Current Labs Project Details

Personas has 100k users, using 50+ personas created by a community of developers. As well, there has been signficant interest from various potential partners in providing content via this channel.

Requirements for Product

Lightweight, on the fly visual customization

We want to expose more customization to users, without the overhead of switching to full themes, or the mismatched icons issues stemming from out of place iconography, etc.

Clean integration with current UI

Must cleanly integrate with other addon/customization UI, especially Themes

Constraints and Dependencies

Scalable web backend

Personas has not yet reached the level of overhead/demand that would give us confidence on how scalable the current solution would be. Need to work on getting more users ASAP to get a better idea on required timelines.

Changes to default theme

There are a number of changes, especially related to the tabstrip construction on Mac, which impact the visual appearance of Personas. We need to identify and change these pieces.

Open questions for this iteration

How far should we go in enabling more Personas?

One example would be to ship alternate icons that work better with darker or lighter themes.

Future problems to solve

Dynamic Personas

Allow dynamic content to update (weather, time of day, countdown timers, etc)

Support for icons/other styling

What are the pain points here, as a new approach to full skinning.

Integration of AMO

Combine Personas platform with AMO platform

Deprecation of old-style themes

In conjunction with extensions 2.0 work, push to make this the primary avenue for visual experience customization.

Required Resources

Firefox

1 x FTE Firefox developer for approximately three months to integrate required Personas support, and make required changes to Firefox chrome to make the experience smoother and visually better. Needs to be comfortable with our theme engine to understand how to make Personas work within that system.

1 x FTE Platform engineer to explore issues around style system, especially -moz-appearance and precedence.

Design resources to support integration of Personas with current theme support.

Web Service

TBD, need developer and IT support for scaling and deploying enough capacity to support projected demand.

Projected Timeline for Integration

Client support

Ship-ready complete in approximately three months. This breaks down approximately as follows:

• 2 weeks: Integration and cleanup (if needed) of existing code.
• 2 weeks: Test creation for visual switching code.
• 4 weeks: Implementation and iteration of integration with current user customziation UI
• 4 weeks: Work on core Firefox themes to enhance the effectiveness and visual polish of the Personas experience.

Server Scaling

TBD