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

Always seemed redundant to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

We already have gui toolkit theming, why do we also need individual application theming?

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they'll be removing the GUI toolkit themes upon removing XUL.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[tripleevenfall]

So... why are you still using Firefox?

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.

[zenbi]

Don't forget to nix the built-in "Pocket" addon.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[GuB-42]

I think GP is talking about the sponsored start page and pocket integration. Pocket is the worst.

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.

[TheDarkMaster]

A good reason? Hum... How about "keeping the look you like the Firefox from more or less 3 years ago" ? The design of the most current version for me is a total clowning invented by people who do not have a clue how to make a useful interface.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[ChunderDownunder]

Can it not be possible to re-implement tree style tabs as an HTML5 web ext?

If XUL is going away it's because neither Fx OS nor Servo will support it if a complex UI is to be rendered in pure HTML/CSS/JS.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[Tough Love]

Ever tried to have a hundred tabs open in chrome?

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[dryeo]

Possibly, it really depends on how much of the internals are exposed and whether the add-on developer wants to start all over.
We'll have to wait and see what choices Mozilla makes going forward though I do notice that the other browsers don't have anywhere near the add-on ecology, likely due to the add-ons having to use pure HTML/CSS/JS rather then lower level stuff.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[ArchieBunker]

Just because you can have 100 open tabs doesn't make it practical. You can only read one book at a time. What is the point of having that many? By the time you hit tab 73 you have no idea what tab 22 was about.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[arglebargle_xiv]

And where did this "Great or Dead" come from? I thought it was Great and Dead, i.e. Firefox was Great some years ago and has been rapidly moving towards Dead ever since the 3.x releases.

(Firefox user since Phoenix 0.3, and the sole reason I'm still using it is the plugins. Fortunately Mozilla have announced that they'll be removing this reason soon).

Re: Always seemed redundant to me.

[mattcoz]

Exactly, the writing was on the wall.

Re: Always seemed redundant to me.

[Dynedain]

Copy-on-select prevents you from doing paste-as-replace limiting you to the stupidly inefficient paste-as-insert

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.

[Zontar The Mindless]

I am SO VERY tired of hacking profiles, extensions, and theme files every 3-4 weeks to get them to keep working. I am tired of the never-ending Gypsy Switch.

I've used almost nothing but mainline Firefox since before it was Firefox (Mozilla Phoenix 0.6, late 2000--and my original profile that I've been migrating all these years dates back to Netscape 2.0 ca 1995). I've been stubborn as hell about sticking with it.

Because I WANTED TO BELIEVE, but fuck that noise.

I want to BELIEVE but at the end of the day I need to GET STUFF DONE. Time to try something else. Thanks for the link.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[solidraven]

RAM is cheap these days. 8 GB will get you far, but 16 GB makes 100 not so big of an issue. And it still responds quite fast at that point, even with all the javascript abuse these days...

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.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[shellbeach]

Yeah, getting rid of XUL is sad times. I'm still hoping it won't happen -- there's been a pretty major developer backlash about that one.

(Obviously, when I said "get rid of the bloat", I meant only the bloat that wasn't useful to me ... :)

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[shellbeach]

For what it's worth, that's been discussed here:

https://billmccloskey.wordpres...

Although the official response seems to be along the lines of -- well, we'll add an API that would kinda allow the same thing, more or less. Whether or not that actually encourages a dev to rewrite their entire, very mature, extension from scratch again remains to be seen. My guess on the latter is that it won't happen :(

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[arglebargle_xiv]

I've been watching PaleMoon for awhile, my only concern with switching is how well-supported it'll be in the long run, since it's being run as a parallel project to Fire^H^H^HChromefox which has a lot more developers. For example how well do security fixes and whatnot from Mozilla get added into PaleMoon?

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[langarto]

Same for me. I cannot understand why Tree Style Tab is not the default. It is obviously much better than the default way to organize tabs.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[Dagger2]

Except getting rid of XUL doesn't mean no more XUL-based extensions, because XUL-based extensions are actually Javascript-based extensions and Javascript isn't going anywhere. (Some of these extensions do manipulate the main Firefox UI, which is written in XUL, but if it was written in HTML instead then it wouldn't make any difference to extensions -- they'd just be manipulating an HTML document instead of a XUL document.)

No, the reason that "XUL-based extensions" are going is because Mozilla just plain doesn't want them anymore, so they're removing support for them. It's not because they're dropping XUL and "XUL-based" extensions have to go as a dependency.

If I was feeling cynical, I'd suggest that the only reason Mozilla decided to call them "XUL-based extensions" in their announcement (I've never seen them use that term before) is because they wanted to give the impression their hands were tied.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[Mal-2]

I've been using Pale Moon for some time now because of the native 64-bit builds, but once the refusal to adopt Mozilla's "UI of the week" model set in, I switched my 32-bit systems over as well. When my mother started asking me "where did such and such option go?" and I was unable to find it myself, I switched her to Pale Moon as well. At this point I don't even care if it's technically better, although it probably is. It's simply more useful than mainline Firefox.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[wardrich86]

Because sometimes there are 5 or 6 good videos on a page, but then you have to go to the next page full of videos. I think we all know what he's up to with his 100 tabs ( ÍÂ ÍoeÊ- ÍÂ)... but most people are usually finished by 10.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[hairyfeet]

They get added pretty quickly, usually within a week of FF adding them. Feel free to register on their forums and ask the dev team yourself such questions as I've asked many questions of the team and they are really a nice bunch of guys that are only too happy to answer questions from users.

