You are not alone. I'm starting to think something is wrong with me because I don't give an iota of a damn about any of this. I have watched people just get sucked into the rabbit hole of browsing for themes for the their browser while accomplishing exactly nothing after being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the choices. (Kinda like trying to find something to watch on streaming platforms)
Me, I have the default desktops from the OS, mobile OS, etc. I have too many windows covering my desktop to even care what it looks like. Yes, that's me, and I'm not even close to being everyone else. If this is the thing that convinces people to stop using Chrome, then fine. Spend time making the UI customizable to the point it looks like a MySpace background because that's what 99.9999% of people not me want. I'll do me, you do you.
Given that a huge number of Chrome users probably come from societies that actively despise this kind of stuff, it might actually backfire.
Lucky for them I guess most people outside of HN probably never even read that marketing material, so I think it's more of a circle jerk for the marketing dpt.
I'm pretty sure Chrome is the most common browser on the planet because Google abused its market position in search and mobile (Android) to shove it down people's throats, helped along by bundling it with other installers. Everything else was secondary.
Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars at minimum, very likely billions. It's absurd that they're failing so miserably, and it's obscene that their CEO has taken increasingly large 8 figure bonuses while the company has floundered under her leadership.
Self respect?
That may have helped but chrome really was a great browser.
I don't use chrome and haven't done so outside of work for over a decade.
And Firefox has always had themes. Real themes. Colorways is just some coloring and it's not even staying around for these supposed mainstream users to enjoy
When done in the physical world this is called decorating, I guess theming is just a digital version of hanging a print from Ikea on the wall. When I do this sort of thing, I usually do accomplish something, because I like looking at pretty things, doing so makes me happier, making my things prettier helps me feel a bit happier when I look at them. Whether that has value depends on perspective, though I feel if it doesn't then that perspective is a pretty dismal one. It's also a way to make an abstract and alien thing feel a bit more familiar and "one's own", and computers are plenty alien and intimidating for a lot of people.
They don't understand people love Firefox because it's not Chrome. Not because it's not Chrome enough.
Yes, the marketing behind it is stupid because it attempts to correlate some deeper symbolic meaning to the act of choosing colors for your web browser. But as a fellow Firefox advocate, I would rather Mozilla plays around with these sort of corny marketing concepts as a way of gaining market share rather than rely on Google's patronage ad-infinitum.
It feels to me like they just ran out of either the will or the engineers to do the hard innovative stuff and are just trying to turn Firefox into their own UX art project at this point.
To play devil's advocate, that may well be exactly what they're doing. I've always used Firefox, but I'm aware that I'm not a typical user andmy interests likely don't align with mass adaoption.
I've said it before when Firefox has released new features that the HN crowd aren't interested in - there's not enough of you (us) for your opinions on [ themes ] to matter. And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.
I don't have access to statistics to qualify whether or not this is the case and contribute to making it harder to evaluate by turning off telemetry and never using Google ads, so I can't exactly complain.
Yes you can complain. They should be well aware that their remaining userbase is very averse to telemetry.
If anything the companies going all-in on telemetry and A-B testing are making ever worse products. Like Microsoft with their Teams that gets slower and more confusing every month.
> And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.
What growth? I only see a decline. All they succeed at is alienating the users that were still using it. Not gaining new ones.
One thing I'd actually like is a reasonably powerful history browser/manager. I want to look for websites I visited in a custom time period, how many times I visited a website last month, or in January, or whatever.
It's all very poor as it stands: a very simple interface with no power-features whatsover, a fixed set of time periods to view (today, yesterday, last month), and a simple total visit count and timestamp of most recent visit.
But the vast vast vast majority of people want to interact with (places in Firefox lingo) bookmarks, history and downloads from the browser instead of closing the browser and open a deeply nested file in a database manager app and write SQL queries to get the data they want.
I just don't get the point. Have a feature or not. But not this temporary stuff. I suppose they think doing a "killed by Google" will make them as popular as chrome again :)
It's so stupid and confusing and baffling that I want to rage quit Firefox with this as the absolute last straw. Like wtf, you're gonna take back my color in a few months? Just pull the upsell for it? Why the hell am I having to wonder about any of this? Why on God's green earth was this done instead of spending any effort getting a SINGLE bit of unity among the Bookmarks, Downloads and Add-ons panels, all of which should behave at least rougly similarly. (Because, to be clear, I had a Firefox theme that was imperceptibly similar to this months ago before this Colorways upsell)
I don't get it. I do not do not do not get it. And now they're screwing around with another extensions menu that takes space on the toolbar but doesn't de-dupe with the extension buttons themselves (I actually can see where this Might be going, but again, zero clear comms about it).
I'm the poster boy for an annoying Firefox advocate and I'm increasingly looking at selling my laptop to build a woodworking shed because it all feels hopeless.