Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul
wiki.mozilla.org
wiki.mozilla.org
Linux: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...
Windows 7: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...
Windows XP: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...
OSX: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...
I personally think it looks nice and welcome the update. I haven't really been using Firefox all that much mainly due to how busy the interface is, so maybe leaning it out will make me a regular user again.
Open 4 tabs. click tab 1 and then tab 3. What order do you display the tabs in? Does tab 1 overlay tab 2? If closing tabs don't to the last open tab this now means that the visual stack is not accurate to how the program operates.
I understand the depth but there are better ways to show it that don't take up as much space nor have to deal with issues like visually showing the tab's z-order
Old: http://cl.ly/image/221j3J1j3R2Q New: http://cl.ly/image/1b1j1m2K2k24
The old one is showing 13 tabs, the new one is showing 12 tabs and the edge of the 13th one. However, the new one is way less cluttered and easy to read IMO.
Firefox UI is as busy as you make it[1]. It's very customizable without much effort. Not that it couldn't use a refresh but I quite like it the way it is.
EDIT: The commenters below get it right. Tree Style Tab[2] add-on is responsible for the tabs and you can remove the clutter by right-clicking the refresh button for example, choosing "customize..." from the context menu and just dragging all the unused stuff away into the box (a window that will appear). Toolbars can be hidden from View → Toolbars. Enabling integration with Ubuntu also thins it a bit.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/zdIy63Q.png
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
At a glance I can imagine how much more effective it is at displaying a large number of tabs in the same window.
In fact, I'm finding it quite brilliant. The web at large takes advantage of vertical scrolling, so why shouldn't browsers? All of my bookmarks are already arranged in vertical lists.
Even when faced with the input procedure of navigating my cursor to a browser tab, vertically stacked tabs have a clear advantage (for trackpad/thinkpad nipple users like myself):
To move my cursor up and down (again, with a trackpad) all I have to do is bend a finger at the knuckle. When moving the cursor a substantial distance left or right, I torque my whole wrist slightly or reposition it entirely.
Maybe that's splitting hairs... I'm rather starry-eyed at the moment seeing your Firefox interface. Perhaps I'm missing some disadvantages?
Drag and drop sometimes stops working and you lose the ability to move those tabs around (change their order). Some pages will be too wide, at least on a small screen like mine, forcing you to scroll horizontally. Also, after every (major) update you need to (re)move the new buttons.
But those are all very minor. Otherwise, it's smooth sailing.
Not so much re-added as just added. The download button (arrow) for example was added in Firefox 20.
Add-ons also tend to insert their buttons. Or even reactivate the add-ons bar. But it takes seconds to fix.
I haven't had that happen for months, so I'm hoping that it was a long standing bug that just got fixed.
I've been using it for years, I can't see myself go back to tabs on top. That's why I can't switch to chrome.
Tabs on the left (or right) is how it is supposed to be ! Websites nowadays have a lot of horizontal space because of our new big wide screens. We don't have 4/3 anymore and all the websites were conceived for that kind of resolution (800600 or 1024768).
Also it's more practical because you can open so many tabs at the same time, you can use nesting etc...
I really don't understand why it's still not the default, or at least a native option of the browser.
For almost all Firefox users, the UI is as busy as Mozilla makes it.
2. We always had those kind of "busy" UI since IE, Netscape, Opera and Firefox.
3. Chrome comes around, makes a very simplistic UI and now many people assume that it's the only way.
IMO Chrome is just too simplistic, It's beautiful yes but is it efficient? For example, the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is to display the menu bar. And I think it's a shame there is no more status bar as well.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...
Now, if they really felt the need to play design games with the UI, they could have at least disabled the status bar by default, and allowed it to be quickly re-enabled (like can be done for the menus).
Forcing users to go through the hassle of installing an extension just to get back core functionality is truly unjustifiable and very shameful.
I expect the average user of Chrome and Firefox to be able and willing to at least get to the "View" menu (or similar) and configure the interface as he/she sees fit.
I use an offbeat windowing manager (WM) (aka, the client to Xorg that actually draws the base-level windows for the GUI). The WM gets to present titlebar as it pleases, and given how my WM works, there's 0 chance that Firefox would be able to draw it's own stuff up in there.
Given that, perhaps some WMs can allow the client window to draw up there and some can not. I get the impression that, at a minimum, the titlebar is not guaranteed to be fair game.
I personally think it sucks (on OS X, that is). How anyone can think that a 10px window dragging area is fine is beyond me.
I just hope Apple can step up its game with Safari.