But I can tell you the reason for PM existing is the same reason why so many of us got sick of FF, which is them adding and taking away shit willy nilly with zero fucks given for the user. PM is dedicated to keeping FF a nice fast pre Australis browser with extension support and a solid consistent UI and for me, a person that wants his browser to browse NOT be some hipster art project? That is enough for me.

But if you are truly worried about security any browser you use should be sandboxed automatically, the two I recommend for this task is SandboxIE if you only want to sandbox the browser and Comodo Internet Security if you want to be able to sandbox any program that runs without you expressly giving permission for it to run out the sandbox. With your browser sandboxed frankly it won't matter about the browser, it'll be locked away where it can do no harm.

Re: Always seemed redundant to me.

[Rakarra]

What I really... REALLY miss in chrome, a feature firefox still has, is the ability to paste a url while hovering over a webpage. It just makes that tab go to that url, rather than screwing around with the location/address bar. Chrome lets you do that if you paste into the new tab button, but sometimes I like to replace the current tab.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'm a bit reluctant to blackhole the openSUSE repo. :)

I can just untar PaleMoon in my ~/bin and ignore whatever FF does, if I'm too feeling to lazy to check/uncheck a few boxes in YaST.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[Bathroom Humor]

This is the main reason for why I've been looking for an alternative browser with that feature. Just in case the developer will not/can not adapt to having no xul.

The only replacement I can find with any promise so far is Vivaldi. The only issue is it isn't FOSS, and it's still in beta right now. Not only that, but the tree style tabs extension really does work better than the current tabs implementation in Vivaldi. Their way of stacking tabs, while useful, is not nearly as convenient.

Then there's the fact that it's built from Chrome (surprise), so the interface really isn't the most customizable. That's really unfortunate, but having editable button placement isn't quite as important to me as having vertical tab placement.

Re:Always seemed redundant to me.

[arglebargle_xiv]

Cool, thanks for the info. I'll be trying PaleMoon out in a minute.

Agree

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, if a few people are the only ones using a specific feature, and they can't live without it, fork the code. Don't continue to bloat the browser for the other 99% of users that would rather have a light, fast browser without this obscure feature.

Re:Agree

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what they can do. They can do something about pages jumping around like they are having a fucking seizure as the load ads and shit.

Re:Agree

[sexconker]

And Hello?
And the fucking proprietary DRM and media shit?
And the "about:newtab" shit that shows you your top visited sites, and "recommended" sites?

All of that shit should be nuked from the code base, and everyone involved should be stripped naked, tied to a tree in the woods, and have their genitals coated in honey.

Re:Agree

[dotancohen]

You mean the garbage they keep adding, like pocket?

I specifically claim to mention this. Removing Pocket should be the first thing on their list.

Re:Agree

[Burz]

FF still ignores OS themes, making their special "complete themes" necessary for many people. And I do mean "necessary"...

I like to read at night without having to turn display brightness to nearly zero (which is still too bright and makes everything look like dishwater). Even if I use an extension like BYM to darken web pages, I still have the FF GUI blaring at my eyes. The solution is to use an addon like DeepDark to tame the UI.

Now I'll have a browser that neither honors my Gnome dark theme setting, nor honors its own custom dark theme. THAT is a clusterf*ck.

Re:Agree

[Anonymous Coward]

They already announced that Pocket will be removed. Not removed, but placed inside its own add-on. http://webscripts.softpedia.com/blog/mozilla-to-move-pocket-integration-to-a-standalone-firefox-add-on-495871.shtml

That is awesome news! Moving integrated add-ons like Pocket to "featured add-ons" is a great idea! Keep the core browser lean and mean. Like it was meant to be.

Re:Agree

[shellbeach]

While I agree Pocket is pointless, was it really bloating up the codebase that much? Genuinely curious ...

Re:Agree

[JackieBrown]

I tried to pull up that extension and was greeted to a EULA. Is this common now? The only addon I use noscript - figured if I wanted to complain that ads are evil because of the insecure scripts then I should start just blocking ads that use scripts

I just tried tab tree based on another post here, so I guess that makes two.

Re:Agree

[Zontar The Mindless]

Too bad I already already posted in this thread. Notwithstanding that, here's your complimentary -1, Fuck You, Your Condescending Attitude, And The Horse You Both Rode In On

Re:Agree

[sad_]

switch to full screen mode, who needs all that gui nonsense anyway?

Re:Agree

[paradxum]

Not arguing a point at all here, just trying to help... Try F11 for fullscreen... no FF ui

Re:Agree

[jez9999]

We did; it's called Pale Moon. And we're showing that far more than "a few people" use themes (not to mention XUL).

You do realize that the reason themes because an "obscure feature" is because Mozilla has been bludgeoning them with a baseball bat for the last few years, right? Continual breaking UI updates, making themes virtually invisible on AMO, telling people to use personas? Themes used to have many hundreds of thousands of users and be a first class citizen in the Mozilla add-ons world until some UX people decided they were undesirable.

Re:Agree

[Rakarra]

It makes it annoying as hell to use Chrome on a phone when you reach down to tap a link and then because some add or picture finally loaded, the page jumps right before you touch it and you end up clicking something else. Phone data connections are already slow enough, having to hit back and reload a bunch of things is worse.

Firefox is unuseable

[DarkOx]

Time to go back to the tried and true sensible interface that is SeaMonkey.

Re:Firefox is unuseable

[dryeo]

Does it support all the extensions? I thought that was about the whole point of using Firefox lately. That, and sometimes it behaves better in terms of resources, but this varies depending on the system and workload.

