Firefox Theme

The Mozilla community (community? hardly seems like that with all the sniping now . . .) has gone nuts in the past few days since the announcement that Qute, the default Firefox theme on Windows (maybe Linux, too? I don't know) will be replaced with "Winstripe," which is a take on the Pinstripe theme used on Mac Firefox.

Much of the Windows Firefox community is up in arms, writing mean-spirited comments aimed at the Mozilla leadership and swearing their allegiance to Qute. We'll forget for the time being that there's no reason Qute can't continue development and be used by all who like it as an alternative theme, since that appears to be an ineffective argument. But it's also ineffective to claim new people won't choose Firefox as their default browser because they won't like Winstripe. It's not polished yet, I suppose, but it's certainly not horrendously ugly. And I doubt so many people use Internet Explorer on Windows because of its smashing design.

But what I'd like to point out is that on the Mac side of things, we've been through this a number of times. There's just not so much noise since there are fewer of us. People bellyached to no end when Camino ditched the blue toolbar icons for Safari-style (and also, Firefox Pinstripe-style) buttons. But it wasn't until people stopped saying "we hate you!" to the designers and gave some real feedback (such as, the contrast isn't great with white buttons on a white background) that the designers listened and created some lovely colored buttons. I've found the color cues make it a lot easier to hit the right button, and the graphics themselves are smooth yet not flat.

And Pinstripe on Firefox wasn't just stuck in the browser and left to sit on its laurels. Just when I was starting to think the original Pinstripe really did look quite a bit unpolished, the developers unleashed a new, very well-done version. It was breathtaking even when that first revision arrived. Clearly, someone had put in a lot of care. And then the theme turned out even better on Thunderbird. These people make terrific toolbar icons, so I am sure the Windows theme is in good hands.

As for everyone carping about how the Qute developer found out that Qute was being dumped -- well, it was going to hurt no matter how he learned about it, I'm sure. And surely he's gotten plenty of revenge for whatever hurt he feels by getting so many people to flame the Mozilla leaders. It's not at all classy.