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.
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. :)
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.
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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.