and can use that as a
basis for deciding whether maintaining support is important or not.

This is of course all subjective and has no real bearing on this
discussion I think so I won't bother to respond to it.

I find funny how people say something is subjective while what they
say supposedly isn't. :P
Firefox is becoming bloated, slow and buggy; things that made me move
from IE to Firefox on the first place.
Instead of fixing bugs, making it more stable and improving
performance and resource usage the developers are wasting time in
vanity things like Personas or making it a clone of Chrome.

A lot of theme bugs are because Firefox doesn't work properly with
themes. There are many bug reports with 2 years of existence and still
no fix. If you want themes to work 100% fix those.

On 11/20/09 3:37 PM, DonGato wrote:
What's slow?  Have you filed bugs about it?  Bloat is, of course,
completely subjective...

Right, we haven't fixed a single bug and are only adding features and
making it a clone of Chrome...

The reality, of course, is that we have fixed bugs, and we have improved
performance.  http://graphs.mozilla.org/dashboard/snapshot/ shows that
we are improving in terms of performance in general.  We've also fixed
nearly 5000 bugs since Firefox 3.5.  None of this is subjective.

/sdwilsh

On Nov 19, 8:30 pm, Mike Beltzner <beltz...@mozilla.com> wrote:

OK. I see the reference to "XPI themes." It's been a long time since
XPI packaging was allowed for themes. Did you have something else in
mind?

Despite your lip service to third-party themes, I can see what you
have in mind for us. I just have one request: please make sure that
visually-impaired users can get big icons, and that your default theme
allows for extra-large text. Right now you are optimized for guys who
prefer tiny text and icons.

Ed

I just want to make note of a couple of things:

10 million downloads.  If I had the resources or the ability to
advertise my theme on addons.mozilla.org start page my theme would
also have a significant download number.  This brings me to one of
Arronax's comments that making it more difficult to view a variety of
heavy weight themes they will slowly die.  I and probably most people
don't want to spend allot of time "searching" for a theme vs clicking
on a link and being brought to a page that lists themes that you can
scroll through.  I don't know about everyone else but that along to me
is the beginning of the end of the use of heavy weight themes.

If Mozilla wants to promote Personas why not just add them to the
current themes section if they are just themes like heavy weight
themes?

How does one get involved with making an intelligent opinion about a
significant change such as the one we are discussing here?

I am also going to ask Why?  I don't want a politically correct answer
or a comment that defends the current ideals instead of truly
answering the question.

Please re-think and consider that by including Personas with heavy
weight themes together is giving users more choices for their Firefox
Experience and not will say "masking" a choice to give the illusion
that we're starting to phase out Themes as users currently know them.

Remember its about progress not regression!

Thank
Jeff

On 09-11-20 6:37 PM, DonGato wrote:

Hi DonGato,
Have you tried Firefox 3.6? -
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Can you imagine how the user reviews of Personas would look like? :-)

Looking at how things are being done, I understand this: "We expect
that most users will prefer to use Persona-style themes..."
like: "We are doing our best to integrate Personas in Firefox in a way
that we expect
that most users will prefer to use Persona-style themes..."

On 2009-11-20 16:50:15 -0800, Ed Hume <edh...@gmail.com> said:

I believe the default theme's text changes size based on the OS font
sizing, if not we should certainly fix that. I guess the icons probably
don't right now but we should probably try to do that too.

On 20-Nov-09, at 9:53 AM, Aronnax wrote:

This was proposed a _long_ time ago, and I blogged about the ideas and  
linked to the wiki doc you mention.  Feedback was minimal.

Ultimately, the reason why we don't have <choose theme> + <choose  
Persona> is that the UI starts getting harder to understand, and it's  
largely a technical distinction.  It also is harder to ensure a good  
experience for users (many themes were poorly implemented).

If you had questions, did you raise them then?

I think that we erred greatly in treating themes as somehow different  
from extensions.  They're just a type of customization, and I do not  
believe that they are more or less interesting than any other type of  
customization that users will do with current-style addons, except  
that they're harder to build and maintain, in many ways.

Easy install/update, easy to create and tweak, very very sandboxed (no  
chrome access, no trust decision required).

To turn it around, why should current themes get primacy over another  
type of customization like tab addons, or toolbars?

-- Mike

On 20-Nov-09, at 4:50 PM, Ed Hume wrote:

Nope.  The idea of "XPI themes" was shorthand for taking the  
limitations off what a "theme" can do and have them simply be a type  
of extension, with all of the same privs for authors.  Rather than  
simply styling the elements (alternate CSS+images) we would enable  
theme authors to do more radical changes, and even provide alternate  
widgets (i.e. separate back/forward buttons, or even different UIs).  
It's really more "stop treating extensions and themes as separate  
things in the UI" as a concept.

-- Mike

On 21-Nov-09, at 10:29 AM, Dave Townsend wrote:

There's a bug, somewhere, on solving this better as higher-dpi screens  
start coming out.  One shouldn't need to install a third-party addon  
to get sanely-scaled icons.

We didn't blow up with Extra Large fonts on Windows last I mucked with  
themes, but that's a good 18 months ago.  If we don't now, a bug  
should be filed.

-- Mike

Hi,

Am 23.11.09 01:52, schrieb Mike Connor:

Some themer asked therefore the same questions (i as well)  some months
ago, if it is intended to replace themes and the answer was no.
 From a themer point of view was this minimal feedback enough. And we
have still no detailed plans, how themes and Personas should work in the
future together, or?

I read for example some blogs from Personas guys and they talked in
particular about time problems to get everything ready for 3.6.
Therefore only now with the default themes and later will it be maybe ..
probable .. who knows .. expanded. What should someone say against
(about) these time arguments? Not easy ;-)

I talked with Myk M. about special Mac Personas problems and asked D o
G. from time to time, how he build it for 3.6 (He build it in a kind of
way, that every theme could use it - now, or later)
When i read then on the other hand only about time problems .. What
should i asked more? I thought there are now only other questions for
the time after 3.6.