Supports most of the Firefox and Thunderbird extensions. Here's an automatic extension converter, http://addonconverter.fotokrai...
In terms of resources, I find SeaMonkey to actually be lighter, even with the included mail, newsgroups and IRC clients. It is also much better for Granny and other people who like a consistent interface and can even be themed to look like Firefox 3. Of course it depends on the same Gecko engine as Firefox so when Mozilla gets rid of themes and extensions, SeaMonkey will probably lose them as well.

Re:Firefox is unuseable

[Zontar The Mindless]

Would these be the same patriarchal defaults that look like they were designed by and for 3-year-olds?

Re:Firefox is unuseable

[Rakarra]

Are you the same AC posting irrelevant bullshit up above?

Either there are more than the usual number of AC trolls on this story, or someone has been working his ass off with the annoying spew and insults today.

Firefox Loses Another Customization Feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla seems to be bent on taking away almost every customization feature (cosmetic and otherwise) and turn it into a knockoff of Chrome after destroying every feature that made it different. At this rate they should just re-badge Chromium and call it a day.

Re:Firefox Loses Another Customization Feature

[darkain]

Ssssooooo, Firefox is essentially turning into Opera Browser then??

Re:Firefox Loses Another Customization Feature

[AFCArchvile]

At this rate they should just re-badge Chromium and call it a day.

How has that been working for Opera? Not well, you say?

"Based on this exploratory and recent interest, the board decided to conduct a strategic review because that would allow us to explore a wider range of options rather than not take all options into account."

Re:Oh you want to get rid of shit

[bsdasym]

That would mean getting rid of all the memory leaks, which everyone obviously loves.

To be fair, 40 or 41 was a great leap forward in the leak department.. at long last.

Storm in a glas of water

[prefec2]

Really, themes are an important feature? I hardly ever configure something in my browser so it looks different. I might do so if I find something annoying, like this chat thing they included several releases ago. I want a working browser. It should be fast and stable. And I want to share bookmarks and the keyring in a save way between all my accounts. True the tool should be able to use the icons of the specific host OS or UI framework, but beyond that. I do not see the need of some extra theming stuff.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[cdrudge]

So you basically want Chrome then?

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[prefec2]

Most people just want to use their browser. Almost everyone I know uses Firefox mostly because IE sucked so much in the past. And they do not play around with themes. They might install icon sets, but only at home.

I know geeks like to configure everything and that is OK , but it is not what matters for the majority of users.

And no I do not want to use the Google sees it all tool for obvious reasons.

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[Lord Apathy]

People are going to look strange at me for saying this but i've been rather impressed with the edge browser that came with windows 10. It's fast for casual browsing. I still load firefox when I need with more muscle but just quick look ups edge seems to be what I go with.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[gstoddart]

Does "basically want Chrome then" mean "don't want a browser which tries to put 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag"?

Because the answer is overwhelmingly "oh hell yes".

If Firefox is differentiating itself by adding features most people don't want or use, they're doing it wrong.

So many features added to browsers these days leave me immediately thinking "How do I disable this crap?".

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[CanadianMacFan]

I normally don't play around with themes too much but I do have the Classic Theme Restorer plug-in installed. I wonder if they are doing this just to kill off this type of plug-in and force everyone onto their new interface. I wouldn't put it past them.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[blue9steel]

That was my first thought.

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[corychristison]

Try Pale Moon if that is what you are looking for. I think the Fork started in the early v20s of Firefox. It doesn't have the new UI crap in it.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[thegarbz]

How does not having a use for themes equate to wanting Chrome? Underneath they are still very different browsers.

I can tell you what I don't want, custom themed apps. I remember the abomination that was the early 00s where we had windows of all different sizes, shapes and colours. Is it too hard to have software simply respect the default OS?

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[MyAlternateID]

Most people just want to use their browser. Almost everyone I know uses Firefox mostly because IE sucked so much in the past. And they do not play around with themes. They might install icon sets, but only at home.

I know geeks like to configure everything and that is OK , but it is not what matters for the majority of users.

And no I do not want to use the Google sees it all tool for obvious reasons.

The great number of useful extensions is my own main reason for using Firefox. I also have Chromium and Konqueror installed but I hardly ever use them.

The Web is just too shitty of a general experience to use any browser without a good ad blocker. The many, many other available extensions is just icing on the cake.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[prefec2]

No I do not. Why should I even try to remember it? I also do not want to remember Mosaic. Beside nostalgic feelings and the lie that everything was better than and rude behavior on the net was reserved for alt.* , there is no need for it. If you want a new UI, write your own. You can use the gecko engine and plug it into your UI of choice. Fiddling around with icons and button positions is not going to help. You could even fork their UI and replace the bad preference dialog jungle. For an end user, however, all these considerations are unimportant. They want to work with the software.

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[rssrss]

I switched after FF's last UI revision. I love it.

www.palemoon.org/

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[Calavar]

So just because a browser doesn't match your personal preferences, it's shit?

Because not everyone wants lightweight browser. Those who do can use Chrome. It's already cornered the lightweight browser market, and a non-profit like Mozilla is not going to be able to oust one of the most profitable tech companies in the world from a market that it has dominated for years.

Mozilla doesn't seem to have any real sense of strategy beyond "let's do what Chrome does", but they don't understand that people who like Chrome aren't going to switch from Chrome to the competition if the competition is exactly the same. The competitor has to offer something that the original doesn't..

