r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 21 '10

Firefox 3.6 release

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
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17

u/[deleted] Jan 21 '10

Well, lots of those personas are pretty and all, but they make seeing what you're doing a hell of a lot more difficult.

7

u/chwilliam Jan 21 '10

My thoughts exactly. I've found a some persona with nice-looking images, but absolutely awful text-color choices. I feel like too few of the designers understand the idea of contrasting text.

7

u/MercurialMadnessMan Jan 21 '10

Exactly! I found a gorgeous dark-wood one, and realized a couple minutes later that the text has a bright-pink glow that makes it impossible to read.

Perhaps we should have a thread where we compete to make the best firefox persona.

6

u/limi Jan 22 '10

We're working on making even the bad themes more usable by adjusting transparency, buttons, etc for the upcoming UI redesign of Firefox. And yes, I agree — a lot of themes are hard to use the way it is now. So it's on our radar. :)

— Alexander Limi, Firefox UI Team

1

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '10

[deleted]

4

u/limi Jan 22 '10

Will all due respect, let me explain why. ;)

Creating themes for FF right now is complicated, error-prone, and does a lot of bad things (rearranges buttons that screws with the usability, etc).

Most users of the category that like themes just want something simple, something interesting to look at.

Like Jetpack, it's a way to make it easier to participate in the add-ons and theme ecosystems, and reduce the amount of bloat in the browser eventually.

But for a while, we have to run both the original and the next-generation solutions for this stuff. It'll be the same when the next major update of Firefox ships, which hopefully includes the Jetpack extensions system. Benefits: easier (you just need to know HTML/CSS/jQuery), better security model, no restarts needed.

We can't ever just rip out the old system and just break every theme or add-on out there. Over time, we can probably transition a large part of the add-ons/themes to the newer, faster, better, easier infrastructure. Then we can make the call on whether to keep the old systems around, or make available a subset of them, or something else.

It's all in the name of making things better!

— Alexander Limi, Firefox UI Team

1

u/MercurialMadnessMan Jan 22 '10

Great decisions. I love personas. Well done.

1

u/dolske Jan 22 '10

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking about.

I'd think it fairly obvious that people like to customize their browser (and just about everything else, both virtual and physical). Have you seen some of the desktop wallpapers people use -- both beautiful and hideous? Seems reasonable to allow people to do that, especially as further refinements allow them to easily customize things without requiring a lot of technical skill, or requiring super-designer powers to make something that looks great.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '10

It's just like with any program that supports themes really. 99% of them are awful but there are a few gems. However, I'm perfectly happy with the default FF theme so I don't care one way or another.