Mozilla is working on a big Firefox redesign, here is what it looks like
53 points by saturnyx
53 points by saturnyx
The cruel irony of web browser design is that you can spend all this time on it, and the user simply insists on looking at the huge window in the middle instead
The whole "tabbar, sidebar and content as 3 separate top-level blocks with borders&gaps between them, almost like separate windows" idea is just terrible. What is this, GIMP?
Looks like another victim of following Liquid-Glass-style "UI only in floating bubbles" design. Luckily without overlapping the actual page.
I think I could live with it, but I have no interest in the wasted space in the margins.
It's so weird that their design team seems to have an aversion to things "sticking together". With Photon the tab selector acted almost like "earmarks" to the actual content. It made visual sense.
Then the next refresh made them hover in the air with huge padding on the sides. They look out of place now. Like they are completely independent from what they're supposed to represent.
And now they want to give the same treatment to the actual element groups too? I really don't get it. I'm sure I'll eventually get used to it, as one does, but it doesn't make me too happy to see even more screen space wasted for no clear benefit.
tbh It's not the worst (especially when in practice you can shuffle the sidebar away). Stuff like Arc's "put two browser tabs next to each other" thing are also very useful.
multiple windows in one window paradigm is back baby!
FF Dev Edition already has this, in the current UI paradigm. It's pretty neat, especially in combination with Vertical Tabs.
If it wanted to be GIMP all of the windows would pretend to be actual windows and a window manager would be included. The only thing worse is when an application actually turns everything into separate windows and tries to let the OS do the window management. Which OSes are surprisingly terrible at.
Tor browser has been doing this forever, partly to make sure the web content doesn't look like a browser element, right?
If you don't have a bookmark bar, and someone puts "Chase" on a fake bookmark bar, I bet you fool at least one person...
Tor browser restricts the viewport to a small number of sizes, selecting the biggest one that will fit. It doesn't really separate things up like this.
In particular, if the window size already matches the letterboxed size, it just looks like normal - you don't get the rounded corners or anything.
Gonna also bring up that the reason it does this is to avoid the slim possibility of the user being identified based on the shape of their display. IIRC it used to just always launch in a 4:3 window and show a warning recommending not to maximize it.
I… like it? I mean, it doesn't seem to be very disruptive: it looks more like a "refresh", a softening with a little more colorful padding there and there.
If they add or keep an option to make the UI denser for people that values screen estate (i.e. that would collapse those new borders and paddings), I think it could be well received by my friends and colleagues.
In my dreams, I read things like:
Mozilla is commissioning a year-long study of browser users by experienced UX designers who will all focus on accessibility, consistency and performance, with a guideline of "make the easy things really easy and the hard things easy to find".
Unfortunately, reality never matches my dreams.
In reality Mozilla probably paid a random agency for the redesign, expecting to get what you want, but instead getting some random shit made up on a bender.
I feel like they compulsively do this every couple years. I quite liked the photon design but I've lost count of how many iterations they've gone through since then.
I'm using the addwater theme on Gnome to make it look 'native' on the Gnome desktop.
I wouldn't mind the constant redesigns if they were delivering some concrete benefit for my browsing. I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix, before it was even part of Mozilla, so I have gone through every redesign. I can only think of one or two where it provided me with a better browsing experience. Thankfully most of their redesigns haven't been a net negative but these early screenshots really don't instill confidence.
Before Nova, there was Firefox Proton, an update focusing on removing visual clutter with simplified menus back in June 2021 alongside Firefox 89. Going back even further, we saw the 2017 "Photon" redesign land with Firefox 57.
Of course there have been some changes since 2021, especially with new UI features like tab groups and the side bar.
Don't forget that Firefox once looked more like Dillo. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mozilla_Firefox_1.0_front_page_screenshot.png
Yeah I don't know. Give me a few buttons, some tabs, an input bar and the only "fluff" things I like are buttons for some some addons (and the downloads, on the right side).
I will never get why you would want to waste so much space. Merging the whole menu bar on Linux/Windows into a button was controversial at the time, but it freed up space for the ... content.
Looking at that screenshot I'm reminded that we used to browse without tabs. I can't imagine living without them now.
tabbed browsing was in Firefox from the very early builds when it was still called phoenix though. Even good old Mozilla suite had it for a few years then already - and of course Opera, which basically had everything decades before anyone else
I was not completely sure about it but I would have said I think it was.
Just posted the first belieavable screenshot I found, didn't have time to look for a tabbed one, I wanted to.. :)
Tabbed browsing was the big reason I switched to Firefox back in the day. I’d love to see more UI/UX innovations like those. The most recent one I can think of are synced tab groups.
It had tabs, but I think the tab bar was hidden if there was only one tab, since many would use it without tabs, and the space would thus be entirely wasted. But I am mildly surprised there was no “new tab” toolbar button. I guess it was just File → New Tab or Ctrl+T.