The only way Firefox is going to survive is if it targets a niche that Chrome ignores, which, up until now, was power-users and others who like a high degree of configurability. That configurability was exactly what made me stick with Firefox for such a long time, but with the add-on ecosystem slowly being reduced to nothing, I didn't see why I should stick with Firefox when Chrome already integrated so well with the default browser on my mobile phone.

Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way because the number of Firefox users has been shrinking steadily.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[Calavar]

How does not having a use for themes equate to wanting Chrome? Underneath they are still very different browsers.

Most users couldn't care less about whether their browser is written in C or C++ or with Gecko or Blink.

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[CanadianMacFan]

Not really an option since the Mac version doesn't exist and isn't being maintained.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[RDW]

That was my first, second and third thought. I don't generally bother with themes as such, but Classic Theme Restorer is what has kept me from switching to Palemoon or Seamonkey as it currently provides the best of both worlds - access to the huge library of Firefox plugins and the occasional useful innovation in the core browser, with an interface I can make look like a subtly updated 3.x (for me the high point of FF interface design). CTR is an extension rather than a theme, but I assume it hooks into the same code as 'Complete Themes' to do its magic (does anyone know for sure?) If it's unaffected by the changes, or if the same thing can be done by whatever new mechanisms the Mozilla developers put in place, then I'm likely to stay with FF. But if it's permanently broken and nothing takes its place, then the alternatives are going to look pretty attractive. CTR has been downloaded a couple of million times, and has over 400,000 active users, so I'm not likely to be the only one making a switch. The range of plugins and the ability to customise are what make Firefox still relevant in the age of Chrome - developers mess with these features at their peril!

Re: Storm in a glas of water

[Lord Apathy]

Why would we look strange at you for using edge? I went through your history for the past few months. Short of disliking silverlight, you seem to very much like windows. Why would we expect you not to like this?

Well I do like windows but I also like linux. I run windows on my home workstation because when because with what I do at home windows works better the. Mainly games.

I run linux, centos 6.7, on my server. It works best for that what I use it for. Basically a big ass file server.

I run fedora at work because I view it as the best OS to use when working in a linux environment.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[hyades1]

So when Firefox releases yet another version, and the buttons and tabs and other stuff you "never configure" have been moved around and start acting differently, yet again, you're OK with that?

Or is that when you might actually want to configure your browser and put all the stuff back the way you like it ? Because this is exactly what you have to do if you "hardly ever configure something in [your] browser so it looks different".

That is exactly what they're going to break...your ability to keep the browser looking and acting the way you're used to.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[sasparillascott]

I feel much the same and have the plug-in Classic Toolbar Buttons that almost certainly hooks into the XUL to give me that 3.x look and colors I like - its one of the things that keeps me on Firefox.

It's crazy what the leadership is doing...get rid of their plug-in architecture (so that advantage is smashed), get rid of the UI customization (so that advantage is smashed)...eventually all we'll have left is Chrome with a different web engine. This must be what its like when the marketshare water is going around and around the bowl real fast towards the end as the "leadership" sets the whole application on fire thinking they're "fixing" things.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[Zontar The Mindless]

Themes go heaps further than what colour the buttons are.

Themes are (or were) our way of undoing self-serving/short-sighted UI changes otherwise forced down our throats.

Or maybe you missed it when, for example, some tool at Mozilla decided that since he didn't like the status bar, no-one was going to have one anymore...?

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'm not interested in "working with the software". The software should be working for ME, not the other way round.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[prefec2]

Thankfully, I am able to learn. And the features I used with Firefox have not changed drastically. I have an URL input field, a back button, I can drag URLs to bookmarks, there is a search bar integrated nice. If it is once integrated into the URL input field fine. If they would change it one day into an unusable piece of junk, then I would look for a new browser, but they did not do that.

This whole discussion is like the MS introduction of ribbons. They make things easier for newbies, but everyone else has to find their stuff again. Unpleasant, but nothing you cannot figure out in a few days. And yes the ribbons are not perfect, and the organization of functionality still is not totally logic, but hey maybe they will adapt that in future. And then I will adapt too.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[prefec2]

Ah yes, and why do I need that status bar again? The right thing to do would be to fork the thing if you want it to be different and see if other people agree on it and use it too.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[prefec2]

You know what I meant with that, so do not try to change the semantics of that. Software is a tool. And you work with tools. If you don't get that, poor you.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[jez9999]

I'm betting a stunningly small amount of the entire Mozilla user base gives a crap.

I'm betting Mozilla has a stunningly small user base now because of this attitude.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[cdrudge]

The OP said "I want a working browser. It should be fast and stable. And I want to share bookmarks and the keyring in a save way between all my accounts." Saying he basically wants Chrome was not saying that he specifically wanted Chrome, rather Chrome met all his requirements.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[thegarbz]

I didn't say they did. If you think those + themes are the only differences then you need to look closer.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[thegarbz]

Pretty much every modern browser meets that requirement.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[Calavar]

My point is that 99% of users don't care about implementation details (what's "underneath the hood"); they only care about features, performance, and stability.

I'm not sure why you're mentioning themes, because those are a user facing feature, not something that is underneath the hood.

Re:Storm in a glas of water

[thegarbz]

Those aren't the people who complain about Chrome and swear to try and use Firefox.

Can I get just a browser?

[gstoddart]

Can I get a version which doesn't have social network tie-ins, isn't a mail client, doesn't have its own chat, make it easy to block ads and other crap, doesn't spy on me, and doesn't otherwise think it's going to be the center of my damned universe?

Because that would be awesome.

Probably never gonna happen, but it would be awesome.

