this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2022
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Did I understand correctly ? Is this a customiszation feature that will be deliberately not available any more to users ? While still being implemented under the hood and taking space in a dedicated menu ? How is this good news for users ?
They're just dicking about for marketing purposes and to give a soft introduction to Firefox's customizability for non-technical users.
You can still install thousands of themes from https://addons.mozilla.org and do even more customization with a userChrome.css file, if you need it.
I'm also guessing, they simply install a theme-addon for whichever Colorway the user selected, so it doesn't use some special implementation, it's just the usual extension API.
So, they're only really removing the splash screen that would show up after upgrades or on new Firefox installations. The actual customizability is not reduced.
So you mean all those themes will still be easily accessible to anyone who wants it ? Then the phrasing is terrible ! They make it sound like they want to create artificial rarity which in itself is to my eyes against free software spirit altogether !
I'm not sure, they intended it to sound like that. My interpretation was that they just didn't want to have this going on forever, as (at least to me) that pop-up did start to get annoying, but then they also didn't either want to take away people's favorite theme, so they decided to have users keep that when upgrading.
Then again, maybe they did intend it to sound like that for marketing purposes, because undeniably people are talking about Firefox.
In any case, I think, Colorways should be seen as a marketing move, for promoting either Firefox itself or for promoting that you can theme Firefox.
As for all these Colorway themes still being accessible, that's the one thing where I would've done things differently. I would've liked it, if they provided an add-on collection with all the Colorway themes downloadable from addons.mozilla.org.
Then they could've gone "Oops, Colorway themes are gone, but did you know that Firefox was extremely themable all along? If you miss some of the Colorways, you can install them from $ADDON_COLLECTION and do explore the many other themes our awesome users have created.”.
I'm still angry becauqe it feels like shady marketing move where product success is more important than user rights. That being said, I get that Mozilla us not the anticapitalist structure I would like it to be.
"Your 94 colorway and the 97 collection will all be available within the add-ons manager." This sentence is a clear proof to my eyes that they intended do make old themes explicitly inaccessible. Why not : "94 colorways and the 97 collection will all be available within the add-ons manager."
Mozilla doesn't have a profit motive, which is enough for me to give them the benefit of the doubt. (There's the legally-non-profit "Mozilla Foundation" and the legally-for-profit "Mozilla Corporation", but the latter is a 100% subsidiary of the former, so they cannot pay those profits out to anyone. They can only pay their employees' wages and re-invest into their projects.)
They do still want as many people using Firefox/Gecko as possible, since that is critically important for their non-profit mission and does help them pay their employee's wages etc., so that's why they are doing marketing nonetheless. Google Chrome didn't exactly gain its popularity without aggressive / anti-competitive marketing either.
As for those 94-Colorways being available in the add-ons manager, well, if you are already in the add-ons manager, you can just type into the search bar and find literal thousands of just as cool user-created themes. Some users even re-created Mozilla's Colorway themes.
So, again, I don't think they are hurting anybody by rotating their curated selection of themes. It would kind of defeat the point, if they kept adding to that list, since it would stop being something that users can quickly explore, and again, their themes aren't really better than the user-created themes behind that search bar.