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Comment by nemetroid | Hacker News Reader

Firefox gave me a confusing popup window on the first start after updating. It didn't explain what "colorways" are. I closed it.

This article is called "Introducing new Colorways for Firefox 94" but doesn't explain what the feature does, beyond being "a new feature that allows our users to express their most authentic selves and to bring them joy while browsing the web".

I went to mozilla.org and, in two clicks, reached the page for "Firefox for Desktop". It has a section with "Latest Firefox features", one of which is "Personalize your experience with new colorways"... But that text is not clickable, so I'm not getting more information there either.

I guess Mozilla doesn't want me to know what "Colorways" are.

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They're colour themes. Mozilla's celebrating the fact that you can change Firefox's colour theme while trying to spin it as something super unique.

> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.

Basically, fashion-industry word salad, but for the tech industry! Hooray!

They invented a word because... um... adding jargon to the lexicon results in... less... jargon? I mean, when I saw the word "colorways" I interpreted it as a synonym for "waveguides." Story checks out, I guess?

Colorways is a term you see used, as a parent post said, in fashion. The different color combinations for say, sneakers, are often called "colorways."

Oh, apparently, my eyes filter out the word 'fashion'. Shoe nerds. Great market segment to target. They probably know how to install apps. That'll save the ship.

Colorways is a pretty common word in other areas though, so it's not entirely made up. Colorways is used extensively in the shoe world to describe when new colors/patterns on an older shoe line drop.

It's way more jargony than "theme", which has been used for color themes since at least win 3.1 and is fairly well-known in that sense among the general population.

Meanwhile, I'd never heard of "color ways" until like 3 years ago, and I'd still not have if I didn't pay (too much) attention to tech and industry news.

[EDIT] Oh my god, it's even worse, I read other posts on this thread and just realized that I got it from getting very slightly into shoes, not even from tech news. LOL. Yeah, this is a terrible name.

Funny thing is, I know enough shoe nerds to parse the phrase "on an older shoe line drop," but this is still the first time I've seen the word.

And I know people in more general clothing fashion, and also interior design. Is this a fashion term or is somebody on the naming committee really into shoes?

Yes but "themes" is used extensively in the tech world to describe changing the color of user interface patterns.

It's sort of odd to use shoe-industry lingo instead of tech-industry lingo when you are a web browser company.

Especially since "themes" is lingo with extensive crossover already. Everyone has used some piece of software with themes.

Colorways is such a niche lingo that most people outside the niche don't even recognize that it's a word.

I'm still gonna mention this to my laser nerd friend as an alternative to 'waveguide' next time we chat.

Where are Mozilla getting these people from? Are they hiring marketing people from the fashion industry?

they didn't invent "colorway".

They don't seem to care about power users anymore, and "everyday life and everyday users" are on Safari and Chrome. Really sad.

And they really shouldn't. If you're not pissing off your power users you're not moving fast enough. The only user-stories that mass-market browser makers should care about are casual users browsing the web and software developers publishing to to the web.

Power users are a completely different market segment and have totally different needs and expectations from causal users.

But they're not moving fast enough, unfortunately. That's why there are a lot of new features available on Chrome that are not on Firefox, and that matters a lot for normal users because for them it's the browser that's broken, not the website.

I hate what you say, but you're right.

This "strategy" will only drive the few remaining users away who actively decided to use Firefox while not winning any new "casual users" over (because those don't care about what differentiates Firefox from Chrome or Safari, they're all just web browsers after all).

>casual users browsing the web

Bold of you to assume they really care about which browser they use. I'd not be surprised if the vast majority of them use Edge and Safari.

Exactly

The other day my mother asked me to check her pc for problems, while at it I was like

"...let me remove Chrome and install Firefox"

-"Don't do that" she said

-"Why?!" I was surprised because she is old and not technical at all, why would she even know what a Firefox is... Or have such strong opinion

-"Just don't do it, I don't like it"

-"Ok, I'll leave Chrome and you can try both"

-"Won't that use more space?"