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[Zocalo]

That is supposedly the objective of the "Great or Dead" project - strip out all the crap, discard the stuff that few people use outright and reimplement the rest as optional modules/plugins or whatever. Quite how Mozilla is defining "optional" is to be determined, but I doubt it's going to be a simple case of opting for a custom install and then telling the installer not to install the modules that you see as worthless. I'm skeptical, given that things like the ill-received Pocket module bring funds to the foundation, but we'll have to wait (and wait, and wait) before we find out - despite the rapidly increasing version numbers the actual amount of change between so called major releases is awfully small.

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[AmiMoJo]

Pale Moon. Doesn't support every Firefox plugin, but most of the important ones work. It switch to chromium.

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[squiggleslash]

So... Chrome or Edge then? ;-) *ducks*

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[cfalcon]

Hard as crap to netflix on Pale Moon (this is 1000% Netflix's fault), but generally a solid experience otherwise.

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[cfalcon]

Or Netscape Navigator!

It's becoming quite obvious that Firefox and Chrome have become assimilated. Chrome and Firefox will become Internet Explorer 2.0- the browser you use when you need to access content that uses obsolete crap, like how Netflix can't stream to Linux without blah blah or how you will probably need Firefox to run Java applets. But I'm pretty sure we'll see a lot of people jumping to Pale Moon, and there's several chromium derivatives that should at some point be relevant enough to point to a semi-winner.

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[hcs_$reboot]

Incognito window in Chrome - isn't that supposed to be quite privacy-safe?

Re:Can I get just a browser?

[KGIII]

If they do it well then maybe they'll get one user back and I can make the move to putting GhostBSD on bare metal.

No, they don't.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Mozilla is not planning to remove support for "complete themes". They plan on removing support for the way they're currently implemented, which is godawful. Frankly it's about damn time, as anyone who has had the misfortune of writing a theme and having it break all the time will tell you.

People really need to stop with the histrionics about Mozilla's recent decisions. They're the right choices, and the only problem is that they didn't make them many years ago. If you're so invested in crappy old addons and themes that aren't being kept up to date anyway, then you're frankly part of the problem.

Re:No, they don't.

[Cochonou]

It's always a bad sign when you consider that your users are a part of the problem.

Re:No, they don't.

[pla]

If you're so invested in crappy old addons and themes that aren't being kept up to date anyway, then you're frankly part of the problem.

Yes. Yes, I am part of the problem - I have absofuckinglutely no interest in trying to hunt down new plugins once a quarter to replace still-functional old ones that do exactly what I want.

Adding support for new web technologies doesn't require completely revamping the look and feel of the browser or breaking the plugin system every other release.

Re:No, they don't.

[just_a_monkey]

How much updating does a theme need, really? It's, like, different icons for the buttons. (I've used my preferred theme for many years and never had to "update" it.)

Re:No, they don't.

[Kjella]

Not always, it's a bit like "the customer is always right" and if you've worked in IT you'll know that sometimes the customer is horribly, horribly wrong and even if you did try to please them it would end up an unusable mess they wouldn't be happy with and they'd still blame you. That said, I'd generally try to have replacement functionality up and running before I pull the plug on the old solution, I know how saying you'll get those features back later works when other things keep taking priority.

Re:No, they don't.

[just_a_monkey]

Ehrm, on closer thought, I use the ESR version of FF. So the reason that I haven't had to upgrade my theme is possibly because the developers haven't changed/broken my browser's UI.

Firefox long term strategy

[Snufu]

Step 1: Eschew everything that makes Firefox distinct from Chrome.
Step 2: Make an inferior clone of Chrome on a budget smaller than Google's sofa change.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Overtake Chrome!

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[iONiUM]

They're in a shitty spot. Their once very-fast-market-dominating browser has become very slow in recent years, and lost a lot of reputation with non-technical people.

So what can they do, leave the browser (and their ever declining market share) as-is, and have a slow (but very customizable) browser, or start cutting out features to try and create a more manageable product which is hopefully also faster to try and compete with Chrome.

This entire situation is a really good example of what exactly the trade-off is between features, and experience. Apple, as a company, leans very much towards experience and thus their products (iOS is a good example) are much more controlled. Android goes in the opposite direction, but at a cost. Mozilla went to the very far extreme, putting in every feature everyone wanted, and the result is this.

There's a balance, but striking that balance now won't help Firefox differentiate themselves (as you've noted), it will just be a me-too product. So what can they do? I don't know.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair, people have been moaning that Firefox is too bloated, but if they remove any bloat they get criticised. Being able to theme the whole ui seems a bit extravagant and not something that many people use.

Firefox has some serious issues that are limiting its performance. Web is a platform now, and the browser is the OS, so performance is critical. To fix these issues is going to be painful. I'm not saying that the UI redesigns were not a mistake, but some big changes are inevitable.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[ADRA]

These trade-offs are mitigated with expressive and potentially vast extensibility mechanisms. Firefox seems to already have a very good trade-off between ease-of-use and extensibility, but gutting extensibility for real or perceived efficiency gains seems problematic.

I think the more likely cause for the removal is that someone has to maintain compatibility with the component and its a hassle to do so. I assume that instead of plugging efficiency gaps, they're using perf loss as an excuse to remove the complexity. Why aren't they conditionally building the UI's based on complete-themes support (or whatever else is happening under the scenes) only if it detects if the user is even using one? At least then the perceived perf loss is only affecting those 'small minority' of people actually using the feature.

Obviously this is a peanut gallery couch analysis but the blog note isn't much better.. .

