Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: developers end users

Upcoming changes for themes

11 responses

Theming capabilities on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) will undergo significant changes in the coming weeks. We will be switching to a new theme technology that will give designers more flexibility to create their themes. It includes support for multiple background images, and styling of toolbars and tabs. We will migrate all existing themes to this new format, and their users should not notice any changes.

As part of this upgrade, we need to remove the theme preview feature on AMO. This feature allowed you to hover over the theme image and see it applied on your browser toolbar. It doesn’t work very reliably because image sizes and network speed can make it slow and unpredictable.

Given that the new themes are potentially more complex, the user experience is likely to worsen. Thus, we decided to drop this in favor of a simpler install and uninstall experience (which is also coming soon). The preview feature will be disabled starting today.

It’s only a matter of weeks before we release the new theme format on AMO. Keep following this blog for that announcement.

11 comments on “Upcoming changes for themes”

  1. Bob i wrote on

    This new theme system would it allow the return of a theme like red cats?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Not quite. Changing the button design is not currently supported (though you can change button coloring).

  2. Robert Ab wrote on

    This work is a wast of time. First concentrate, please, on missing WE APIs.

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Different people work on different things. WE API work is ongoing, following priorities (which you may or may not agree with).

      1. Robert Ab wrote on

        Problem is that removing XUL addon support caused workflow problems for some users relying on Firefox and its extensions. And the work on new APIs is just too slow. It is now almost a year from the introduction of FF57.

        1. basil wrote on

          This. I use chrome at work, and find it easier to replicate my old setup there than finding addon replacements that’d work (and behave the same way) with ff57.

          Just wondering, when are you coming out with the usage stats? For all this fuss about the new firefox, there hasn’t been any major crowing about how many people stayed vs changed browsers or went to esr. hmm, i wonder why…

  3. Bob wrote on

    Can you bring back the theme preview feature?

  4. Matt wrote on

    I miss the themes in the od Firefox. I know it isn’t important and that there might be security concerns with the old add-ons but right now I can access only three add-ons in the add-ons manager. Everything else I try gives me a server error message. I think it adds to the enjoyment of the browser experience if you can customize the appearance to show sports themes, night skies, falling leaves or whatever you want When will these new changes be completed and the server error message be stopped?

    1. Jorge Villalobos wrote on

      Not sure what you’re referring to. Can you provide more details about the server error?

  5. Mel wrote on

    Can you bring back the preview. It’s a complete waste of time and effort to install a theme, only to realize that it looks awful.

  6. malone wrote on

    Please bring back theme preview feature! Background image says absolutely nothing about how a theme will look in the browser!