-"Not really a problem as long you don't open both at same time"

-"Don't do it I have already tried it" and more or less ended there, but I am still curious why

Maybe I should explain her that now it is different because they have colors ways....

(with fast internet, low ram, and still HDD, I thought that Firefox with disk, and memory, cache disabled would be best)

> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.

It’s the first time in my life I’ve heard the word “colorway”. That’s how disconnected Mozilla is from reality.

It's a fairly common term for shoes, and (I think) for other clothing as well. While I'm not a fan of importing fashion jargon to computing, it's more connected to reality than certain HN commenters seem to be.

Which everyday users have "colorways" in their vocabulary?

Its very popular in the sneaker community.

I would hazard a guess that a Venn diagram of shoe fanatics and Firefox users has very little overlap.

Have never seen the word in my life. Had to DDG it, came here as I'm already on the site.

Also very common in the mechanical keyboard community.

> we chose “Colorways” rather than “themes” to show we are branching out from our language of “browser” to speak the language of everyday life and everyday users.

What's weird here is that they consider "branching out from our language of \"browser\"" a completely normal phrase but the word "theme" far too technical for 'everyday users'.

Though that's nowhere near as weird as the fact that they think "Colourways" is a normal word, that'll disqualify anyone who has English as their second or third language for a start, but maybe it's more commonly known amongst native speakers?

It's not a standard word, although it seems similar to "folkway" etc.

> They're colour themes. Mozilla's celebrating the fact that you can change Firefox's colour theme while trying to spin it as something super unique.

This is incredibly misguided to me.

Who is your core base? Clearly, someone who went out of their way to install a third-party browser on an operating system that likely comes with a pre-installed Chromium browser (whether Microsoft or Google) did that for a reason.

And they likely didn't do it because they wanted better themes or were unaware such a feature exists.

Has been user since Netscape open sourced it. Initially it gained a lot of users largely due to it been very customizable and listened to feedbacks. Over the years, I don't use FF anymore especially when they deprecated xul and Waterfox/Palemoon forked out. They lost most of their core that I think they not sure who is their core base.

> I guess Mozilla doesn't want me to know what "Colorways" are.

They don't. They want the user to try it out, to get them get used to a temporary feature. Who on Earth would want to get used to a temporary feature?

Compare it to subscription software. I hate such, I prefer to buy a license and own it forever, but I understand devs gotta eat. With a subscription software at least you know next month/year/whatever you are going to have to pay for access or the next version. With Mozilla Firefox, the feature is... going to be removed.

I'm very curious who came up with this idea. I wonder if its some marketing fellow who has zero clue about technology. Cause it very much feels like a feature from the physical world being applied to the digital one. Improperly applied, I might add.

Or perhaps its a lie to trigger FOMO, and in 2 versions they'll say "ah, due to the great success we are going to keep the feature" or they'll perhaps make it part of Mozilla subscription. Which is, TBH, fair enough, but then it makes me feel like a beta tester. Which is, TBH, fair enough, but be upfront about it and I opted out of beta tests/surveys/etc.

> Firefox gave me a confusing popup window on the first start after updating. It didn't explain what "colorways" are. I closed it.

My #1 reason for using Safari, despite its kinda sucking in a lot of ways, is battery life.

#2? Lighter load on system resources generally, than Chrome or FF.

#3, though? It doesn't spam me all the time with "helpful" messages about very frequent updates.

Really? I think it's pretty clear that colorways are just a feature intended to address the whole body experience of what it means to be a person.

I'm just glad the decades-long nightmare of not being able to express my most authentic self while paying my gas bill and looking at lolcat pictures is finally over.

I had the same experience - a popup that sounded like it wanted me to get into another "Pocket" type thing so I dismissed it. Only when I wanted to switch my theme did I see that actually some of the (ugh) Colorways are kinda nice. It's a bit weird they wrapped it in a vague SV startup name and didn't bother tell us what it was.

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