Re: WRT the Modern theme, why I use it

Paul Hartman wrote:
> With regard to the blog post about the modern theme, here are my
> thoughts and why I am a Modern theme user.

Great, and let me add that I have been using modern theme back in the 
early days.  BTW: Too bad we still don't have blog comments enabled, but 
we are (still) working on it.

> I've used Modern Theme forever, since it was born I guess, and being
> stubborn and unchanging I'm rather used to it. The flatness and lack
> of glassy, glowing, shiny things doesn't bother me, in fact it is kind
> of comforting, like arriving back home after a long vacation. Sure,
> the hotel is fancy and you have a beach, but home is home.  Also, it
> is exactly the same on every platform, unlike Classic which tries to
> mimic the local system theme, so my Seamonkey at work (in Windows XP)
> and at home (in Linux) looks identical, again making it a more
> comfortable user experience.

The proposed changes are minor changes only, and for elements we 
interact with like: <button>, <menulist>, <spinbuttons> and <treecol> 
elements. They should all look the same, and on all supported platforms 
i.e. nothing but the look will change.

> Another reason I use Modern is the Classic theme looks really terrible
> on my system (I use KDE), and on Windows it looks like Windows which
> is ugly too. :)  I use gtk-engines-qt which does a pretty good job of
> taking my KDE/qt theme and using it in GTK apps, but it's far from
> perfect and sometimes makes things worse. Firefox default theme looks
> much better (and more "native") than Seamonkey classic theme does to
> me. Obviously they've got a lot of people, money and effort invested
> to accomplish that.

Ditching modern theme saved the Mozilla Foundation, now Mozilla 
Corporation a lot of time, energy and thus money.  Also, remember 
Mozilla Firefox supporters paying a grant total of $250.000 (for a small 
name in the newspaper add)?

Also, having only one default theme, like in Mozilla Firefox, makes life 
easy for add-on developers.  Lowering the boundary, enabling more people 
to step in, which is good, but Firefox is changing too much too late for me.

> So, I use Modern because it looks better than Classic, and because it
> has not changed in a decade and I don't change what I'm used to.
> Really, that's why I use Seamonkey in general... Firefox is faster and
> has many interesting add-ons, but I'm used to Seamonkey and Multizilla
> and see no reason to change. Plus, I can freely use both browsers so
> if there's something I really must have in Firefox, I can use it. But
> all of my bookmarks and saved forms etc are in SM.

Choice is important here, but we should at least support the two default 
themes.  Even if I no longer use one of them.  Even without having such 
a great team, and thus everything we change will be done in a slow pace.

> That being said, you may think I'll be against improvements to the
> Modern theme but that is not the case at all. I look forward to any
> improvements to the look of MZ in the Modern theme and certainly
> welcome them with open arms. :)

There will always be people who like theme A over theme B, that's life. 
  Like I said; I have to test my work with both themes, and that's why I 
thought: let's go change things a bit. just like we do so often.

Look at it this way; I had two options A) stay off-line and forget all 
of you or B) have a though time and work hard, trying to fix the things 
we should have fixed so long ago already.  Choice A was the easiest way 
out, of course, and a lot of people would have picked it over B, but not me.

I can't explain you why, seriously I can't, but this is me.  Some say 
I'm an eccentric person, one with an excessive devotion.  Others call me 
a loyalist, waiting for SeaMonkey to go under, and not to stop before 
the captain himself abandons ship.

Whatever it is, I'm glad to be here and to be able to do something for 
you ;)


-- 
I am HJ and I LIVE STRONG.
Supporter of the Lance Armstrong Foundation
http://www.livestrong.org