For those who are in love with Mozilla Firefox’s themes, there’s bad news. Mozilla is surely going to discontinue Firefox themes. The news about Mozilla to remove Firefox themes has come directly from Benjamin Smedberg, who is the Manager of Firefox quality engineering at Mozilla:
As part of Firefox great-or-dead, we’ve decided to stop support for “heavyweight” themes which can do arbitrary styling and replace chrome packages. We may simply remove that support completely, or we may extend lightweight themes with some additional features such as changing colors or icons.
Which Firefox themes will be discontinued
This news has come as a shock to the users of Firefox. Mozilla Firefox has always remained a browser that can be customized as per users’ wish. There are hundreds of themes available for Firefox to choose from. In fact, Firefox’s this add-on has been the USP of this browser. And many users have stuck with Firefox only for its themes. Some themes are extremely popular among users, such as Noia, FT, DeepDark, Sunset Over Water and Tiger Eyes. However, due to Mozilla’s new approach toward the ‘heavyweight’ themes, the support for these themes will be stopped. This is equally applicable to the Firefox direct clones.
Once this policy is applied, users will be left with custom toolbar backgrounds or the lightweight themes. It is not yet clear which Firefox themes will be treated as the ‘lightweight’ themes by Mozilla.
Users’ reaction to this?
Certainly not a great reaction! Most of the Firefox users are unhappy due to Mozilla’s decision to discontinue Firefox themes which will be categorized as ‘heavyweight’. Users loved its diversity. The browser’s strength was its customization. As a result, it is quite possible that most of the users who are loyal to the browser due to its themes, might just part ways.
Firefox/Mozilla will lose many users, but, like a good browser it will keep on ticking. I stopped using Firefox, about 4 years ago. I decided to use Chrome. When Firefox decided to do their updates/upgrades like Chrome does — I thought why use Firefox??? Plus, Firefox was getting way over bloated, in my opinion.
I tried themes once and was not particularly interested. I can see where people would be annoyed, I do know some style junkies that theme their entire OS. If they keep the old style addon development rather than the new API based addons (I doesn’t look like, judging by the FF Nightly discussion) then devs could just make addon-based themes.
I just got fed up with this new version of firefox 42.0 after update from 41.0.2. Going to use chrome now.
I used to use Firefox as my main browser when it was different from the rest. During the time before Persona themes came out. When every developer around was making full themes and the Firefox add-ons were the best ones around. Mozilla should’ve focused on what made Firefox better than the others and just improved on that. Making Firefox look and feel more like Chrome only hurts Firefox. Why choose a Chrome clone when you can just use Chrome? People only choose the clone when it’s cheaper than the original. Android is chosen over iOS because you can get an Android phone for every member of your family for the same cost as just one iPhone. But if the cheapest Android phone cost the same as the iPhone, almost no one would own an Android phone.
Got a pop up today (4/27/16) that FF is discontinuing personas plus. It asked me to rate a few things, asked for feedback. My feedback? THIS SUCKS. I use FF specifically because it’s different from Chrome and can be customized. I have a lot of addons and customization because I like my browser to look a certain way. If FF does not allow me to continue customizing it, I’m gone. Morons. I left Yahoo mail for the very same reason, they took away my ability to customize. Morons.