Designing Firefox for the future
42 points by thang
42 points by thang
I read the title, and opened the tab with dread. It was a very pleasant surprise to mainly see things that I didn't care about.
I say this without sarcasm. Today, when I see people talking about designing for the future, I expect a disaster.
Oh, at least in compact mode the "tab/address bar are a detached floating island" silliness won't happen.
I have been struggling to understand, these past few years, why the detached style has been becoming popular. Apple especially with their Liquid Glass. Because, to me, it’s just so obviously wrong. The visual hierarchies presented are just bad and completely misleading, quite apart from being wasteful of space, often significantly.
At least with this new splits thing the traditional visual hierarchy does have problems, so when I think about it carefully I begrudgingly accept that for Firefox there is a legitimate argument to be made, but still… most of where this style is being done it’s just dumb.
I would really like to understand what people are thinking on this stuff.
(If you’re not sure what I’m on about: take examples from https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/macos-tahoe-26-makes-the-mac-more-capable-productive-and-intelligent-than-ever/: this image’s left sidebar is inset, which is just plain wrong, and this later video is ridiculous with its left and right mismatch, and the Messages screenshot at the end demonstrates the absurdity of the inset left sidebar even better, just think about the information hierarchy presented!)
I suspect it's not actually popular at all amongst users, but that instead designers just copy it because "What's good enough for Apple is good enough for us".
I don't really see the point redesigning the UI when it already is functional and modern enough imo but I'll probably get used to it in a week or so.
Yeah pointless UI churn is some off the most off-putting things you can do to a product. Any UI change inevitably breaks someone's habits and workflows and annoys users. Nobody wants to start their day figuring out which Linear B glyph is the reload button today.
If the change is bringing actual useful improvements, then fine. But fiddling with these things just for the sake of looking a bit more modern is very disrespectful to the users.
I'll be the old man yelling at clouds, but why do they feel the need for to chase the latest desigs trends like a teenager? I don't want to use Chrome but it sure does look more consistent and to the point. And the floating is... rage inducing. Were they browsing /r/unixporn too much and saw that many people used i3-gaps? There's already a margin between the address bar and the main window, why do we need more?
I say this as someone who choose the perfect font size in the terminal so there's no wasted spaced around the borders.
Because Mozilla has a problem that they cannot state outright: their purpose is to prevent Google from being broken up for monopoly power.
Everything follows from that.
What would a Firefox organization run by a foundation dedicated to the public welfare look like?
their purpose is to prevent Google from being broken up for monopoly power.
Could you expand a bit on this? I don't understand how it could be interpreted that Mozilla's purpose is that :S
Firefox's development is almost entirely funded by a deal with Google, despite Firefox being a competitor to Google's browser and Mozilla making noise about surveillance tech.
Google could walk away from the deal and instantly kill Mozilla corp. Google can kill volunteer-driven browser engines with the "fire and motion" strategy of inventing new web APIs faster than anyone else can keep up, and then blocking other engines for being "inferior" or serving them half-assed slow fallback code for not having all the Google's self-serving APIs. Now they're also pushing for "web integrity" and new captcha system that's basically DRM.
Google can pull the trigger on Firefox, but it's more convenient for them for Firefox to exist, just small enough that it isn't a real threat to the business, but they can always say there's a healthy competition on the open Web, and totally not a mirror of their mobile Apple-Google duopoly.
I knew about this stuff. But, if that was the reason for grandparent's post, then i don't think this can justify claiming that "Mozilla's purpose is to prevent Google from being broken up for monopoly power".
If that was the case, then we could presume that if Mozilla seized to exist, Google would be broken up by anti-monopoly laws? Or it would be at a higher risk of being broken up at least. But i don't see how that's obviously true, given the existence of other non-insignificant browsers. I'd think if Mozilla disappeared, Google and Chrome would probably do just fine. But it should be an obvious conclusion, if Mozilla's purpose was to prevent Google from being broken up.
Or, thinking of the converse: if Google was broken up for monopoly power, would that mean that Mozilla would automatically also seize to exist? Because there would no longer be a purpose for it's existence? Again, i don't see how that's obvious, at all. So that's why i doubt the initial premise.
given the existence of other non-insignificant browsers
Everyone but Safari are based on Blink (aka Chrome) or Firefox. And Safari is restricted to Mac OS.
Safari is Apple-only, but its engine WebKit is not. GNOME Web (Epiphany), for example, is WebKit.
This is particularly useful for people that want to test on Safari but don’t want to pay ridiculous amounts of money to Apple. For general web compatibility testing, I’ve found Epiphany to be a very good approximation of Safari, able to reproduce all Safari issues.
Today I learned that Epiphany is based on WebKit, and today I remember that Epiphany existed. But that reinforces my idea that there aren't many other non-insignificant browsers
As an aside, thank you for the tip. It may come in handy.
The one thing I find Epiphany useful for is light(er) weight PWAs for various commercial services.
Do you think that if Mozilla stopped existing today, Google would be at significantly higher risk of being forced to break up by anti-monopoly laws?
