The Web is a medium with built-in customizability.
This "our product is perfect and must be used as is" attitude reminds me of a relatively recent example that seems to be dying down: mobile websites that used the `maximum-scale=1 ` value in `<meta name="viewport"`. This disabled zooming in mobile devices. This was an accessibility issue that affected people who otherwise don't encounter other accessibility issues.
If it were simply a matter of providing the smallest payload to clients, these sites could provide some sort of external manifest/source map mapping human-readable class names to hashes.
Let's stop using divs for presentation whilst we're at it and spend man-years on picking the right semantically named elements with no benefit to anyone anywhere ever.
No ajax or js either, I'm pretty sure they didn't envisage that.
Edit: I now realize that, taken out of context, my comment sounds pretty twisted.
Edit: read the FAQ, downvotes are not for disagreement.
Commenting about downvotes in arguments isn't ok, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Not to mention how your method could break tomorrow without warning because Facebook (or whatever you're skinning) push out an update that's incompatible with the theme you've hacked on to it.
Anecdotal: I use a custom Facebook skin that makes the whole UI red and add a background image. Since I've started using it, I spend less time on the website. It feels, in a way, more tiring to use the custom theme.
Would also like to point out that customisation on MySpace is probably responsible for a whole generation of not only developers but non-tech focused people learning how to code. Met a lot of artists and designers who now work on the internet who MySpace was the starting point.
Not sure on the generation of web developers MySpace created. Pretty sure every single page that looked like this was plastered with logos for theme building sites/companies littered with various neon-on-black comic sans designs as far as the eye can see.
What you had to make skins yourself??? You didn't just get them via micro-transactions and loot-boxes???
/s
(I may have opinions about this trend.)
Plus, you have to keep adding skin support for every new feature you add, which means the many skins that don't keep up will no longer work for the latest version of your app, which pisses off users. And when skins slow down or stop being made (people get bored, move on) it reflects poorly on the app, making it look like a ghost town.
Businesses often care a lot about it, they just call it “branding” (and it can be a big deal, even for internal tools); obviously, you need to show different examples to them than typical consumers.
If you don't want/can't run Winamp, VLC might almost be what you want.
to be fair it's been a long time since i looked into skinning it and things may be better now. it's still an excellent clean audio player, i just keep it close to stock with a few addons so i send audio to a chromecast.
there sure were some wild and beautiful fb2k skins and themes back in the day.
I will say I really like(d) the windows 7-10 taskbar in general, and the windows 7-style start menu interaction with the windows 10 look (without the tiles). I switched to Ubuntu with gnome last year after win10 just pissed me off one too many times with the "user engagement" crap that gets loaded with win10. Though I've thought about going back a few times. (Laptop at home and at work are 2014-2015 mac pros)
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
I tried to theme some popular sites to my taste of dark themes and it's really tedious.
Type nullsoft
If the end user thinks it would be better with a different font or larger text or a different background, then they're right.
And realistically once an app ships to the end user the developer has forfeited all control anyway.
Oh how many devs i have encountered over the years with that exact attitude, in particular post iPhone...