My most authentic self while browsing the web is when I can finally again start to use the full range of extensions on current Firefox for Android. That would really make me feel included in the experience.
It's really hard for me to grasp the many somewhat random new ideas Mozilla works on while some fundamental mechanics of the product are still broken.
edit: ... I don't want to sound as if this is in itself a bad addition. It's just that it feels as if the house is burning and they are painting the door.
I mean technically you can already do that, they're just not making it easy. At least not "Look we've made a colour picker so you can mess up whatever theme you had!" easy.
They've made a blog post about it a while back, it involves installing the nightly version and working your way through a few menus to switch their 'featured' list of extensions with a custom extension list published on addons.mozilla.com. [1]
Firefox gave me a confusing popup window on the first start after updating. It didn't explain what "colorways" are. I closed it.
This article is called "Introducing new Colorways for Firefox 94" but doesn't explain what the feature does, beyond being "a new feature that allows our users to express their most authentic selves and to bring them joy while browsing the web".
I went to mozilla.org and, in two clicks, reached the page for "Firefox for Desktop". It has a section with "Latest Firefox features", one of which is "Personalize your experience with new colorways"... But that text is not clickable, so I'm not getting more information there either.
I guess Mozilla doesn't want me to know what "Colorways" are.
They're colour themes. Mozilla's celebrating the fact that you can change Firefox's colour theme while trying to spin it as something super unique.
> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.
Basically, fashion-industry word salad, but for the tech industry! Hooray!
They invented a word because... um... adding jargon to the lexicon results in... less... jargon? I mean, when I saw the word "colorways" I interpreted it as a synonym for "waveguides." Story checks out, I guess?
Oh, apparently, my eyes filter out the word 'fashion'. Shoe nerds. Great market segment to target. They probably know how to install apps. That'll save the ship.
Colorways is a pretty common word in other areas though, so it's not entirely made up. Colorways is used extensively in the shoe world to describe when new colors/patterns on an older shoe line drop.
It's way more jargony than "theme", which has been used for color themes since at least win 3.1 and is fairly well-known in that sense among the general population.
Meanwhile, I'd never heard of "color ways" until like 3 years ago, and I'd still not have if I didn't pay (too much) attention to tech and industry news.
[EDIT] Oh my god, it's even worse, I read other posts on this thread and just realized that I got it from getting very slightly into shoes, not even from tech news. LOL. Yeah, this is a terrible name.
Funny thing is, I know enough shoe nerds to parse the phrase "on an older shoe line drop," but this is still the first time I've seen the word.
And I know people in more general clothing fashion, and also interior design. Is this a fashion term or is somebody on the naming committee really into shoes?
And they really shouldn't. If you're not pissing off your power users you're not moving fast enough. The only user-stories that mass-market browser makers should care about are casual users browsing the web and software developers publishing to to the web.
Power users are a completely different market segment and have totally different needs and expectations from causal users.
But they're not moving fast enough, unfortunately. That's why there are a lot of new features available on Chrome that are not on Firefox, and that matters a lot for normal users because for them it's the browser that's broken, not the website.
This "strategy" will only drive the few remaining users away who actively decided to use Firefox while not winning any new "casual users" over (because those don't care about what differentiates Firefox from Chrome or Safari, they're all just web browsers after all).
> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.
It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard the word “colorway”. That’s how disconnected Mozilla is from reality.
It's a fairly common term for shoes, and (I think) for other clothing as well. While I'm not a fan of importing fashion jargon to computing, it's more connected to reality than certain HN commenters seem to be.
> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.
What's weird here is that they consider "branching out from our language of \"browser\"" a completely normal phrase but the word "theme" far too technical for 'everyday users'.
Though that's nowhere near as weird as the fact that they think "Colourways" is a normal word, that'll disqualify anyone who has English as their second or third language for a start, but maybe it's more commonly known amongst native speakers?
> They're colour themes. Mozilla's celebrating the fact that you can change Firefox's colour theme while trying to spin it as something super unique.
This is incredibly misguided to me.
Who is your core base? Clearly, someone who went out of their way to install a third-party browser on an operating system that likely comes with a pre-installed Chromium browser (whether Microsoft or Google) did that for a reason.
