[dao-]

> Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could

Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.

[dale_glass]

Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up, but nothing equivalent happened whenever it went away.

My current desktop has been Fedora since Fedora 16, and I just upgraded from one release to the next continuously. So yes, whatever choice I made back in 2013 is just going to stick around on my current machine unless it goes away entirely or I manually change it. Colors are just not that important, if I like it well enough, it's going to stick around forever.

The only one that caused intense feelings in me was the "Dreamer – Bold" theme that caused a fair amount of confusion about why the heck couldn't I tell which tab was active, and what could be possibly broken. Because it never occurred to me that the theme could be designed that way intentionally.

[dao-]

> Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up,

Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible to the average users.

[Y_Y]

Does your internal telemetry tell you that "average" users don't know what Firefox is, and that proficient users who might recommend it to them are sick of the mismanagement of the browser?

[margalabargala]

> In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.

People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.

The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.

If users have managed to continue using those themes, well, that's in spite of what Mozilla did with them, not because of them.

The criticism of colorways wasn't because people hate browser themes, it's because making features that self-destruct after indeterminate amounts of time is user-hostile. "Limited time features" is alone enough to make someone want to swap to a fork.

[dao-]

> People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.

> The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.

It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...

[jlokier]

Oh... I'd completely forgotten that I picked a theme when those were offered.

So it hadn't occurred to me since then that I could change it.

I guess I count among the users who are still using a colorways theme. But after getting used to it, I ended up thinking of it as being what current Firefox looks like by default.

[RunSet]

> Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry.

The users who regard colorways as frivolous likely also disabled the telemetry.

Rather like how the "psychological profile of a serial killer" is merely the psychological profile of a serial killer the police are capable of catching.

[Izkata]

And on the other end of the spectrum, Colorways was extremely bland compared to user themes.

[bufio]

Telemetry Brain and "Most average users don't..." may explain why Firefox has been getting consistently worse for a long time.