655934 - Allow Lightweight Themes to change how about: pages appear to users

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1347201

(Firefox :: Theme, enhancement)

Description

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

This behaviour will llow Firefox Future Home Tab page to be similar to Chrome's current home page which allow themes to edit its home page

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

default Home Page for the Home Tab should allow user to change the background display using theme/persona similar to what chrome is doing right now.

Comment 2

[patrickjdempsey]

The new about:home page includes the following icons:

Downloads
Bookmarks
History
Add-ons
Sync
Settings

These should be themeable to match the currently selected theme, otherwise this will be confusing for some users.

Comment 3

[Joshua Smith [:joshua-s]]

We should do this for all browser pages that don't have a specified background.

Shorlander made a sample mockup for the homepage at http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/aboutHome-prototype-i03/aboutHome-prototype-i03.html.  It needs some work to address searchbar visibility, but it is a cool idea.

I put together a few mockups as well:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d3qmanliery6i8e/about-about.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/rjee40wbluddqej/about-newtab.png


It would be nice to have some input from UX on where they want to take this.

Comment 4

[Blair McBride [:Unfocused] (UNAVAILABLE)]

You may be interested in bug 620963, where I made it possible for the lightweight theme to bleed into the page of about:addons. Sadly, my way of doing it in that patch hit a platform bug that disabled sub-pixel anti-aliasing for all text, so it never landed.

Comment 5

[Blair McBride [:Unfocused] (UNAVAILABLE)]

Screenshot of said patch: http://grab.by/8C0i

(And, oops, didn't mean to remove the needinfo. Flagging Boriss for that.)

Comment 6

[Joshua Smith [:joshua-s]]

I will take this if we do decide to implement it.  Maybe (for simplicity's sake), we could have it so that the persona creates an image named about:background or something, and just reference that from each page?

Comment 7

[Jennifer Morrow [:Boriss] (UX)]

Attachment: Mockup: User sets a background image for new tab page

The attached mockup shows the user setting a background image.  This bug pertains to personas and themes specifically, so only #4 in the mockup (showing a background image) is relevant here.  If a persona or theme extends down the page, that is the background that would be on the New Tab Page by default, and users could add a different image here.

Comment 8

[Joshua Smith [:joshua-s]]

Looks great, but before we proceed, lets get some info from the persona people.

Comment 9

[u428464]

Oups CCing myself has made the needinfo disappears. I don't know who was needinfo-ed, apparently none in particular.

Comment 10

[u428464]

In fact I don't know if needinfo-ing none is useful so I let Joshua needinfo-ing the right people.

Comment 11

[Joshua Smith [:joshua-s]]

Needinfoing Unfocused as he is on the Personas team.

Unfocused, does the Personas team want to proceed with this?  Maybe in the UX branch?

Comment 12

[Blair McBride [:Unfocused] (UNAVAILABLE)]

(In reply to Joshua Smith [:joshua-s] from comment #11)
> Needinfoing Unfocused as he is on the Personas team.

No I'm not :) And I don't think there is a "Personas team" these days. But perhaps I can shed some light on things anyway.

Lightweight themes (what used to be called Personas), at the moment, can't do what the mockups here show - the images aren't sized for that use. That's why in bug 620963 I made them fade out: http://grab.by/8C0i If they get extended any further down the page, the line where the image ends becomes very obvious and ugly.

Comment 3 shows a mockup of about:about with a background image - personally I'd want to avoid that, as it feels like overkill and gimmicky. IMO, this feels more suited to just about:home, about:newtab, and about:addons (see bug 620963 for rationale).

Comment 13

[Joshua Smith [:joshua-s]]

So, how do you want us to proceed on this?

Comment 14

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

(In reply to Joshua Smith [:joshua-s] from comment #13)
> So, how do you want us to proceed on this?

I agree with Unfocused that we should only apply this to about:home and about:newtab and not all about: pages.

I think we need to approach this in a few ways:

1) Add support for existing Personas. e.g. fade them in, get a dominant fill color or some combination of those things

2) Extend support to allow for much larger full window images

We will have to work with AMO to get the backend changes to allow larger images.

Comment 15

[Joshua Smith [:joshua-s]]

This looks like it will take someone a little more experienced than myself...

Comment 16

[Tan Wei Lin Jason [:Ryuji]]

Ultimately, I think Complete Themes should be able to change the icons for Downloads, Bookmarks, History, Add-ons, Sync, Settings  in about:home.

Comment 17

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

Attachment: screeny.png

I have an add-on that does something like this at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/big-theme/versions/1616210. Would we consider playing with that?

Comment 18

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Mike/:ntim, is this on our radar for the webextensions theme work?