And they likely didn't do it because they wanted better themes or were unaware such a feature exists.
Has been user since Netscape open sourced it. Initially it gained a lot of users largely due to it been very customizable and listened to feedbacks. Over the years, I don't use FF anymore especially when they deprecated xul and Waterfox/Palemoon forked out. They lost most of their core that I think they not sure who is their core base.
I'm just glad the decades-long nightmare of not being able to express my most authentic self while paying my gas bill and looking at lolcat pictures is finally over.
I had the same experience - a popup that sounded like it wanted me to get into another "Pocket" type thing so I dismissed it. Only when I wanted to switch my theme did I see that actually some of the (ugh) Colorways are kinda nice. It's a bit weird they wrapped it in a vague SV startup name and didn't bother tell us what it was.
> I guess Mozilla doesn't want me to know what "Colorways" are.
They don't. They want the user to try it out, to get them get used to a temporary feature. Who on Earth would want to get used to a temporary feature?
Compare it to subscription software. I hate such, I prefer to buy a license and own it forever, but I understand devs gotta eat. With a subscription software at least you know next month/year/whatever you are going to have to pay for access or the next version. With Mozilla Firefox, the feature is... going to be removed.
I'm very curious who came up with this idea. I wonder if its some marketing fellow who has zero clue about technology. Cause it very much feels like a feature from the physical world being applied to the digital one. Improperly applied, I might add.
Or perhaps its a lie to trigger FOMO, and in 2 versions they'll say "ah, due to the great success we are going to keep the feature" or they'll perhaps make it part of Mozilla subscription. Which is, TBH, fair enough, but then it makes me feel like a beta tester. Which is, TBH, fair enough, but be upfront about it and I opted out of beta tests/surveys/etc.
From the article: "What inspired you to make the jump from fashion and retail into a tech company?", a question which might help explain the pivot to form over function.
Not exactly new, Mozilla always comes with a "revolutionizing the UI!" every now and then. The annoying part is that is increasing, the accumulated banality combined with useful features being removed
> Colorways are just the start of a dialogue of our expression of Firefox, what we believe the experience of using the independent browser should be and could be.
Though, I’m not sure this is the beginning of allowing users to customize Firefox :p
Plus, editing the base stylesheet for Firefox used to be very common and allowed for even more flexibility.
I’m a huge fan of making color themes very easy to use and modify. So I hope this feature allows for complete customization rather than just picking from a few pre-defined swaths. Otherwise, it’s kind of missing the mark on the bit about letting users choose their own environment for the web.
> These Colorways are here for the next two product releases (they won’t go away if you’ve selected it). This is a limited-time release which is intended to embrace the “now moment.”
I find this odd. They are changing the options every few releases to increase engagement. I don’t get why that’s important for this feature. Why not just add new ones? It doesn’t seem very user friendly.
So. It’s cool! But I’m worried it’s more about making Firefox trendy than about giving users power.
Edit: I tried it out, and unfortunately there is no user-customization. And I don't even enjoy most of the "colorways"! Where are the blue colors, for example?
It's disappointing to me that they didn't just ship Firefox Color as a built-in addon. They could have even made all these colorways default theme choices.
Having a default theme that follows the system is great. But browsers allow running different different windows as different profiles with different cookies and credentials, and being able to tell those profiles apart at a glance is an important use case for web developers.
Both Chrome and now Safari have some attempt at useful tab management via tab groups. I feel like Mozilla is just bike shedding now when they could be making high value improvements in tab and bookmark management.
The current mozilla ceo is doing whatever they get paid to do by the advertising investors. They are driving firefox slowly to the ground.
Firing developers, nerfing the UI, removing feature which had be stable for years. You name it, every single change is to drive this browser to the ground. Mark my word, we wont have a firefox we love in 5-10 years max.
Firefox Android has an innovative tab whack a mole game, where they keep opening a new tab for everything, and every couple of hours you have to individually close old tabs you don't want anymore. Try to avoid hitting the ones you want to keep! It's lots of fun.
