Mozilla Plans To Remove Support For Firefox Complete Themes

AmiMoJo writes: Mozilla's engineers have announced the removal of Firefox complete themes as a way to lighten the browser core and remove a feature they don't see as heavily used any more. "Personas", or lightweight themes that are basically just wallpaper images, will remain. The Firefox community did not respond well to this piece of news, most seeing it as the engineers "chromifying Firefox." The change is part of Mozilla's Great-or-Dead initiative, which plans to simplify the Firefox codebase and remove features that are not popular.

Comments

Re:For once I agree

[gman003]

Let's hope "video autoplay" is next!

about:config media.autoplay.enabled = false
There might be a UI method of getting to that but I couldn't find it in the five seconds I allocated to searching. Note this only stops HTML5 videos, but you really ought to have Flash set to click-to-enable (or disabled) for myriad other reasons.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[shellbeach]

They keep copying Chrome anyway so what’s the point of using a bloated browser that tries to mimic Chrome?

For me, it's the amazing Tree Style Tab extension that keeps me on Firefox more than anything else. Chrome seems to have no intention to ever implement this.

As for getting rid of theme support ... from my perspective I'm all for it. I remember the original Phoenix 0.1 release, when the aim was to completely gut the Mozilla codebase of all bloat. It's about time that happened again.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[dryeo]

The good news, they're getting rid of bloat, things such as xul. The bad news, no more xul based extensions (most all) so no more Tree Style Tab extension so all users who stick with Mozilla for the extensions won't have an excuse to not move to a different browser.
They seem determined to reduce the user base to 0%

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[hairyfeet]

So switch to PaleMoon which has forked away from FF and has said they plan on keeping the extension framework, even going so far as to contact the extension devs to get them to support PM (which has its own UI string now) and they are compiling their own forks of the extensions that don't support PM.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[hairyfeet]

You are VERY welcome. I can tell you its VERY solid, the UI stays consistent (pre Australis of course) and they are dedicated to keeping FF the way it WAS, with a sane design, extensions, the whole shebang, and have been for a couple years now. they have even gone so far as to set up their own sync servers so you can enjoy that functionality without PM being tied to the FF backend, very nice indeed.

A lot of my customers are SOHO and SMBs and they don't like this "change for change sake" BS so I went and tested browsers and found the ones that were the most solid and dependable. I've been handing out PaleMoon and Comodo Dragon, which is similar as far as consistency but Chromium based, for a couple years now and my customers? Nothing but happy with them both. I also practice what I preach and my own browsers are PaleMoon and Dragon and they've been rock solid and reliable, and I don't have to fear my UI getting shat upon if I update the thing. Both are great, give 'em a spin.