"Skins" was actually picked by the community, but Mozilla didn't like the connotations

Mar 2, 2012 13:45 GMT  ·  By

Not that long ago, Mozilla started working on a new theme system which would make it easier for designers to create new themes for Firefox and easier for users to install them. The project was dubbed Personas and it was a huge success.

Now there are tens of thousands of personas and a huge number of people use them. Still, even after all this time, most people, even the ones that used them, didn't come to use the name personas, it didn't catch on.

What's more, it was confusing to people who didn't know what a persona was, the name was too abstract to evoke anything related to the look of Firefox.

The decision was made to change the name and go with something that more people will understand and be comfortable with. This being Mozilla, this was put to a vote, interestingly enough though, the winning name was not the one Mozilla ended up going with.

Instead, Mozilla decided to call all visual customization options for Firefox themes, be them old-school themes that go deep into Firefox's UI, or the new ones, light Personas.

"We think it’s easiest for a user trying to change Firefox’s look to go to a single place without worrying about the difference between a 'theme,' a 'background,' and a 'skin.'," Mozilla explained.

"For people who do know the difference and only wish to browse one type of theme, we’ll distinguish 'background themes' (current Personas) from 'complete themes' (current themes)," it added.

That's not all, Mozilla will move all personas, or background themes, to the Mozilla Add-ons (AMO) site from their current home and will integrate the current site into AMO. But that won't happen for a few more months, during which time they'll still be called personas.

The community, 41 percent of the voters, actually picked "skins" as their preferred name change. It was different from themes and it was a better fit for what personas are, a skin for the Firefox UI. But Mozilla didn't like the term very much believing it to have negative connotations, so it went with the second most popular choice, themes, chosen by 22 percent of voters.