The amount of marketing bullshit packed into this announcement about themes is frankly embarrassing, and makes me even more worried about the direction Mozilla is going in.
> of our diverse verbal languages. And we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.
And they think "Colorways" is a word people will say in everyday life more than "themes"?
I can just about guarantee it's a less-well-known term than "theme", as far as theme's usage to signify changing or customizing the colors of software. As in, way more people who aren't nerds will see "theme" and know what it means as it relates to software, than will see "colorways" and even have any point of reference for its meaning to maybe figure out the connection. Probably more people know what "Pantone" means, than "colorways". It's that obscure and jargony.
It's a term used in fashion to describe a given collection's theme, expressed in one or more outfits comprised of one or more pieces of clothing, accessories, and makeup.
I can't say whether that's widely understood or not, but I am familiar with it, so fyi for others.
Being a die-hard Firefox user of 15+ years it hurts me to say, but WHO THE HELL CARES. Sounds like yet another random whimsical UI bullshit that Firefox is overflowing with these days.
That's not what your core users want, more of an exact opposite, and it's not something that would help you stop FF market presence decline, leave alone reverse it.
I'm really sad about this. Every announcement I see from Mozilla fills me with dread that they're just milking whatever income they've got while driving the browser into the ground, in silent support of the inevitable Chrome monoculture.
Mozilla hates their core users. They think that things like this will attract "trendie" and "diverse" users, which is a futile endeavor. "Trendie" people are always jumping from trend to trend, so even if they switch, they will just switch away when the new trend comes along. "Diverse" people use what ever panders to their race or sexuality the most, and Google panders to them far more than Mozilla ever could.
Maybe when Mozilla finally kicks the bucket in a few years, someone will start something else that isn't just a Chrome fork.
> Maybe when Mozilla finally kicks the bucket in a few years, someone will start something else that isn't just a Chrome fork.
I hoped for quite a while that Servo was the beginning of something that would become the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox to Firefox's current bloated, Mozilla-(the browser)-like state. The layoffs mostly crushed that hope.
They’ve said before that the work that was done in Servo has already been incorporated into the shipping version of Firefox. It would have been better if they didn’t have to do layoffs, however the Servo project served its purpose.
> "Diverse" people use what ever panders to their race or sexuality the most, and Google panders to them far more than Mozilla ever could.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, how the fuck can a browser, the most universal platform we have right now, cater to any specific minority group? I'd get it if you were talking about accessibility, but what does the browser have to do with your race or sexuality?
It so appears Mozilla has decided to die on this hill, remember that they published the "We need more than deplatforming" bullshit last year while Firefox slowly bleeds to death.
The thing that really is baffling about this article is that whenever I see saccharine, unspecific, obtuse, corporate language like this, I at least understand why the language is the way it is. Usually it's some company is in hot water and is trying to make sure no one can quote a single line in their press release.
But... Why would Mozilla be trying to obfuscate setting the color of the browser? What's to gain from that? I assume someone looked at this blog post, maybe even multiple people? And then, I assume, thought to themselves: "Yup, this communicated what I want to communicate."
But it's hard for me to imagine an audience that would be receptive to ... this.
The only way I've been able to make sense of Mozilla over the last decade is to figure they've been taken over by several interests that don't align with a bright future for the browser, for the company/foundation, or the needs of users. There seems to be some kind of slow-motion many-party cannibalism underway.
Based on the recent actions from Mozilla, they appear to believe that the core technology behind their browser is fine and competitive, and that the issue lies with the perception of the market. Futhermore, they believe if they could just get the existing users excited, they'll be able to grow their market share again. Unfortunately, this isn't going to work.
Sometimes I wonder if the current leadership team even use Firefox on a day to day basis.
But nobody speaks like that. Nobody even thinks like that. A normal human would have said "you can now change your browser's colour scheme, which we think is kinda nice".
There are a lot of people living in a head bubble who think they can put in two years at a FAANG and change the world. This is an outgrowth of that mentality where trivial things are sold as something revolutionary so someone can feel like they "made a difference".
They are using woke corporate speak to convey to you what they are really trying to sell: not a browser or its features but values and virtues, and a certain ideology or belief system.
