Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: end users themes

Themes on AMO

19 responses

Personas has officially joined the Themes family on AMO! The renaming is finally complete, and we’d like to thank you for your patience. People looking for ways to change the look of their Firefox no longer have to worry about the difference between a “background” theme and a “complete” theme. Simply click over to the Themes section and start trying on skins by mousing over the designs, or click over to the Complete Themes section for deeper customizations.

Work on the migration of getpersonas.com continues, and there is a lot of progress being made, so stay tuned for that!

If you are looking for Mozilla Persona, an identity system for the web, it can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/persona/

19 comments on “Themes on AMO”

  1. Jivko wrote on

    When are you going to stop with the Firefox custom theme destruction? Why don’t you put custom themes on top of the page and personas skins at the bottom of the page? So many people have stopped working on their themes because of this. Developing custom themes is not an easy thing to do. I remember a few years back when the top theme had 150 000 weekly downloads. Now the top theme has less than 50 000. Stop destroying custom themes with this personas crap.

    1. NMS wrote on

      You are absolutely right. Its like slapping on the face of dedicated developers / themers who spend hours to get full fledged theme and updating whenever a new version break their theme. (eg : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/5549109/ )

      Persona is very amateurish way of theming , and at any given time , it shouldn’t be weighed against full fledged themes.

      Hope firefox understands this , but i am sure , FF really do care for developers and promote full fledged themes more .

    2. Justin Dolske wrote on

      The current top persona (other than the Yahoo one) has 238,997 users. Personas are easy to make and enormously popular with users. Sorry that you feel they’re “crap”, but a _lot_ of users clearly disagree.

      1. The fellow wrote on

        As noted from the post you stole this from http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2640791&p=12594203&hilit=yahoo#p12594203 Themes from 2 to 5 have more users then personas 2 from 5. Personas are no more popular then Themes.

        The reason that Personas suck is because Mozilla is allowing bad actors like BrandThunder to change install crapware like superfish.

        Themes are slightly more popular then Personas. Who cares? Firefox users obviously like both. AMO seems to be the only folks who don’t like themes and are going out of their way to do make sure they are marginalize,

        1. kmaglione wrote on

          I don’t see what BrandThunder has to do with anything. Their Personas Interactive add-on does have a lot of features that I’m not particularly fond of, but other than for a short period when it was inadvertently approved, their Superfish integration is strictly opt-in. I also highly doubt that it impacts on personas in any significant way, given that their user count pales in comparison with persona use in general.

          1. The Fellow wrote on

            You might want to hang out in one of the support forums kmaglione. The tripe may have pale user counts but they are the leader in “Search Hi-jacked” posts.

        2. Michael Kaply wrote on

          Can you please point me to one of these “Search Hi-jacked” posts?

          I search SUMO looking for posts and I have found none (although their search does suck).

  2. Jivko wrote on

    Also it’d be nice if there’s a way to make custom themes install without restart like personas and a way to add a persona to the custom theme.

  3. Ken Saunders wrote on

    I’ve thought about this for a day. I am not in the habit of openly criticizing Mozilla’s choices when what’s done is done, but I feel compelled to comment. Selfishly for my own needs to get it out, but more so to show my support for theme developers and the users that use “Full Themes”.

    Not that my opinions or words holds any weight, but I was one that voted for a different name for lightweight themes. Probably, lightweight themes.
    I was aware that they would be called simply, themes, but I wasn’t aware that things would be implemented this way and that full themes would essentially be pushed out into the back alley.
    I’m very disappointed and quite frankly a little pissed about it.

    I just don’t understand or have read the reasoning behind this. There is room for both. Even if the naming is Themes and Full Themes, full themes could have better billing. I only see the one link to full themes and that’s at the bottom of the drop down list and nowhere at all in the left hand column on the themes page.
    My only conclusion is that Mozilla is trying to squeeze out full themes completely. What other explanation is there? Why, I don’t know.
    If there’s been any decline in the popularity and usage of full themes, it’s because lightweight themes have been officially promoted and quite heavily by Mozilla for a few years now. They’re even in the newsletters.

    I saw a metric several years ago that showed that the Themes menu item in the categories list on AMO was the most used yet that menu item was removed.

    Lightweight themes are so popular because a) they’ve been promoted officially and heavily by Mozilla and b) people are always looking to customize their computers.
    Lightweight themes are not crap as noted above. I’ve made a few, they work well for casual users and those that like to change things quickly and often, but they are not a replacement for full themes nor are they equal.

    Full themes take a tremendous amount of time, effort, and work to develop and equally, maintain.
    Theme developers have helped me personally by guiding me and teaching me how to customize Firefox for my own needs and with creating add-ons and userstyles that help others with visual impairments.
    It was a full theme developer that created the first theme specifically for end users with visual issues and that was the first contribution to AccessFirefox.org.
    A light weight theme cannot aid end user with disabilities. They cannot provide large UI elements, simple ones, or high and low contrast interfaces.

    While it’s true that the second most popular lightweight theme currently has 238,754 users, the -fourth- most popular full theme on AMO has 256,530 users.

    It’s getting more difficult for end users to discover full themes or that they even exist, and it has become quite obvious to full theme developers that they’re efforts and contributions since before there was even such a thing as Firefox are not appreciated and that their days are numbered. Many developers have quit and that’s a loss for end users.
    Remember, they’re Mozilla contributors not casual add-on developers and they’ve contributed heavily to Mozilla’s end users for a long time and without monetary compensation except for the occasional voluntary donation by users.

    This is sad. Very sad.
    There’s room for both.

    1. Guest wrote on

      +1, I couldn’t agree more!

      Firefox does once again one step further into becoming “Mozilla Chrome”.

    2. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Hi Ken, we are moving the Full Themes promo box up to the spot below the main header on the Themes page (bug 829754), and that should be live Thursday (1/17). If you have other suggestions, we’d like to hear them. Thanks!

      1. Guest wrote on

        Actually clicking on “Themes” on AMO should display full themes too instead of only showing thme as sub category. Why there is not enough room for both?

        Since its still broken: The “Full Themes” link still points wrongly to “themes(=Personas now)” instead of “full themes”.

        I know there is a bug filled on Bugzilla for that, but comon guys, how hard can it be to change/fix one link? This is somehow awkward, isn’t it?

    3. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Additionally, we are going to update the Themes landing page to make it easier for people to find the type of theme they are looking for. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831835

  4. Caspy7 wrote on

    In somewhat unrelated news…
    Perhaps at some point someone might give a mention/blog posting about LibreOffice using Firefox themes (personas).
    http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LibreOffice-4-0-RC1-supports-Firefox-compatible-themes-1783133.html
    I found this a surprising but interesting development.

  5. Jivko wrote on

    Moving the full themes link does not fix the problem. Meanwhile I’ve lost 1/2 of my weekly downloads. Put some previews of the most popular or upcoming themes like you did with personas.

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      We’re working on improving the themes landing page to address this issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=831835

  6. Dan Ullman wrote on

    Is there any chance this will be fixed?

  7. sys9kdr wrote on

    I visited AMO just now and clicked themes.
    But “Full theme” section was not displayed.
    I found “Complete theme” section only.
    Did you rename “Full theme” to “Complete theme”?

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Yes, sorry for the confusion. Our original intention was for “themes” to represent any visual customization of Firefox, and make the distinction between “background themes” and “complete themes” when necessary. The original announcement is here: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2012/03/01/personas-are-joining-the-themes-family/. There was a miscommunication when the change was made, so for about two weeks they were called Full Themes before we made the correction.