134260 - [meta] Dynamic theme switching (change skin)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect, P2)

Description

[Aaron Kaluszka]

Dynamic theme switching keeps getting disabled because of odd behavior and
crashes, but this is one of the coolest features of Mozilla and should continue
to be worked on.

Comment 1

[Jonas Jørgensen]

--> Skinability

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I think many of the crashes are now fixed (see bug 116038 and bug 121055, which
fixed a bunch of others that are marked as duplicates of those), and many if not
most of the crashers that remain (e.g., bug 124205, bug 125518) are issues that
could happen with dynamic style changes on web pages even if theme switching is
turned off (and we'd be better off finding and fixing them).

Comment 3

[André Dahlqvist]

Bug 116296 is apparently about dynamic theme switching problems too.

Comment 4

[Francesco De Francesco]

*** Bug 144455 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 156578 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Alex Hosking]

I think this should fixed as it realy gets on peoples nerves

Comment 7

[Stefan Borggraefe]

*** Bug 168886 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

Pheonix has it. Cant we have it too?

Comment 9

[Alfred Kayser]

But also for Phoenix, it is still buggy:
scrollbars don't get updated,
images from the same filename/reference (ie chrome:://global/skin/global.png)
are not reloaded,
but I haven't seen any crashes (yet).

Comment 10

[Nicholas Allen]

*** Bug 202365 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Steffen Wilberg]

Reassigning to default owner and QA because Hewitt is "gone".

Comment 12

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

See also: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=151816&action=view

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Click on links so that you have a session history
2. Go to Tools | Themes
3. Click Get More Themes
4. Install the most popular theme
5. Select the most popular theme in the dialog box
6. Click apply

Check that whatever feature you are investigating fixing is working.

I would recommend starting with bug 245327, which is the most obvious and
destructive bug I could see in extremely brief testing of the feature.

See also this screenshot for the kinds of bugs to look for:
   http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=151816&action=view

Comment 13

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

*** Bug 226791 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Robert Parenton]

Blocking flags transferred from Bug 226791.

Comment 15

[Bill Mason]

*** Bug 249767 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[John Hawkins]

Back in the Netscape 6 days, I believe the default behavior for a theme change
was to give a small alert, and then the browser would close and auto-restart --
having all the same webpages as before open for the user... Would re-instituting
this implementation be such a bad thing?

Comment 17

[Aaron Kaluszka]

Yes, if you knew the history behind this bug, it's the whole reason for its
existence.  Though lately Firefox stuff got tacked to it, it was originally
opened for Seamonkey, of course.

Comment 18

[chris hofmann]

dbaron, are we ready to flip the switch?  we should do it soon so we can start
watching for talkback data

Comment 19

[chris hofmann]

sounds like we are ready to throw the switch

Comment 20

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

I'm kicking this off the aviary PR blocker list since it's basically no
different from the other bug. 

Comment 21

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

I'm not sure why this bug is on the aviary blocker list.  (Maybe there is
something related to dynamic theme switching that should be, but I sure don't
think it's this bug.)

Comment 22

[chris hofmann]

minus for blocking-aviary1.0 too...

Comment 23

[Alex Hosking]

Is this a no no now then?

Comment 24

[Thomas K. (:tom)]

(In reply to comment #23)
> Is this a no no now then?

See Bug 226791

Comment 25

[Pardal Freudenthal (:ShareBird)]

I'm wondering if we could fix this as part of the work being done in the new Extension Manager API (Bug 461973)

Comment 26

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

(In reply to comment #25)
> I'm wondering if we could fix this as part of the work being done in the new
> Extension Manager API (Bug 461973)

The remaining bugs with dynamically changing the skin are unrelated to the extension manager.

Comment 27

[Pardal Freudenthal (:ShareBird)]

We could maybe change the approach to make this work. I was able to write an extension using dss enable, reload chrome and the session store API from Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/61769/

Comment 28

[Zibi Braniecki [:zbraniecki][:gandalf]]

(In reply to comment #27)
> We could maybe change the approach to make this work. I was able to write an
> extension using dss enable, reload chrome and the session store API from
> Firefox:
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/61769/

Wow. I just started using it. It works much better than I expected. It would help devs here if you could prepare a patch against Firefox out of your extension.

Comment 29

[Pardal Freudenthal (:ShareBird)]

(In reply to comment #28)
> Wow. I just started using it. It works much better than I expected. It would
> help devs here if you could prepare a patch against Firefox out of your
> extension.

I could considerate writing a patch for it, but I'm not sure if it is possible at all. I guess we need the fix for Bug 449967 first.

Comment 30

[Andy McKay]

Due to a long period of inactivity on this bug (5.48 years), I am intending to close this bug within a month or so in accordance with: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/OldBugs Please remove [intent-to-close] from the whiteboard and comment on this bug if you would like to keep it open.