It's another example of the Stone-toss comic "..Burgers?"[0]. The browser and Mozilla is just the medium for the message.
I'm all in for ridiculing the use of jargony fashion terms like "colorways" when a word like "colors" would suffice. But I fail to see how their statement reads as "woke". To me this article just seems like bog-standard marketing-speak.
I would value them adding to that sentence "... and we won't EVER do to your desktop browser what we did to the Android one, and also we're sorry about that and this is the bugzilla link where we're fixing that grave breach of trust of our users"
There is no doubt in my mind that themes and good colour support is very important and that their claim of boosted engagement is correct when the user picks a colour.
The joke to me is the blog post explaining it. I had to dig for a while to find out what a colourway even is. The first few paragraphs were meaningless marketing dribble.
My whole desktop environment already has a theme… and has had one for… thirty plus years. What makes a browser developer think they need to interrupt me to choose colors I've already chosen?
> Why would Mozilla be trying to obfuscate setting the color of the browser? What's to gain from that?
This is one of the things that really got me on board with the ideas of free software and Richard Stallman. I understand why corporations would want to force users to comply with data, tracking, etc. But they even go to the point of imposing cosmetic decisions. The ideal Android UI for me was whatever my Galaxy S3 had, yet for some reason I'm forced to upgrade to new, increasingly uglier system UIs as I upgrade Android versions. why?
I remember a few years ago when theme customization was removed from most desktop environments. Dark theme was removed from Android, though it may have come back.
> These Colorways are here for the next two product releases (they won’t go away if you’ve selected it). This is a limited-time release which is intended to embrace the “now moment.”
Unclear to me what this means exactly. Will they remove the feature entirely or just plan to change up the colorways available?
sounds like there are color themes that users have a limited time to select before they remove the ability to select these specific color themes in future releases, as a marketing tactic.
this whole thing is just baffling top-to-bottom. who is this aimed at? normies aren't shopping around for browsers, though maybe the "diversity" platitudes work on someone.
Since releases are like once every 6 weeks, its available for ~3 months. What happens when I buy say a new computer in March 2022? Or if I buy one soon, and it arrived in March 2022? I can't apply this Firefox theme because it was available for a limited amount of time?
Everything is available for a limited amount of time. But this is too limited.
I find this utterly ridiculous. Its self defeating. Why would I get used to a feature which is going to unavailable in 3 months? Sure, it stays available if you selected it [1] but what happens if you reinstall your OS or get a new device?
Given its FOSS though, wouldn't it be possible to re-add this feature, even as themes? After all, its just a theme pack. Or is it proprietary?
[1] Supposedly, you could export your profile directory or something like that. But perhaps they're gonna make it available via a subscription in 3 months. Which is their right.
Looks like it's just a way of indirectly promoting the Firefox Color extension with several built-in examples of what you could do with it... Without talking about the extension that allows this at all.
So, this feels like a small project for someone learning the Firefox code with some nice looking marketing on top.
I tried a few different colour schemes, they were all dreadful contrast and went back to default. Who asked for this and more to the point why are they all hard to read?
Firefox this is not what I want in my browser. Fix the weird problems with Youtube videos cutting out, improve tab management dramatically, bookmarks equally could do with some work. The core features need work, I don't need yet another way for the browser to look bad.
I feel like this is an April 1 thing that accidentally shipped in November: a fabricated nonsense world coupled with an abhorrent and unavoidable eyesoreness to every page.
Baffling. Well, at least Microsoft Edge is usable these days...
Yep I loved that part, after clicking not interested in the new theme feature, the user is presented with an additional inescapable popup that only is dismissed by clicking the single button (which I am sure is an analytic metric)
I remember long ago when Firefox (actually maybe it was chrome) added some theming ability and I went into gimp and crafted my own theme out of gradients and some photos. It was extraordinarily ugly (I was determined to use every single colour) however it was fun to make and it was mine.
The article talks a lot about customisation, but you get six times three choices, which is barely 4 bits, to express yourself. I feel like the description does not really line up with the implementation.
>but you get six times three choices, which is barely 4 bits, to express yourself.
