“”Skins” are a recent product of the hyper-democratization of code. The computer equivalent of back-ally chin tucks, skins allow a growing number of applications to change their looks in a growing number of ways, almost all of them bad. In a scenario that undoubtedly leaves DeTocqueville twitching uncomfortably in his grave, an unthinking Jolt- and marketing-fueled push towards visual freedom — is leaving 15 years of common-sense progress in user-interface design bleeding in a ditch.”
this is in response to the fact that mozilla allows one the freedom to develope skins via xul. as suck points out there are plenty of poor examples of skins, but there are also handful of great ones and it should be obvious that the skins don’t need to get thrown out with the user interface bathwater. or something like that.