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[iONiUM]

I think you're probably right. I think the real reason is just maintainability. I think by reducing the code, it will make it easier to maintain as well as try to find performance gains in general. Technically they can find it without removing the code, but it's much easier with a smaller code base. I'm also assuming their funding / team size has decreased in the recent years (I have no idea if it did), and this might be related?

At the very least, it's a good way to get morale of developers up when you start removing what is considered "legacy" or "bloated" code, regardless of whether people use it a lot or not. It's rewarding to clean it up and makes them think of new things too.

As for Firefox's trade-off between complexity and usability, I don't really agree with your opinion here. I find Firefox very difficult to use these days, and their debugger console is a total mess (especially when it was Firebug before, and now it isn't) especially when you compare it to Chrome's.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[prunus.avium]

Ironic since the main reason Firefox even exists was the original developers thought Mozilla was too bloated...

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[squiggleslash]

I think the complaint has never been bloat, but ridiculously high memory usage. While they're similar in concept, bloat generally means "A program that uses up huge amounts of computing resources by implementing crap that nobody wants", vs ridiculously high memory usage which is more of a "Why is that I'm using 2 gigabytes simply by having Twitter, GMail, and a bunch of news articles open?"

Some of it, in fairness, is more to do with how we program webpages these days. jQuery, for example, encourages the use of closures, which are notoriously hard to garbage collect. But... well it does seem to be mindboggling how we've gone from browsers like Firefox 3.x, which I happily ran on a 128Mb (yes, megabyte) Slackware Linux laptop, with no apparent memory leakage and decent performance, to today's Firefox which seem to have added little in features, yet end up sucking gigabytes of memory on a regular basis.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[hcs_$reboot]

Step 3: ???

For starters, and ahead of themes (?!), they have other problems to address: watching porn on FF is slow, on Chrome it's fine.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[snadrus]

I figured this relates to their effort to stop using their weird XUL system. The fewer parts of Firefox that are over a decade old, unused, and unmaintained, the better.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[JackieBrown]

I think the complaint has never been bloat

You don't have to go beyond the comments on this page to know that is false

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[narcc]

I find Firefox very difficult to use these days, and their debugger console is a total mess (especially when it was Firebug before, and now it isn't) especially when you compare it to Chrome's.

I completely disagree. It's a lot better than it was in the firebug days, and a bit better than what Chrome offers. What do you think is better and why?

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[narcc]

I think the complaint has never been bloat, but ridiculously high memory usage.

Only by idiots. Chrome has been the biggest memory hog for years now, using significantly more memory than FF. Yet the same yahoos that bash FF eagerly promote Chrome as a 'lightweight' alternative. It doesn't make any sense.

it does seem to be mindboggling how we've gone from browsers like Firefox 3.x, which I happily ran on a 128Mb (yes, megabyte) Slackware Linux laptop, with no apparent memory leakage and decent performance, to today's Firefox which seem to have added little in features, yet end up sucking gigabytes of memory on a regular basis.

As for memory usage and performance, you can thank modern web standards for a lot of that. Pages are heavier and more resource intensive than they were 10 years ago, and far more is expected of the browser. You'll want to include modern web standards when you're feature counting.

Re:Firefox long term strategy

[Rakarra]

Step 1: People bitch about bloated firefox

Step 2: Remove bloat

Step 3: People bitch about lost features

But I haven't seen firefox devs do this. What I -have- seen:

Step 1: Add bloat and decent features.
Step 2: Remove decent features, but leave bloat that people -don't- like, and then add other stupid features that people don't like.
Step 3: People wonder why firefox loses the features they liked and yet doesn't run any faster.
Step 4: "Let's add bullshit like Pocket and Hello. Surely that couldn't be considered bloat! And we'll hire some UX-tards to fuck up the firefox interface and then remove the ability to not make it look like ass."

For once I agree

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Having worked on a number of commercial projects, I'm proud of having pulled "custom themes" and other cruft out of about a half dozen shipping pieces of software. I've seen these features go in because 1) a lead developer wanted to play with a customization library 2) a key customer wanted the whole application in their corporate color or 3) product management thought people spent all day with their application maximized on the screen and needed to twiddle every button.

For once, I agree with Mozilla. Yanking customization like this is just what you need to do when a product grows up.

Keep up the "less features in Firefox" and I might even make it my primary browser again. Let's hope "video autoplay" is next!

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:For once I agree

[Alter_3d]

I don't have any mod points so I will just say thank you. I hate video autoplay but never thought to google a way to disable it.

Re:For once I agree

[chooks]

Thank you.

Re:For once I agree

[KGIII]

You're new here, aren't you?

Re:For once I agree

[jez9999]

For once, I agree with Mozilla. Yanking customization like this is just what you need to do when a product grows up.

Utter bollocks. I used theming to get the Fx 4 user interface to look like the Fx3 one when the fucked it up. That was the one saving grace it had. Firefox is well into being a waste of space these days, and this is just another example of why.

Re:For once I agree

[Lost Race]

That particular setting does fuck-all as far as I can tell. It most certainly does not stop HTML5 videos from playing automatically. There isn't even any add-on that can do that reliably.

Re:For once I agree

[Rakarra]

Thank you so much! Why oh why oh why isn't that the default setting?

Advertisers hate it.

I wont miss something I never used.

[LiquidPaper]

I wont miss something I never used.

Re:I wont miss something I never used.

[Lord Apathy]

I don't understand why this is even in the core code. The core code should contain only the essentials to make the browser function. Anything else such as themes, adblockers, chat clients, and fucking social buttons should be downloadable add ins.