Or, do you think that if Google got split up for monopolistic reasons, then Mozilla would immediately close doors because it would no longer have a purpose?
Because that's what the "Mozilla's purpose..." phrase implies.
I was not talking about anti-monopoly laws but about how diverse the browser ecosystem is (not).
But since you asked my opinion, I can share it. if Mozilla stopped to exist, it would be hard to blame Google since the monopoly effect is not as blatant as it was with Windows and Internet Explorer. And if Google was made to split, I don't know what would happen. And if Mozilla disappeared, maybe some non profit would try to port Webkit to Windows.
Mozilla gets the majority of their funding from Google in exchange for defaulting to giving search traffic to Google. (Apple has a similar arrangement with Google in Safari, but this makes up a vastly smaller percentage of Apple's income.)
Meanwhile, Mozilla has carefully avoided doing a variety of things which might be very compelling to users- like shipping with a robust ad-blocker on by default- but which could sour their relationship with Google.
This kind of dependency and conflict of interest is fundamentally at odds with providing genuine competition for Chrome, and the miniscule browser marketshare Firefox has shriveled to reflects this.
It wouldn't just sour their relationship with Google. Google knows exactly how much money they make from Firefox users seeing ads when searching. Unless a built in ad blocker had a whitelist for Google, Google would immediately make $0 from the search deal, which would of course instantly end it.
What specifically in the post do you identify as "latest design trends"? Can you elaborate please?
Mozilla has been so notoriously bad at anything related to design in the last 15 years to the point it’s not even funny anymore. This new design system already looks dated.
Mozilla has a problem of having a shrinking userbase, which means that increasingly more users are ones who used it for a long time, got used to it, and like it exactly the way it is.
Mozilla is stuck between trying to keep the existing self-selected userbase and trying new things to appeal to a broader population that isn't using Firefox (yet).
That's the thing though right, the new designs don't appeal to a broader population. They're basically doing random stuff and hoping it works, but the existing users have no reason to play along or pretend to like it whenever that "random stuff" is actually bad.
I'm not saying you're wrong but how do you know they don't appeal to the broader population?
They've gone through so many cycles of this by now, it should be clear it's not working, and if anything, their constant UI churn is likely one of the key things that hurting their user retention. Even if someone switches to Firefox because they like the new look, in a few months it'll have a different new look that is not to their tastes anymore.
Design is thankless in that good design is in the background, not something you notice. That's not really how I'd describe Firefox'es design philosophy. They constantly chase fads and try to shove the design into the foreground, the actual web browsing is more like an after thought. It's like "yeah I guess you can browse the web as well, but look, you can make the tabs any color this week! Next week we're thinking of making the tabs spin when you click them! And after that the bookmarks will be in 3-D!"
If that doesn't drive users away, the intrusive ads and the dialogs on startup sure will. It's like it's trying to drive away users.
I used firefox for years, and the reason I stopped was because they kept moving things around, changing how things looked for no reason, broke features I was using. I'd happily come back if they just got out of the way and let me use the damn browser. Chrom{e,ium} manages to do that, so why can't firefox? It's also why I'm a bit agitated about this. I liked firefox, and mourn the mess that it's become.
Really? The chrome is so minimal at this point there’s very little design I can even think of to be bad. Especially with the new vertical compact tabs the whole browser is a thin address bar at the top and a thin tab bar to the left. What is so hilariously bad about it?
This trend of playing with gradients and "glowing" drop-shadow used to look quite good, until it became a telltale sign of AI-generated CSS. If you ask Claude to "make you a website" you get something very similar. It doesn't look bad but with that context I've come to resent it and see it as cheap.
I remember when "the future" was skeuomorphism. When the future was dropshadows on glass and round corners. When the future was flat and pointy. When the future was bright colors. When it was pastel. When the dropshadows on glass came back.
Recently it seems the cycles are getting shorter.
This, too, shall pass.
I like that they're playing around with colour accents in the chrome by default and not just dull gray. I'll probably turn it off on my machines (feels like it might be too much for me personally) but I have to hand it to them, Firefox will look pretty darn unique with those new colourways.
And we’re bringing back compact mode. People told us that they missed it, and we listened. If you want your browser controls as condensed as possible, this one’s for you.
That's really rad. I've been using the deprecated compact mode since forever, glad to see it's making an official comeback!
And we’re bringing back compact mode. People told us that they missed it, and we listened. If you want your browser controls as condensed as possible, this one’s for you.
I genuinely appreciate this, but they never fully removed it. You could always re-enable it with about:config and then setting browser.compactmode.show to true and using "customize toolbar" to turn it back on.
I really hope that compact mode in the new design is just as compact as the "unsupported" compact mode in the current version, though.
Tree style tab is the way, as long as I can hide this garbage and use tree style tab, they can fuck this up as much as they want too
Imagine that I posted that graph showing the number of firefox users going down but mozilla exec compensation going way up, that's my only comment on anything mozilla-related. I feel like an organisation like this can't exist without the goodwill of the community. I'm sure a cute mascot will fix that, although unironically that may have been the best idea they had in years out of trying basically nothing else.
