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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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: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

[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

[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.

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.

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

[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:No, they don't.

[Cochonou]

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

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.

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: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: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.

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: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