The roads I take...

As you may have noted, Mozilla published a plan for a new themes system that doesn't fully cover my thoughts on the matter and ends up making themes that go as far as my LCARStrek theme impossible.

The only way I could still hold up this extent of theming is to spread it guerilla-style as userChrome.css mods, i.e. a long CSS sheet to be copied into people's userChromes.css manually. That would still allow the extent of theming, but be extremely inconvenient to distribute.

Because of that, I will stop development of my themes as soon as Firefox 57 hits Nightly and I can't use the LCARStrek theme myself any more (EarlyBlue, which is SeaMonkey-only, is something I just dragged along anyhow). Given the insecurity of even having releases and the small "market", I also will not continue them for SeaMonkey only, Firefox has been the only thing that really mattered any more there.

Also, explicit theming support for Firefox devtools is being removed from LCARStrek with the 2.49 release that I just submitted to AMO as it's extremely complicated to maintain and with the looming removal of full themes from Firefox, that amount of work is not worth my time any more. Because of this, there is a bit of a mixture of styles in some areas of devtools esp. in Firefox 52 (improving in newer versions) but that is outside of the control of a theme author. I tested that devtools are usable this way, contrast of icons in toolbars isn't optimal at times but visible enough so developers can work with them. To any LCARStrek users, sorry for the inconvenience, I would have put more work into this if the theming feature of this extent would not be removed.



This is a hard step for me as the first thing I experimented with when I downloaded my first Mozilla M5 build in 1999 was actually the theming files, and LCARStrek came out of that as a demonstration of how awesome this system of customization was and how far it could go. It achieve a look that really was out of this world, but I guess the new direction of Firefox is not compatible with a 24th century look.

It will also be hard for me go move back to the bland look of the default theme, esp. as it looks even more boring on Linux than on other platforms, but I have a few months to get used to the idea before I actually have to do this, and I will keep the themes going for that little while.

Somehow this fits well with the overall theme that MoCo and myself are at odds right now on a number of things, but you can be assured that I'm not gone from the community, as a matter of fact I have planned a few activities in Vienna in the next months, from WebVR workshops to conference appearances, and I'm just about to finish the Tech Speakers training and hope to be more active in that area in the future.

LLAP!

Yesterday, I updated my LCARStrek and EarlyBlue themes to SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 and did official releases of those updated versions.

On AMO, you need to log in to get those versions from the sandbox - alternatively, my KaiRo.at theme downloads page offers them without login.

Those versions made good improvements apart from the usual updates to fit with the newer SeaMonkey version: Both also feature updated DOM inspector and ChatZilla support, highly improved support for right-to-left language display, full support for customizable navigator toolbars, controls in <video> elements, and new history window and sidebar as well as some other bugfixes and improvements.

The full changelog as well as the complete source of the themes are available from my public git repos.

After uploading a 2.0 Alpha 2 version of LCARStrek about 10 days ago, I now could also update my EarlyBlue theme for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 2 a few minutes ago, at the right time to hand them to the Mozilla community as Christmas presents.

On AMO, you need to log in to get those versions from the sandbox - alternatively, my KaiRo.at theme downloads page offers them without login.

As said before, the tri-licensed source of the themes is available from my public git repos.

I mentioned in my status updates a bit ago that I updated my EarlyBlue theme for SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 1 - and a few minutes ago I finally also was content enough with what I have to do the same for LCARStrek, which is actually used more, AMO reports double the downloads and more than four times the users for LCARStrek compared to EarlyBlue.

You now can make the look of your SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 1 build go back to the days of the early Mozilla M4-M8 days, or jump forward to the 24th century!


(Those preview images are actually from SeaMonkey 1.x, but the current versions look strikingly similar.)

If you want to try them, see EarlyBlue versions or LCARStrek versions on AMO (2.0a1 versions are sandboxed, so you need to log in to get them!) or KaiRo.at theme dowloads.

By the way, both themes are tri-licensed and the source is available from my public git repos - and if I find the time, I have plans to make them support Firefox in the future (probably not before a FF 3.1 release though).