This reminded me so much of that one Better Off Ted[0] episode, especially considering all the marketing speak in that article on top. In it, the Veridian company decided to allow employees to individualize their work space, but couldn't allow them to make choices themselves, so they choose the individuality for their employees, out of 4 exciting and non-offensive choices. "Enjoy your new personalities".
This could be the stroke of genius for Firefox to finally break free of its funding dependency on Google, with one small addition: paid themes^W colorways. If people's willing to buy custom skins for games, I don't see why not they wouldn't for their browser.
Sheesh, this reads like an Onion article. Isn't this just color themes? E.g. a standard feature before the UI/UX gods decided that taking features away from users is a good thing?
I for one enjoyed trying out the different color schemes to see what looks good.
Now what they mean by "limited time only", I have no idea. Are the colours going to suddenly revert with a new version of the browser? If so, why?
The FOMO marketing BS definitely puts a damper on the whole thing.
Like most other readers here, my initial reaction is "Thanks, I hate it." I especially hate the assertion that they're increasing customization when in reality they've steadily been removing/hiding real customization options (e.g. compact theme, UrlBar.preventClickSelectsAll).
But, on further consideration I see the value. This feature isn't for power users. The goal of this feature is to increase chances that normal everyday users will make Firefox their daily-driver browser. For many people, having a custom colored browser will be a deciding factor to keep them using Firefox. This is why they didn't call it "themes", which is a techy word that would cause many people to gloss-over and ignore it altogether.
And, in reality, Firefox is still the most customizable browser for power-users. This feature doesn't remove userChrome.css, it doesn't stop users from editing thousands of options via about:config. It doesn't prevent hardcore power users from editing omni.ja to restore preventClickSelectsAll functionality.
So frankly, I hope this feature can help increase Firefox's market share by even a little bit. The more people using Firefox - even if they're not power-users - the better for the future of the open web.
My, and I bet many others', reaction to this article can be summed up in one concise acronym: WTF.
Sure, take away and slowly degrade all the other customisation opportunities that Firefox has, and what makes us choose it, but at least you can choose the colours!!!!
The whole flowery BS language about being diverse and inclusive just gives this shitshow even more facepalm-worthiness. The Mozilla I knew and liked is certainly no more.
This is a good illustration of a diversity/inclusion hire bringing new perspectives to a product.
I saw the splash screen for this feature the first time I opened Firefox after updating. I selected a colorway, if only to make Firefox browser windows stand out from my other windows, which is useful as I have to log into several cloud accounts.
The thing I immediately noticed is that 2 of the 3 'experiences' of each color are basically a 'dark mode' for that color. I don't find any of them very readable.
The second thing I noticed is it also gets rid of the specific color theme of Private windows which is a little annoying. So they have some things to fix.
Lastly, if you want blue or green or purple browser windows, just change your Windows color theme.
> And we don’t really tolerate this type of what I would say are one-size-fits-all tools anywhere else in our lives.
Oh my god, yes we do. Overwhelmingly, yes, that's the norm for tools. Very few people give a shit what color their hammer or circular saw or whatever is, unless it's something to do with colors improving safety. I give no thought to the color of anything in my kitchen unless it's going to be visible most or all of the time, at which point it's a fashion concern, nothing to do with tools. And you know what color's best, then, 99% of the time? "Same as everything else".
All I ask is that my web browser's appearance fit in well among the other applications in my operating system. Unfortunately, Firefox stopped caring about this a long time ago, along with pretty much everyone else. Australis was the last version of Firefox's interface that I enjoyed using.
145 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadIt's really hard for me to grasp the many somewhat random new ideas Mozilla works on while some fundamental mechanics of the product are still broken.
edit: ... I don't want to sound as if this is in itself a bad addition. It's just that it feels as if the house is burning and they are painting the door.
They've made a blog post about it a while back, it involves installing the nightly version and working your way through a few menus to switch their 'featured' list of extensions with a custom extension list published on addons.mozilla.com. [1]
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
This article is called "Introducing new Colorways for Firefox 94" but doesn't explain what the feature does, beyond being "a new feature that allows our users to express their most authentic selves and to bring them joy while browsing the web".
