Firefox drops animated themes in version 18

[nsane.forums]

The upcoming version 18 of Firefox will break animated themes in sacrifice of performance and load time improvements. Users who wish to keep their animated themes can find a workaround within.

Mozilla announced Tuesday on its Add-Ons Blog that animated themes would no longer work in the upcoming Firefox 18, due to performance updates packaged in that version.

Themes, formerly called "Personas", require large image files to accommodate the wide variety of screen resolutions and header heights. These images - 300 x 200 px for headers and 3000 x 100 px for footers - slow down the loading process for Firefox. Of course, animated themes had an even greater negative effect on load times and performance, since the browser has to redraw the huge images continuously.

The solution in Firefox 18 is to crop the images to the user's screen size at start-up, which improves load times by a significant amount. Bug 650968 has the full details of this change. A side effect of this solution, though, is that animated themes will no longer animate in the new version of Firefox. Truly a tragedy for user customization.

The Firefox team is looking into other solutions that might bring back animated themes at some point. However, users who refuse to go gentle into that good night can install the Personas Shuffler add-on, which will preserve the animation as it refreshes the themes on every load.

View: Original Article

[Olexijl]

Crap. I love my animated theme. I refuse to break it just because of the speed.

[Marik]

f**k it, break it smash it destroy it, w/e, as long as this gives me even more speed and lesser load time and lesser memory consumption

wish v18 would cut the ram usage in half

[Bizarre™]

wish v18 would cut the ram usage in half

I also hope they work on virtual memory usage. Mine reaches +1GB after a few hours.

[Sonar]

so users who use the default theme (that isnt animated) wont really see much changes? we will see! im using beta 4 - is this already put in i dnt really notice any change yet

[Olexijl]

People: You wanna more speed?

Just buy SSD drive (about 120GB or bigger size), install Win7 there, Firefox, and now you have speed. If Mozilla simply drops functions because of speed, it is not nice.

I care about functionality a lot. About security too. But speed is for me not relevant. Every program installed on SSD launches much quicker then on normal drive.

Using Win7 x64? Then buy 8GB RAM. It is (here in Germany) not very cheap, but not expensive. It is all affordable.

[emerglines]

more speeeeeeeeeeeeed happppppppppppyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy :)

[liverpal]

good good ff :)

[Shadowx]

Where is speedy btw :think:

[dcs18]

People: You wanna more speed?

Just buy SSD drive

That reminds me of the most famous quote ~ Marie Antoinette.

[Paft]

People: You wanna more speed?

Just buy SSD drive (about 120GB or bigger size), install Win7 there, Firefox, and now you have speed. If Mozilla simply drops functions because of speed, it is not nice.

I care about functionality a lot. About security too. But speed is for me not relevant. Every program installed on SSD launches much quicker then on normal drive.

Using Win7 x64? Then buy 8GB RAM. It is (here in Germany) not very cheap, but not expensive. It is all affordable.

An SSD makes FF launch quicker but that has little to do with overall performance of FF. I have an SSD and performance wise it's no snappier than on a HDD. If FF is getting performance tweaks then more the merrier.

Edit: Also if you read the first paragraph in the blog:

In order to accommodate various screen resolutions and header heights, themes (formerly Personas) require very large image files. Header images need to be 3000 x 200 px and footer images 3000 x 100 px. As a result, loading them slows down Firefox. Animated themes pose an even more persistent problem for performance, because animated images are much larger in size, and the browser needs to redraw them continuously.

Your post was kinda silly.