If you want a fast and sleek broswer just keep the core code. You want to customize the hell out of it go fo it,and enjoy your lumbering hippo.

Re:I wont miss something I never used.

[Lord Apathy]

I can't argue with that logic. Agree.

Re:I wont miss something I never used.

[dryeo]

Themes do need to be downloaded and replacing the default theme is pretty trivial as most all the UI is a theme (CSS and bitmaps) and part of the core, at least currently.
But don't worry, the long term plan seems to get rid of all customization, things like add-ons including add-blockers take having support in the main code base so will be removed and you will get a browser that acts exactly like the Mozilla Foundation wants rather then how the user wants

Please please

[ADRA]

Can someone tell me if this actually affects me? Oh they removed some underlying feature. That is neither here nor there if its of truly marginal use or something that can be added back with Add-Ons. All this isn't clearly outlined in the comment or announcement, so here goes:

I have the following plugins. Which Add-Ons if any will be broken without any future fix after the deprecation?
- Classic Theme Restorer
- Add to Search Bar
- Adblock Plus
- Quick Search Bar
- Hard Refresh
- Flashblock

Re:Please please

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic Theme Restorer will almost assuredly be completely dead with this change because I'm assuming it's effectively a theme and they're removing the ability to rearrange the UI at all.

Everything else will be killed dead by the removal of the "old" plugin API as well. It's hard to say whether they can be reimplemented using the "new" plugin API as it doesn't exist yet.

Re:Please please

[aix tom]

Yep. Pale Moon has been my default browser for two years now.

It's also going to be the default browser in our corporate system images when we roll them out next year.

Re:Please please

[Anonymous Coward]

Do yourself a favour and remove the ad owned Adblock Plus for uBlock Origin
While you are at it try out Disconnect, NoScript and Request Policy

If you use Pale Moon (highly recommended) Classic Theme Restorer isn’t needed.

Hard Refresh? is CTRL + F5 too hard?

Re:Please please

[Badooleoo]

It's always played archive.org games fine for me in Pale Moon, maybe look into the problem a little more.

Re:Please please

[Hognoxious]

Classic Theme Restorer will almost assuredly be completely dead with this change because I'm assuming it's effectively a theme and they're removing the ability to rearrange the UI at all.

Firefox can fuck off then. At some point they made a dog's breakfast of the UI and without CTR it's a pain in the ass to use.

Re:Please please

[geminidomino]

I used to use it as my primary browser, but I need Firebug.

I switched to Opera, then Chrome, but both are so insistent on getting in my way - "timing out" SSL bypasses so that working on the dev server randomly blows up, and refusing to download files to %temp% to open without having to save tons of one-off text and CSV files... it's just getting on my nerves, I'm daily becoming more tempted to go back to Palemoon and just deal with the ancient version of Firebug.

Now that uMatrix looks to be working on Palemoon, I might just take the plunge. Why is it so hard for the big browsers to just not fuck things up?

FF developer edition is nice too

[jopsen]

Try: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/... With the screen dimmer extension this is pretty nice: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... there is a few glitches with GTK + screen dimmer on linux, but it's way better than anything chrome has to offer which keeps blinking like crazy.

Re:Mozilla

[sims 2]

No they found someone to steer. Unfortunately it was Captain Peter Wrongway Peachfuzz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Seriously though why would anyone think this was a good idea?
On that note why does google not allow me the option to use the desktop site on mobile and sometimes not even on desktop?!

Too much and too little

[mspohr]

Interesting to see all of the complaints now about removing little used features and reducing bloat.
The outrage here now is as great as I have seen in the past when FireFox was adding features and bloat.
Can we make up our minds?... or do we just like to whinge?

Re:Userbase of MS Edge

[prefec2]

In Europe, especially in Germany, many people use Firefox, because it is not MS and it does not suck like IE. And they are a lot of people. So to stay in the game not being replaced by the new MS browser, you have to provide a fast and responsive behavior of your browser. Firefox can do that, if they want. And from their post, it looks like that is direction they are going.

A complete overreaction

[Lirodon]

This is actually a side effect of the other changes they are planning; particularly, the deprecation of XUL. The bug itself has comments dictating that they are not removing the concept entirely, but want to revamp it to fit the new architecture. Theoretically, a new theme system could be built under the new architecture.

Re:A complete overreaction

[Blaskowicz]

But have you seen the "modern" preferences page and crash recovery page? They look ridiculously oversized, non native and flat.
For preferences you can get used to it, no big problem. Although it is still a mixed GUI : some buttons spawn normal windows.

For the "crash recovery" / "tab recovery" page (whatever it's called it says like "sorry we've crashed, do you want to restore the tabs below") the result is unacceptable because pages to restore are displayed one per line, but the GUI is so oversized that only four lines are displayed and that's the GUI to restore/discard/check a hundred tabs on more. That's on 768 high displays. Perhaps it's optimised for new laptops, those with a 1080p resolution on too small a panel : good for those people not so much for people who don't have or want a new computer or a display with 140 to 160 ppi.
But imagine a spreadsheet where cells are so big that only four lines are displayed, or a word processor that displays four lines of text. In fact the former "recovery" GUI was hard enough to use because there was already some padding. The other problem is you can access that GUI though accidental or deliberate crashing, but I would like such tab trimming without having to kill -9 the poor browser.

Re:A complete overreaction

[gnupun]

particularly, the deprecation of XUL.

