I'm begining to wonder if there are just some people using low resolution screens that have this icon somehow taking up a larger portion of their screen. It's less than 16 pixels high at its maximum. That's the same height as all the other icons. Its width is never more than 26 px. Again, this is still very tiny.
The people on dark themes didn't like things due to a difference of opinion on the color of the border. I changed that in Flagfox 5.0.1 for them.
Sorry, but that's not how software development works anywhere. Every single change has costs and benefits and will get praise and criticism from users. The criticism for this one is loud, but very focused. Looking at this thread it looks like there is a giant outcry for the old icons, but in comparison to the total user base as well as the positive feedback I've had, very few people have complained.gidstelios wrote:Being a software engineer myself I would immediately return a feature that I would have removed back to my software if the people using it asked for it
It's very simple, here are my options:
1) Revert a major version that went through months of development and testing, now deployed to 800000+ computers thus far. (obviously not happening)
2) Revert the entire new style of Flagfox and abandon all improvements (obviously not happening)
3) Add back one old set as an option (would annoy whichever group wants the other; see also #4)
4) Add back both old sets as an option, which won't happen for the following reasons:
a) It would take a month and a half or so to localize the option text for the options dialog (not an exaggeration; welcome to volunteer translation)
b) It would bloat up the installer and monthly updates with many more icon files (which are larger in file size)
c) NEITHER OF THE OLD SETS ARE MAINTAINED. (the site for the old primary set doesn't even load anymore) Continuing to use them would mean that I would personally have to continue monkey patching them to make updates as needed. This is a time sink which I simply can't continue doing. I'm not going back to including flags with known holes and obsolete flags. (there are lots in the old sets that just used colonial powers' flags; the new set actually has the real ones) Again, my hack-ins don't match and the size needed to go with it usually ends up looking quite bad. I also can't make more minor updates, as a competent looking out-of-date icon is better than a correct 12px high blob. (again, old icons were tiny) Every hour wasted on screwing with the old set is an hour I can't do something more useful, and another hour of frustration that doesn't actually produce a decent update. Simply put, I don't want to include icons that are known to be bad. There have been plenty of complaints beyond this over the years. This new set is the only want to fix those issues for everyone, and the only way to keep the flags in Flagfox actually up-to-date.
5) Add in a new flag icon set as an option using some other set of icons that is actually up-to-date and maintained
6) Create a method to load an arbitrary flag icon set as an option (via some about:config pref)
#5 still has disadvantages, as I would still have to keep updating the new alternate set and it would still bloat up the installer. This is still something I wish to avoid. To most of us, another couple hundred kilobytes an update is nothing, but that's just not true for everyone. I've already had to increase the installer filesize by 100k or so due to the inefficient new packaging required to go extractionless and restartless. Another 200k a month on top of the new 100k is not trivial to some people. It should be a non-issue, but it still isn't. Adding one thing helps one group, but hurts another. I also plan to release a version of Flagfox for Mobile Firefox where bandwidth and disk space constraints prohibit just dumping in a few hundred new files. I would like to have to avoid forking installers for desktop and mobile, as it makes things a maintenance pain on my end as well as increasing release complexity quite a bit.
#6 has issues. This wouldn't be a great option I could really put in the options dialog, as the icons need to be named properly to be found, so I'd have to package sets myself and put them up for people to download and install. It's a theoretically possible route, however.
Again, to people who haven't decided what I will say before ranting and not bothering to listen: #5 & #6 are legitimate possibilities. You will not, however, get something immediately upon a wave of my magic wand.
However, I have to tell you that I have just had to de-prioritize dealing with this spiteful group of people to maintain my sanity. There are a couple of polite people criticizing, and I thank you for that, but also two or three people who went off the deep end. Someone posted a mother fucking death threat in a review on AMO. (not even with any context) There were two people spamming links to hacks of 5.0.0 with the old icons in it so often that Mozilla moderators had to get directly involved to shout them down and contact them directly to get them to stop abusing the system. (posting any file sharing links like that is a direct violation of their policy, obviously) There are crazy people who think Mozilla actually lets addon developers directly delete reviews.
I'm sure someone will tell me I shouldn't reply here anymore. (they might be right) However, if someone asks legitimate questions in a non-asshole manner, I tend to want to reply. This thread, however, is getting to the point where nobody who will reply from here on out will have read anything I have said. I will not repeat the above again and am now less tolerant of BS.
PS
The above should be more concise, but it isn't;
“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.†― Mark Twain