The Dark Balloon

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Playa-Hating

A complete and utter denouncement of update.mozilla.org even though it's a great, functional web application that's designed (and does, nine out ten) to make Mozillian lives easier. Sarcasm has been employed. Tread carefully.

Colors From A Nightmare

I can count the following colors: white, sea mist green, red, dark blue, black, BSOD blue, silver, and grey. Of the previous, the following should not, at minimal, exist: sea green, BSOD blue, grey, and silver.

The Sea Header That Tried

The white-to-sea-green header does not fit with the rest of the application at all. One assumes it was a try to match a dark blue (since blue does seem to the be the overall color in here) gradient, but failed miserably. As for the separated (no idea why) "Mozilla Update" PNG, the shadow—and I know this is nit-picky— needs a higher blur. Sharp-blurred shadows are a throwback to amateur advertising. Plus we like fuzzy things.

Edit: A kind soul has informed me that this actually is a tribute to the Modern colors, albeit the white.

Edit #2: It's from this Firefox button.

The Red Line That Came In Too Late

Red does not fit with the overall blue theme that I'm guessing exists. Make the red border blue. And turn it from an image to CSS. The rest of the application is 2-D.

The Sub Navigation That Crashed Windows 95

That blue hue does not fit and does not look nice. Make it the dark blue color that the Firefox's world icon or the Thunderbird's wing icons have. That's what color pickers are for.

Play With Sharp Objects

-moz-border-radius borders, when used sparingly, look good. Unfortunately, they don't look good even then. Stick with regular borders, or don't use borders at all. Too many borders really show up when extensions start getting listed. And, as mentioned above, why the grey?

The Loud Font

Bold fonts are a no-no. More than that, people who use bold fonts as the default font should suffer the same fate Comic Sans MS and Arial users should suffer. And if you use both…well, that's unspeakable. Choose a nice sans-serif font (Verdana, Trebuchet, et cetera) and use that. Unless, of course, you want the user to mistakenly believe that the web page is being displayed while Windows 95/98 is in low memory mode.

The Tabs That Were Stolen From Apple

Why in the world are the tabs a homage to Apple.com? This would've made sense if you were trying to create a Web app for Mac OS X users, but now you're just clashing design styles and color. The tabs by themselves are a nice imitation (kudos to the creator; although the fonts shouldn't be bold and should be a Lucida Grande or a Lucida Sans Unicode font), but when compared the rest of the flat, non-shiny web page, it's a sore. Start of nit-pickery. The tabs should have a margin between them and they should be centered. "Blockquoting" them, a.k.a. giving them a margin-left, is awkward and stands out.

Conclusion

I'm not offering a solution. I'm not filing a bug. I'm not going to raise a single finger to try to modify the design (though I've tried, unsuccessfully). No, I'm not going to do anything about this. Why? Because hypocrisy combined with laziness is fun.

On a non-design note: allowing people to rate themes is a really poor show of judgement. You're more likely to alienate theme developers than to create a fun competition. Allowing comments by default is also questionable.