Re: Gnome 3 Extensions/Themes Website?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le vendredi 10 juin 2011 à 11:25 +0100, Allan Day a écrit :
> One possibility for extensions would be to turn them into something more
> akin to Google Labs - that is, something that is communicated and
> structured as an experimentation ground, rather than a market place that
> we encourage users to use (the very name 'extension' does just that).
> The other nice thing about Google Labs is that the experimental nature
> of the features it contains is clearly communicated.
I think the main reference here is the way Firefox manages extensions.
Many people use stock Firefox, and it works very well, but many others
like to play with appearance (personas, equivalent to our themes), or
need a specific feature (extensions, in both terminologies). This
example is quite positive. The fact that people can easily extend their
desktop encourages them to support it and hack on it. IMHO, the
available stock of extensions is one of the reasons why many GNOME fans
use Firefox rather than Epiphany.

While I'm a big supporter of the "default desktop consistent and great
for everybody" approach (and I'm not running any extensions), I don't
think it hurts the GNOME brand to promote extensions. At the end of the
day, people who use them know that they aren't stock GNOME, and how to
disable them if they want to get the default experience. The difference
with the applets mess is that in GNOME 2 there was no default
experience: everything was applets, and once you had messed with your
panel, you had no clear way of resetting it. With the Shell, you can
just disable extensions.

Finally, extensions makes it easier to enforce a common design that
works for 95% of users, while allowing the remaining 5% to do what they
like. This is a good way for designers to turn down complaints and keep
hackers happy. ;-)


Regards