I remember when it was a radical redesign from Netscape Navigator (or Communicator, as 4.0 started calling it when it has all the calendaring and stuff added?). Phoenix 0.1 was very visually radical.
Waves from Dillo
I think people forget what a huge impact the UI has on user behavior. For example, it was not until I stopped scrolling with the mouse wheel and instead scroll by "screen pages", that I started to read long text pages like books instead of skimming through the text.
On Dillo pressing Esc hides the menus so the page text is all I see and pressing Space advances one page (minus a configurable overlap gap), so I can free my hands from the mouse or keyboard while reading, which helps me a lot to stay focused.
I will never understand why Mozilla insists on copying the worst UX and UI design decisions from chrome, Windows and Mac instead of at least attempting to do something that sets them apart from big tech.
Vivaldi is the closest thing we have to a browser for power users and that's just sad. I really hope Ladybird become useful for daily browsing soon.
Oh, I know this one! I once complained about this at a previous job and got a huge lecture on how you have to do redesigns all the time because otherwise you will just forever keep looking like Win95 and people won't take you seriously anymore.
I wanted to argue that there should be an actual good design which people should try to find and stick with but couldn't even convince myself. Fashion exists.
It's the sad reality. Many times, I've heard average users (for a lack of better word) complaining that Firefox looks outdated. So if your app doesn't look like the top competitors, they won't use it and you'll lose users which for Firefox means losing revenues throught search clicks.
Nova design language
Why does Firefox insist on having a design language of its own? The operating system has one. A displayed website has one. So there will be three on the screen at a minimum, just so their brand gets a share of attention? Do something user-centered for a change.
Words cannot express how deeply I dislike the shapes of the tabs in these mockups. My computer is not a Fisher Price toy. I'm not a hardcore retro computing person, I like good modern designs, I just really really really don't like this. They need to study user preferences more.
Sören Hentzschel, a web developer and author of several open-source extensions, shared these early mockups, but the final app could end up looking pretty different since actual development has only just started.
Hm, I don't hate it. Main worry I have is the gaps between e.g. the side bar and the left edge of the window – hopefully that is purely visual and the click targets do actually extend to the edge.
I've seen both software where that is the case as well as software where that isn't. A "good" example world be KDE Plasma's task bar, which allows me to flick my cursor to the bottom left and still hit the menu even though visually the cursor is in the gap. A "bad" example would be Gajim after the switch to GTK4 and libadwaita; if I maximize the window and flick my cursor to the top-right, it will actually miss the close button and do nothing on click.
Please don’t be full of AI, please don’t be full of AI
Edit: looks like mostly a UI redesign. I don’t like it but I usually don’t like UI changes
I still think the omnibar was a mistake for "power users" and if I could switch it back with an about:config flag.
Does that 1 tab if you want to search kill you? No, it does not.
Could you avoid so many accidental leaks of your clipboard or "sure let me search for example .org because oyu fatfingered a single space"
Looks like they take all the good ideas from Zen browser and paste it in new Firefox.
Argh what's with everyone liking rounded stuff.... Slightly rounded corners I say why not, but fully rounded? hell no... 😬 Leave the current clean rectangles alone
I hope they don't make the mistake Zen made, where you need precision to use the scrollbar on a maximized window because the padding is in the way
I just wish the tab bar was a tree so I could drop an add-on.
I use vertical tabs and tab groups, it gets you 90% the way. I know it’s not for everyone, especially if you need features from treestyletabs like search
Oh, they re-implemented it? I recall an old add-on Mozilla put out like probably a decade ago.
One year ago this week.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/firefox/136.0/releasenotes/
I went around all my machines removing the various vertical tab extensions I used, trying out outrace Firefox Sync cheerfully putting them all back again. All of them. At once.
Nope Nope Nope.
I really hope that the Firefox forks that I actually use don't adopt this nonsense.
Some of this stuff has already landed in Nightly. For now, you can disable it by falsing the prefs sidebar.revamp and sidebar.revamp.round-content-area.
I learned this when inspecting the browser to figure out what I needed to change in userChrome.css to get the old back (since I dislike wasting space on frippery, and indeed had already shrunk the splitter and killed a lot of the space wasting in the existing design) and I saw some @media not -moz-pref("sidebar.revamp") and similar.
You can toggle the revamp in the settings as "Show sidebar", in both Nightly and the release version. Just the default is different.
I wish they would concentrate on making a user agent, instead of an application runtime. But, that ship has sailed.
Why do you (clarifying: Why does Firefox) want chrome on the top and the side? One or the other is necessary, but having both means your window is bulkier than needed, especially when you shrink it to the page size.
That full-screen-only attitude doesn't suit a browser; browsers are often used as a secondary window in a workflow.
I feel like a bit of a hater for thinking this since it looks fine, but it feels a bit boring to me. The whole aesthetic feels like ultra-processed corporate product. I wish the designers would find a knob that says "magic" and crank it up 300%. It's safe and inoffensive, but I want a design that feels like I'm living in a magical future that has integrated nature and technological progress in order to create harmony.