I went to mozilla.org and, in two clicks, reached the page for "Firefox for Desktop". It has a section with "Latest Firefox features", one of which is "Personalize your experience with new colorways"... But that text is not clickable, so I'm not getting more information there either.
I guess Mozilla doesn't want me to know what "Colorways" are.
> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.
Basically, fashion-industry word salad, but for the tech industry! Hooray!
Meanwhile, I'd never heard of "color ways" until like 3 years ago, and I'd still not have if I didn't pay (too much) attention to tech and industry news.
[EDIT] Oh my god, it's even worse, I read other posts on this thread and just realized that I got it from getting very slightly into shoes, not even from tech news. LOL. Yeah, this is a terrible name.
And I know people in more general clothing fashion, and also interior design. Is this a fashion term or is somebody on the naming committee really into shoes?
It's sort of odd to use shoe-industry lingo instead of tech-industry lingo when you are a web browser company.
Colorways is such a niche lingo that most people outside the niche don't even recognize that it's a word.
Power users are a completely different market segment and have totally different needs and expectations from causal users.
Bold of you to assume they really care about which browser they use. I'd not be surprised if the vast majority of them use Edge and Safari.
The other day my mother asked me to check her pc for problems, while at it I was like
"...let me remove Chrome and install Firefox"
-"Don't do that" she said
-"Why?!" I was surprised because she is old and not technical at all, why would she even know what a Firefox is... Or have such strong opinion
-"Just don't do it, I don't like it"
-"Ok, I'll leave Chrome and you can try both"
-"Won't that use more space?"
-"Not really a problem as long you don't open both at same time"
-"Don't do it I have already tried it" and more or less ended there, but I am still curious why
Maybe I should explain her that now it is different because they have colors ways....
(with fast internet, low ram, and still HDD, I thought that Firefox with disk, and memory, cache disabled would be best)
It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard the word “colorway”. That’s how disconnected Mozilla is from reality.
What's weird here is that they consider "branching out from our language of \"browser\"" a completely normal phrase but the word "theme" far too technical for 'everyday users'.
Though that's nowhere near as weird as the fact that they think "Colourways" is a normal word, that'll disqualify anyone who has English as their second or third language for a start, but maybe it's more commonly known amongst native speakers?
This is incredibly misguided to me.
Who is your core base? Clearly, someone who went out of their way to install a third-party browser on an operating system that likely comes with a pre-installed Chromium browser (whether Microsoft or Google) did that for a reason.
And they likely didn't do it because they wanted better themes or were unaware such a feature exists.
My #1 reason for using Safari, despite its kinda sucking in a lot of ways, is battery life.
#2? Lighter load on system resources generally, than Chrome or FF.
#3, though? It doesn't spam me all the time with "helpful" messages about very frequent updates.
They don't. They want the user to try it out, to get them get used to a temporary feature. Who on Earth would want to get used to a temporary feature?
Compare it to subscription software. I hate such, I prefer to buy a license and own it forever, but I understand devs gotta eat. With a subscription software at least you know next month/year/whatever you are going to have to pay for access or the next version. With Mozilla Firefox, the feature is... going to be removed.
I'm very curious who came up with this idea. I wonder if its some marketing fellow who has zero clue about technology. Cause it very much feels like a feature from the physical world being applied to the digital one. Improperly applied, I might add.
Or perhaps its a lie to trigger FOMO, and in 2 versions they'll say "ah, due to the great success we are going to keep the feature" or they'll perhaps make it part of Mozilla subscription. Which is, TBH, fair enough, but then it makes me feel like a beta tester. Which is, TBH, fair enough, but be upfront about it and I opted out of beta tests/surveys/etc.
Though, I’m not sure this is the beginning of allowing users to customize Firefox :p
For example, Firefox color already exists: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-color.... It allows for a lot of custom colors across the Firefox UI. It’s even official and easy to use! Not sure why it’s not built in honestly.
Plus, editing the base stylesheet for Firefox used to be very common and allowed for even more flexibility.