They aren't deprecating XUL because FF would stop working without one of its main platform-independent components. They are actually deprecating XUL extensions which means no old-themed UI. My guess is they want to completely ruin FF by forcing all laptop/dekstop users to use the new chrome-like tablet-based UI. Goodbye 10% market share, hello 0.1% market share.

Asking for feedback. DECISION ALREADY MADE!

[Chas]

I loved this.

"This is why I'm here asking for feedback."

But when given actual feedback.

"Sorry, the decision about this has already been made."

Not to mention that a new architecture for this can't be done yet because the new plugin setup isn't ready yet.
And anything else they do will be deprecated the second they kill XUL and the old plugin setup. Translation: Wasted time and effort.

Basically this has been a pattern at Mozilla for a good, long while now.

A bunch of these top-down decisions, without actually addressing their user-base FIRST.
Stupid non-browser features being added in.
Customization and ability to extend function being excised out.

"Oh. We're going to replace that."
But they don't have a single fucking line of code in place. They're just looking for "ideas" while they gut the browser of everything that makes it useful to people.

"Great or die" my ass. It's "be a Chrome also-ran or die".
I simply do not get why Mozilla is so set on slobbing the Chrome knob. As it relegates them to followers, utterly beholden to the whims of the Chrome crew. Rather than innovating the browser AS THEY SHOULD BE.

Just rename the damn browser to "Chomewannabezilla" and be fucking done with it.

Re:Like systemd

[aix tom]

Well, if it comes to Firefox, I did:

1) Complain a lot for a while
2) Switch to Pale Moon
3) Donate once a year to Pale Moon

It's well worth it, having gone from feeling "Fuck!!! What have they broken this time!!" on every Browser update to "Hey, great, some little bugs have been fixed" on every Browser update.

I use themes because FF is ugly by default

[Dracos]

But the last theme I liked, and could actually install because the author hadn't abandoned, was for FF 3.5. I absolutely can't stand the default FF theme (which Australis made worse) and personas are useless. The complete theme concept has been deliberately allowed to atrophy over the last several years. The lack of updated complete themes is one of the reasons why I'm still using FF33 (and every time I upgrade I lose at least one extension I rely on).

When they yank XUL out, FF will cease to be useful and distinctive to me. Chrome isn't an option because it's been FF's model for stripping the UI, and I hate the developer tools interface.

If there is a is a wrong-headed choice, Mozilla proves yet again that they will invariably pick that one.

SM FTW!

[antdude]

I still use the suite products, like SeaMonkey, since Netscape v3.x days. :)

Pocket... WebRTC... Hello chat thing

[waspleg]

I hope I haven't missed anything else as offensive as these.

Re:not popular

[ChunderDownunder]

Video without a flash plugin is okay.

What *is* daft is autoplay. There seems to be no way to disable it and every click-bait link fires up some shitty ad.

Maybe that can be disabled via no-script or some such but I'd prefer click to play.

Chromifying

[Soccerguy1832]

The day they added the big overhaul with the new gui and the little 3x3 menu thing is the day I found the classic theme restorer addon. Why are they streamlining it so much? Isn't firefox for the savvy user? Isn't it supposed to have the most utility? Mozilla has their priorities wrong.

Does one mature out of over themeing?

[jader3rd]

I remember when I had my first computer all to myself in college, and for about the first two or three years I'd get skins for different music players and whatnot, and spent a lot of time finding every which way I could customize/personalize every program. And now, it's more of a meh. Personally I feel like I "matured" out of the desire to completely overhaul the look of every program. I'm not saying that all personalization is bad, but there can be tasteful lines drawn. Plus, now that I code I'm aware of the potential overhead of a fully customizable system; and a lot of the times it just doesn't feel worth it.

Seamonkey?

[rsilvergun]

Isn't that just Seamonkey? You even get plugin support (more or less). My little FF plugin works in Seamonkey with only a few minor differences.

Re:Phoenix 2

[shellbeach]

All excellent points!

But, you know, maybe these latest changes to Firefox will invite a Phoenix-style fork after all?

Re:Asking for feedback. DECISION ALREADY MADE!

[Chas]

Never mind that the "heavyweight" API was anything but.
And that most of the current themes were tiny and totally BURIED under about 400+ legacy themes for modern gems such as Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.6...
They removed it because it wasn't in heavy, regular use. It wasn't in heavy, regular use because Mozilla is total ass at project management.
And worse, they're doing it BEFORE even having some sort of viable replacement even in the planning stages, let alone implemented. Pretty much guaranteeing such a feature will remain an ill-documented, ill-maintained backwater.

And if you think chasing a feature-free toy like Chrome is the epitome of "making a good browser", you may as well be using Chrome. Since you're not actually using or doing anything that makes Mozilla worthwhile.

SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

What about, you know, multithreading, multiprocess, sandoxing... you know... important things that would bring this browser in the 2000s.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

[Merk42]

Add feature few use to Firefox:
UGH! This is why Firefox is bad!!!

Keep feature few use in Firefox:
UGH! This is why Firefox is bad!!!

Remove feature few use from Firefox:
UGH! This is why Firefox is bad!!!

Enable Telemetry? ;)

[fomalhaut]

Kids, now you know what "telemetry" is good for. They are removing things only a bunch of nerds use.

I don't think it's that bad idea. I will be missing the possibility of the "classic theme", as the new look is terrible. I'm sticking with Safari just for the chrome look.

PS: As it seems to be mandatory on this thread, I've used Phoenix 0.x since it was the best browser available for a SunOS 2.7 workstation.

CTR Author says no problem

[Chibi Merrow]

I asked the author of Classic Theme Restorer if it would stop working, he said it would have no effect on CTR.