962001 - Add support for compatible-by-default for themes, as an opt-in

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Blair McBride [:Unfocused] (UNAVAILABLE)]

Quoting (with minor amendments) from bug 956990 comment 2, regarding the issue of themes breaking following significant UI changes (Australis) when checkCompatibility=false:



There's also the question of whether themes should even be able to ignore compatibility. There's almost guaranteed to be some breakage of a theme with every Firefox update. But, we can't gauge how severe that breakage will be - very rarely will it be as severe as the Australis breakage. Sometimes it will be very minor, in which case disabling a theme will be far *more* disruptive to people. 

But, the checkCompatibility is still a very permanent thing on Nightly - I really want to make that a last resort for people. We don't do compatible-by-default for themes because we can predict with a high degree of certainty that there will be some form of breakage. But we can add an opt-in to enable compatible-by-default for themes. This would let us get some of the associated safely benefits too, such as being able to still deny compatibility to themes that weren't compatible pre-Australis. 

So we'd have something like the following set by the application:

  extensions.strictCompatibility.theme = true
  extensions.minCompatibleAppVersion.theme = 29.0

And people can opt-in to compatible-by-default for themes in the same way they opt-out of compatibility checking in the past, by opening about:config and setting (or via an add-on setting this pref):

  extensions.strictCompatibility.theme = false




Note: To be most effective, we'd want to transition any remaining Nightly users away from extensions.checkCompatibility.nightly=false and onto this, via the help of bug 961999.

Comment 1

[Andrew Swan [:aswan]]

Complete themes are no longer supported