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A New Look For Firefox
ben writes "Regular users of Mozilla Firefox may be interested to know a new default theme is planned for 0.9 in preparation for the road to 1.0. 0.9 will also feature new improved theme and extension management, which will make it easy to make Firefox look the way you want it to."
...They leave everything as it is, and fix the resource leak in windows? It's hard to try and convince people to switch to my browser when I have to "end process tree" the thing once a day.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Qute was a great Default theme. It looked great as a default theme, and really made switchers from IE feel comfortable. This new theme just doesnt fit in Windows or Linux... it looks good for OSX, but just not in other OSes.
in the browser market, you'd be looking to take it from Internet Explorer (duh). That's Internet Explorer on Windows ... not the Mac. I think that it is important to have a default theme that makes it easy for the mums and dads to identify with (because they are not likely to change it). I think the current default theme does this and the proposed change is a mistake. But what do I know?
This is why I like open source software development. Just look at that forum thread. Inside a company like IBM or Microsoft, a debate like this would be kept covered up out of PR fears. Open source developers more often than not do not give a shit about PR (which is a good thing), they just want to make the best possible program. They also don't have to be afraid of losing their jobs, getting their salaries lowered, or whatnot. So we get to see the nitty gritty details of intra-project disputes and arguments from the front row, even silly things like what theme ships with Firefox as the default.
Gotta love it.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
Yes I do think this could have been handled a *lot* better because Arvid but a lot of work into this excellent theme and now is word will be getting a lot less attention as it'll now just be a downloadable theme on update.mozilla.org
Also as you can see from the forum thread mentioned in the original article you can see the information process wasn't the best.
However, ultimately difficult decisions have to be made and they can't satisfy everyone all of the time.
If you look at the original charter for m/b, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox you'll see that they intended from the very beginning to have only a small group of people making the decisions.
To quote:
The size of the team working on the trunk is one of the many reasons that development on the trunk is so slow. We feel that fewer dependencies (no marketing constraints), faster innovation (no UI committees), and more freedom to experiment (no backwards compatibility requirements) will lead to a better end product.
I've managed plenty of software development teams before, and you just don't assign any random engineer to make important UI decisions. Some people have the talent for this and some don't. It's part aesthetics, part usability, part style. Very important stuff, and not something you learn getting a computer science degree, hacking Unix, writing HTML rendering engines and so on.
Now I know you can just download themes to your heart's content. I'm using a tiny theme because that's the way I like it. However there's no reason not to have several default themes to choose from at install time. I would suggest the themes be "Default", "Internet Explorer", "Netscape", "Opera" and perhaps a Macish theme. As long as it is explained that this is simply the look and feel and has no real functionality differences (explained in a calm and simple manner), things should be less scary. Previous posters are absolutely right-- the more different it looks, the more scared the user will be, even if everything is in exactly the same place.
The Mozilla devs did the right thing and asked about having Qute freely licenced 6 months ago. They were apparently told no and have therefore taken the only reasonable course left to them, sourcing another theme.
The new theme might not be brilliant but it is a work in progress and rather importantly is freely licenced so other people will be able to tweak it over time.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I've seen IE barf on pages before. No browser is going to be perfect and I think explaining to people that you may have to close and restart a browser during the day (if they keep it open THAT long) is a lot easier than saying "ok, if you close those 5 pop ups and uninstall CometCursor, you'd see the page you're lookin for."
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
And here is a complete screenshot of the new theme. I think this is a huge step backwards.
Remember that to gain market share, you have to design the product for the average idiot. Yes, you know the one; the guy that thought his CDROM was a cup holder.
To win the average idiot, you need simple layout, bright colors, and hand-holding wizards.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
It'd be nice if Firefox could detect KDE and switch its button order. However, as Firefox is written in GTK and KDE already has its own non-Gecko browser, probably most of the Firefox developers aren't KDE users and don't care. If you do care, go ahead and code it.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
once again backwards compatibility has been sacrificed (and we are not even at 1.0 yet)
Uh, hello? How did this get modded up?
Rather than feeding this relatively obvious troll, I'll simply remind folks that the whole POINT of the pre-1.0 development cycle is to break things. And nobody's forcing anyone else to use Firefox, stable or not. End of story.