6/06/2004 09:53:00 PM - The New Face of Firefox
Mozillazine has been slashdotted again. This time it is due to the plans to change the default Firefox theme. I must say that I find it amusing that (1) the brand identity keeps changing and (2) people care so damn much.
Let's tackle the first one. When I first started using this product, I was using Phoenix. I had just switched from K-Meleon, which seemed to have ground to a halt at the time. Their reason, as I would find out much later, was that they were waiting on some bug in Mozilla to be fixed. It was too late. I was hooked on Phoenix. It had themes, extensions, and was updated frequently. Then came the naming crisis. Firebird was chosen. People complained. Nothing unusual there. Then it went from Firebird to Firefox. Not nearly as much complaining this time. Somewhere in there the default theme went from Orbit to Qute. Most people complained that they couldn't figure out what the trhobber was supposed to be. And now a new theme has come along. I've seen forum postings aluding to the fact that Qute wasn't free enough, although Arvid has said that he could be pursuaded. As it is, some of the official artwork is only available in official builds.
It was early into my use of Phoenix that I found a theme that I liked. It was a port of the Pinball theme that was available for Mozilla. I've been using Pinball ever since then. I liked it so much that I even started contributing to the theme, helping skin new widgets and getting Text + Icon Mode working right (pesky go button). The changing of the default theme has never made a difference to me; I can easily change it. There are 70 themes and 185 extensions for Firefox 0.8. Why are people concentrating on a bunch of images? This certainly doesn't make the browser less usable.