I’m a huge fan of making color themes very easy to use and modify. So I hope this feature allows for complete customization rather than just picking from a few pre-defined swaths. Otherwise, it’s kind of missing the mark on the bit about letting users choose their own environment for the web.
> These Colorways are here for the next two product releases (they won’t go away if you’ve selected it). This is a limited-time release which is intended to embrace the “now moment.”
I find this odd. They are changing the options every few releases to increase engagement. I don’t get why that’s important for this feature. Why not just add new ones? It doesn’t seem very user friendly.
So. It’s cool! But I’m worried it’s more about making Firefox trendy than about giving users power.
Edit: I tried it out, and unfortunately there is no user-customization. And I don't even enjoy most of the "colorways"! Where are the blue colors, for example?
Maybe now that other browsers are shipping this they'll bring it back.
But does improved tab management "embrace the now moment"?
Firing developers, nerfing the UI, removing feature which had be stable for years. You name it, every single change is to drive this browser to the ground. Mark my word, we wont have a firefox we love in 5-10 years max.
Makes me so sad :(‘
And they think "Colorways" is a word people will say in everyday life more than "themes"?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=color+theme%2C...
I can't say whether that's widely understood or not, but I am familiar with it, so fyi for others.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=theme%2Ccolorw...
That's not what your core users want, more of an exact opposite, and it's not something that would help you stop FF market presence decline, leave alone reverse it.
Maybe when Mozilla finally kicks the bucket in a few years, someone will start something else that isn't just a Chrome fork.
I hoped for quite a while that Servo was the beginning of something that would become the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox to Firefox's current bloated, Mozilla-(the browser)-like state. The layoffs mostly crushed that hope.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, how the fuck can a browser, the most universal platform we have right now, cater to any specific minority group? I'd get it if you were talking about accessibility, but what does the browser have to do with your race or sexuality?
Colorways and current Mozilla is the same, appearances over content
But... Why would Mozilla be trying to obfuscate setting the color of the browser? What's to gain from that? I assume someone looked at this blog post, maybe even multiple people? And then, I assume, thought to themselves: "Yup, this communicated what I want to communicate."
But it's hard for me to imagine an audience that would be receptive to ... this.
More sadness: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Sometimes I wonder if the current leadership team even use Firefox on a day to day basis.
It says right in the article: allows our users to express their most authentic selves and to bring them joy while browsing the web.
There are a lot of people living in a head bubble who think they can put in two years at a FAANG and change the world. This is an outgrowth of that mentality where trivial things are sold as something revolutionary so someone can feel like they "made a difference".
All those futile things about people, spirituality and creating stuff were exhaustively complicated.
https://itdm.com/mozilla-firefox-usage-down-85-but-why-are-e...
It's another example of the Stone-toss comic "..Burgers?"[0]. The browser and Mozilla is just the medium for the message.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/are-you-sure-this-will-help-u...
Much easier to construct that defence of a bad idea than to have a good idea.
Also Stonetoss is an antisemetic white nationalist so he’s not a great example of sane commentary.
Hint to Mozilla - the only effective marketing you have is: "Firefox isn't feeding your data to Google's AI and it has uBlock Origin."
I'll hold my breath
As far as I know it's the only browser for Android that supports the uBlock addon, that's why it is my go-to browser.
There was a time when one could run many extensions on Firefox on Android. Mozilla restricted it to just a few.
I am still sad about losing Stylus.
I didn't mind playing with colorways for a few minutes.
The joke to me is the blog post explaining it. I had to dig for a while to find out what a colourway even is. The first few paragraphs were meaningless marketing dribble.
This is one of the things that really got me on board with the ideas of free software and Richard Stallman. I understand why corporations would want to force users to comply with data, tracking, etc. But they even go to the point of imposing cosmetic decisions. The ideal Android UI for me was whatever my Galaxy S3 had, yet for some reason I'm forced to upgrade to new, increasingly uglier system UIs as I upgrade Android versions. why?
This articles also states:
> These Colorways are here for the next two product releases (they won’t go away if you’ve selected it). This is a limited-time release which is intended to embrace the “now moment.”
Unclear to me what this means exactly. Will they remove the feature entirely or just plan to change up the colorways available?