Yes, correct.
But there is one difference.
Themes have a very weak lobby and will be from time time forgotten.

Yes, as well correct ... and you had for example forgotten to mention
that many many have a very very bad usability .. and they can not
replace the other themes, when someone want more ;-)

Themes do not need or earn a primacy.
A fair treatment is enough. For example have themes not even anymore an
own name and must share it now with these Personas background images.

By the way,
what is now the official name of these themes?
For example: Old rusty heavyweight XPI extension themes, or what? ;-)

Aronnax

Hi,

We have for example alredy some theme-extentions
Brand Thunder https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/37347

Even my Mac OS X only themes have higher download numbers ;-)
They are hidden somewhere in Appearance Add-ons + Toolbars Add-ons
and this is probably one of the reasons.
When you want to kill themes, when treat all the other themes in the
future like these theme-extentions ;-)

On the other hand have we more and more themes, which includes
additionally an extension.
For example:  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10674
I think many themer would be happy with possibilities, but not when they
are then hidden in nowhere of the Appearance selection ;-)

Cheers

Ohh. It sounds wonderful, but NO THANKS.
As Aronnax! has pointed, we have already such possibilities in those
two ways: the "extension-themes" (and that example "ruins" another
themes with their "wonderful skinned" toolbars; and looking for the
number of "themes" they produce (82?), one can imagine the propo$e$
from them...) and the bundles (that also need some guidelines to avoid
missing up other themes). So, we have already the possibilities (with
the bundle) you are talking about.

The great advantage from themes against extensions is the way they
register the skin providers and how they are selected. The skin
providers brought from themes substitute the originals. This is a
great feature, since if the user has installed a crap theme, he/she
must only to select another theme and will have no annoying side
effects.

Styles brought from extensions that are made only looking for the
default theme will still living there even if the user choose a third-
party theme. This could be simply avoided, we have enough
documentation and guidelines for it. I can say I spend 70% from my
work on my themes repairing things that extensions break that should
never get broke...

Again, we have already a great theme system, that really makes the
difference comparing to the boring models from the others. Why kill
it?

And what about the link to the real themes on personas home page? It
still not existing there.

Cheers

----- "Pardal Freudenthal" <par...@gmx.de> wrote:

Nobody has ever stated that we are "killing" anything. Also, the uptake and ease of development, application and deployment of Personas fix real problems with the existing theme system. This is win-win.

I'm sorry you feel differently, but don't think there's much point to discussing this further.

cheers,
mike

Currently have some Personas user as well some difficulties to see this
win-win ;-)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/10900

Or they have maybe as well another opinion about a real win-win ;-)

Cheers

Pardal Freudenthal wrote the following on 12-17-2009 1:43 PM:

I'm with you, Pardal.

--
Regards,
CatThief

To reply privately, please PM me at MozillaZine...
http://forums.mozillazine.org/ucp.php?i=pm&mode=compose&u=25774

I am sorry, but I don't see this as a 'win-win'.
A win-win situation is where both Personas and 'xpi' themes can live
together.
But currently, FF3.6 with and without Personas 1.5 extension:
1. doesn't allow a theme together with a personas. It even switches back
from a selected theme to the default theme.
2. doesn't point to the addons/theme site.

Especially 1 is an active method of disabling/removing existing theme
usage: or 'killing' it.
Killing is never a 'win-win'...

I don't understand why the mozilla organization thinks that
'heavy-weight' themes are such a trouble.
They are 'sandboxed' and cannot do the harm that normal extensions do.
Allowing (or even forcing) the existing themes to become an XPI
extension, just paves the way for new issues...

Introducing Personas as a type of theme is fine (even with the extra
competition),
but locking out the old type of themes in the way as described above,
is considered 'unfair' in terms of competition (see the IE case in the
European open market issue).

On 17-12-2009 20:50, Mike Beltzner wrote:

On 1/4/2010 7:05 AM, Alfred Kayser wrote:

This is hardly true.  It's trivial for a theme to do extension-like
things.  It wasn't the original intent, sure, but it is certainly possible.

Cheers,

Shawn

On Dec 17 2009, 8:50 pm, Mike Beltzner <beltz...@mozilla.com> wrote:

Ok! I agree with you that the idea to "kill" the theme system is quite
absurd.
Such a decision could only be done as a long time target, with a lot
of discussions. Killing the theme system now, would mean that this
decision was made a long time ago.
So, which kind of people would encourage a lot of developers to work
without any payment sacrificing their free time (and believe me,
making themes demands a looooot of work and time), having in mind to
"kill" this work after a while? What would these people say to these
developers now? Some of these developers are working on this for more
than 5-6 years now!
No, this is impossible.

So, I suppose the document from Mike Connor:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Mconnor/PersonasUplift#Deprecation_of_o...
contains a typo. "Deprecation of old-style themes" must be read as
"*Depreciation* of old-style themes".
This is exactly what is happening now. Themes are going to be
"depreciated", pushed to the status of second-class citizens.
Maybe having seen the issue in this way, it serves as a basis for
further discussions?

Themers have already a lot of issues to deal with. like changes on XUL
that kill backwards compatibility, lack of classes and ID's that would
be helpful for other UI approaches than that from default theme, style
rules living on content, hard codded images, inline styles, poor
written stylesheets brought from extensions and so on... With this
"depreciation", the chances for solving these issues are minimal.
(Maybe are exactly these issues the reason for "depreciating" third
party themes?)

I don't think that theme developers deserve "depreciation". They
deserve just a little respect...