Chrome and Firefox have made it easy to turn your browser into an instant eyesore with themes and personas. With one click, you can change all the colors of your tabs, blur the text, make buttons indistinguishable from the background, all the while staring at your favorite video game character in the 40 pixels of whitespace unused by your browser!
Browser theming comes as no surprise, as there have always been communities of skinners who customize applications, sometimes hacking them to do so. In fact, I used to be one of these people. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop from 2005:
I wasn’t satisfied until every aspect of the GUI was personally altered by me. As a consequence benefit, no one could figure out how to use my computer.
Today, themes are easily applied and openly endorsed by the creators of applications which were near to perfection in the first place. Can you read this text?
Mozilla and Google should take a lesson from Apple – take pride in your design and control it with an iron fist.