I guess the marketing goons think FOMO's a good hook in this context? Me neither.
At least with this feature Mozilla told us how long it'll be before they remove it.
this whole thing is just baffling top-to-bottom. who is this aimed at? normies aren't shopping around for browsers, though maybe the "diversity" platitudes work on someone.
Everything is available for a limited amount of time. But this is too limited.
I find this utterly ridiculous. Its self defeating. Why would I get used to a feature which is going to unavailable in 3 months? Sure, it stays available if you selected it [1] but what happens if you reinstall your OS or get a new device?
Given its FOSS though, wouldn't it be possible to re-add this feature, even as themes? After all, its just a theme pack. Or is it proprietary?
[1] Supposedly, you could export your profile directory or something like that. But perhaps they're gonna make it available via a subscription in 3 months. Which is their right.
So, this feels like a small project for someone learning the Firefox code with some nice looking marketing on top.
Firefox this is not what I want in my browser. Fix the weird problems with Youtube videos cutting out, improve tab management dramatically, bookmarks equally could do with some work. The core features need work, I don't need yet another way for the browser to look bad.
I feel like this is an April 1 thing that accidentally shipped in November: a fabricated nonsense world coupled with an abhorrent and unavoidable eyesoreness to every page.
Baffling. Well, at least Microsoft Edge is usable these days...
I got the same "I don't control my computer any more" feeling I get from shitty software like Windows 10.
The article talks a lot about customisation, but you get six times three choices, which is barely 4 bits, to express yourself. I feel like the description does not really line up with the implementation.
This reminded me so much of that one Better Off Ted[0] episode, especially considering all the marketing speak in that article on top. In it, the Veridian company decided to allow employees to individualize their work space, but couldn't allow them to make choices themselves, so they choose the individuality for their employees, out of 4 exciting and non-offensive choices. "Enjoy your new personalities".
[0] S01E07, 5:23, totally legit I am sure copy available here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6l5j39?start=323
[1] https://color.firefox.com/
Now what they mean by "limited time only", I have no idea. Are the colours going to suddenly revert with a new version of the browser? If so, why? The FOMO marketing BS definitely puts a damper on the whole thing.
But, on further consideration I see the value. This feature isn't for power users. The goal of this feature is to increase chances that normal everyday users will make Firefox their daily-driver browser. For many people, having a custom colored browser will be a deciding factor to keep them using Firefox. This is why they didn't call it "themes", which is a techy word that would cause many people to gloss-over and ignore it altogether.
And, in reality, Firefox is still the most customizable browser for power-users. This feature doesn't remove userChrome.css, it doesn't stop users from editing thousands of options via about:config. It doesn't prevent hardcore power users from editing omni.ja to restore preventClickSelectsAll functionality.
So frankly, I hope this feature can help increase Firefox's market share by even a little bit. The more people using Firefox - even if they're not power-users - the better for the future of the open web.
Sure, take away and slowly degrade all the other customisation opportunities that Firefox has, and what makes us choose it, but at least you can choose the colours!!!!
The whole flowery BS language about being diverse and inclusive just gives this shitshow even more facepalm-worthiness. The Mozilla I knew and liked is certainly no more.
Again, WTF.
I saw the splash screen for this feature the first time I opened Firefox after updating. I selected a colorway, if only to make Firefox browser windows stand out from my other windows, which is useful as I have to log into several cloud accounts.
The thing I immediately noticed is that 2 of the 3 'experiences' of each color are basically a 'dark mode' for that color. I don't find any of them very readable.
The second thing I noticed is it also gets rid of the specific color theme of Private windows which is a little annoying. So they have some things to fix.
Lastly, if you want blue or green or purple browser windows, just change your Windows color theme.
Oh my god, yes we do. Overwhelmingly, yes, that's the norm for tools. Very few people give a shit what color their hammer or circular saw or whatever is, unless it's something to do with colors improving safety. I give no thought to the color of anything in my kitchen unless it's going to be visible most or all of the time, at which point it's a fashion concern, nothing to do with tools. And you know what color's best, then, 99% of the time? "Same as everything else".