Themes for GMail: An Ecstatic “Darnit!”

GMail has a dashing new feature: Themes. And it’s not even the experimental Lab kinda thing–it’s fully supported.

Awesome.

I really like GMail’s appearance, but switching it up every now and then is a very nice change. And I suppose some people really don’t like the original color scheme, and are really happy they don’t have to use Better GMail or a Greasemonkey script to mess with it.

And ninjas are cool:

However, I have two main problems:

What’s up with chat? In the screenshot you can see some problems. And before, I was using a different theme, and the same person’s status (but not name–it was whited out) appeared a good 10-15 times. Eh? I’m sure a bug fix is coming, but I wish they’d taken a few more days to polish the product before releasing it. Better yet, they could’ve submitted it as a Labs feature, and then just had it graduate soon. But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s a small point. Edit: See end of post.
GMail is still refusing to be nice and open about things. I feel like it would be a simple process to push out some documentation on how to create a theme, create a website which hosted a slew of third-party themes, and next to each one have a little check box titled “Have as an option in GMail”. This would exponentially increase the amount of themes out there, make them easy to obtain, and avoid bloat on the settings page. Some people would play it safe and just use official themes, others would gladly welcome the diversity. Questions about the feasability of the idea? Look at Firefox.

You might be thinking that I’m a little bit too excited about free-as-in-speech software and open standards, but the only thing Google has to lose on this is the pain of producing documentation, the annoyance of making the repository website, and the hassle of incorporating it into the GMail settings. I think they can handle it, and I think it’ll improve the quality of the product. There is no “oh, but the programmers need the money you pay them” or “if they open their standards they’ll lose customers to other pieces of software” arguments, just software improvement.

Am I happy they have themes? Definitely.

Could they do it better? Sure.

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Edit: After further investigation, it seems to only be a Firefox-on-Windows problem. Firefox on Ubuntu does fine, and Chrome on Windows does fine, but Firefox on Windows throws up that bug. Weird, but not nearly as infuriating as being a global error.