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Why is Firefox/Personas/Lightweight buid in dictatorial?

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 8 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

Pingu
Pingu
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When you are using a theme (e.g. Nautipolis) with Firefox (FF) and want to add a Persona you have to have the default theme and not Nautipolis, NO CHOICE! Or Nautipolis without a persona. It did work together perfectly in FF3.6.21 and later with problems but not so in FF6.0.1. Both extensions are up to date and working. There is no comment given on WHY it is not user friendly only a hint that it is not user friendly (never designed to...). It even works when you mouse over a persona with a theme (Nautipolis) activated. But once you activate the persona, next time you start you have to have default theme, you are dictated to have the default theme. If you try to activate both (theme and persona) in Appearance, one of which is always deactivated, NO CHOICE! I think FF can do better (Same with Thunderbird)!

When you are using a theme (e.g. Nautipolis) with Firefox (FF) and want to add a Persona you have to have the default theme and not Nautipolis, NO CHOICE! Or Nautipolis without a persona. It did work together perfectly in FF3.6.21 and later with problems but not so in FF6.0.1. Both extensions are up to date and working. There is no comment given on WHY it is not user friendly only a hint that it is not user friendly (never designed to...). It even works when you mouse over a persona with a theme (Nautipolis) activated. But once you activate the persona, next time you start you have to have default theme, you are dictated to have the default theme. If you try to activate both (theme and persona) in Appearance, one of which is always deactivated, NO CHOICE! I think FF can do better (Same with Thunderbird)!

All Replies (2)

the-edmeister
the-edmeister
  • Moderator
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Dictatorial? Benevolent dictators maybe, but Mozilla sure as hell isn't a democracy.

Mozilla did have one version of the Personas Plus extension - v 1.4, back in Nov 2009 - where you could have both a full theme and a persona enabled together.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personas-plus/versions/
Heard a variety of theories why Mozilla didn't take it further, but that's the way Mozilla does things. They develop a feature until they're satisfied with it, and then release it. Regardless of what the user community thinks about whether it is complete or not. Every major version up to and including had at least one feature that I would classify as half-assed, and I have yet to see Mozilla go back and full-ass a feature in a subsequent release.

I played with Personas Plus 1.4 a bit back then and found most full themes didn't work too good with a persona running at the same time. After that version Mozilla didn't do anything more toward being able to have both enabled at the same time. At least they did try to have both a full and a lightweight theme enabled at the same time.

If you think that is a big issue, why not download that extension and dissect it, and see if you can figure how to modify that extension to make it work with the Firefox 4+ versions.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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See also:

To open the about:config page, type about:config in the location (address) bar and press the "Enter" key, just like you type the url of a website to open a website.
If you see a warning then you can confirm that you want to access that page.

  • Use the Filter bar at to top of the about:config page to locate a preference more easily.
  • Preferences that have been modified show as bold(user set).
  • Preferences can be reset to the default or changed via the right-click context menu.