But I have 26, and it won't look so good then. (I tweaked my chrome to shrink the minimum tab size, so I can get lots of them without having to scroll the tab bar.)
Maybe it's better now and I should try again.
Those mockups are busier than the current interface, at least for OSX. The new OSX UI gains some vertical space in exchange for losing horizontal and making the UI more cluttered.
EDIT: Actually it only gains about 4 pixels of vertical space despite all the downsides, including the loss of the title.
Is this really too much to ask for? http://imgur.com/zD8lUYW
Don't get me wrong, I prefer Firefox. This just strikes me as wrong; the rest of the new UI is fine.
Settings > Appearance > "Use system title bar and borders".
edit: clarified I meant Chrome.
A full height title bar with the title of the current tab in it that I can use to drag the window around. Having to precisely aim my mouse pointer in order to drag my window is extremely annoying.
But why do you think the Firefox tab placement is better?
Chrome and Opera squeeze the tabs, but list them all, whereas Firefox forces a scroll after so many, which feels horrible. Also Opera has let's you list and switch open tabs with CTRL+TAB, or lets you reposition your tabs.
Really though managing tabs should be left to the window manager. Otherwise you just get inconsistant behaviour between applications.
That's when the title comes into it's own.
I use this tiny add-on, written by one of the main Firefox front end developers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-tab-wi...
It makes Firefox have the Chrome behavior of making tabs shrink infinitely. All it does it tweak one minor setting in the UI, so it's pretty bulletproof.
Anyway, I fail to see a significant difference between Finder and Chrome's appearance: http://i.imgur.com/sgfMXOy.png
If Chrome was full of tabs, the ~20px area to drag the window around is arguably a bit small, but it'd look ridiculous if there was a huge margin above the tabs.
On Windows Vista, 7, and 8, explorer does not have a titlebar since the location breadcrumb trail makes more sense. On OS X, iTunes and the App Store also do not have titlebars, favoring other ways to show information that makes more sense in the context of the app.
I find myself installing addons to cut or move parts of the UI back to where it was when I was used to it. Starting with the location bar ending with status bars. Additional fumbling around in the config became the normal thing to do after an major update...
I know it's nice if your are the developer and you can force stuff on your users because most of them can't do anything about it and will accept it in the end but remember one thing: you will cross a border for another part of your custormers and then somebody will come up with something new just because you forced us and then you'll lose customers.
As a matter of good design, configuration options should be used very sparingly. Yes they diversify the UX, but they also diversify the UX! Some decisions just have to be "made," like losing the title bar.
> you will cross a border for another part of your customers and then somebody will come up with something new just because you forced us and then you'll lose customers.
If the overall design is good, the customers loss are negligible vs. the customers gained. No one bothers chasing the miniscule emacs market.
But configurability is not on many consumer wish lists. Ya, power users love to have it there way, but most consumers just want a good experience out of the box.
Sure YOU say the decision to make something go MUST be done. You don't even bring a reason for it here. I don't see it. Why does it HAVE to be made? Is the title bar going to be forbidden or something? Is it banned in some countries? I don't understand. I don't understand even more why I shouldn't have the CHOICE to make such irrelevant decision by myself. Why not? Give me at least one real reason...
Most of the time (like here) I have the feeling we are in some kind of Fashion Show. Some design guru decides: this will be like that now. All the big fashin designers jump on the train. But the fact remains that people on the street won't dress like that...and sure you push it here and there through the discounters and you may reach a mass where it becomes a thing. But initaly nobody wanted that. It may be even a worse kind of clothing. It may be a shoe that hurts your leg muscels in the end but nobody is interested in that because it is Fashion.
I see it the same way here. Don't take me wrong. I appriciate changes that are useful. I appriciate it even more if there are options but I don't see any reason to force Fashion moves on me in software.
A word on Win8? Nah I guess you already know ;)
@X Windows: are you kidding me? Do you want to start a discussion about marketing methods now and then? I guess you've just missed the point on that one. I can sell you the most ugly crap software if I have the money or the right marketing strategy but it has nothing to do with the topic.
Plus numerous other customizations.
It's the circle of life!
I'd actually rather there was a simple meta key in each application, that you could use to just show you the vital data about a page. Meta data in webpages can be human readable - title, author, summary etc. How about an overlay? And how about have this for every app? Looking at an image - activate meta key, to see copyright info etc, listening to a tune, activate meta key to see tag info etc. Far better than hiding it under some menu item and distant properties tab.
Opera has an info bar, but it's not that user friendly.
That doesn't particulary address whether the title is necessary, it's great for window management, using windows instead of tabs. But you'll need a good window manager. I'd rather windows than tabs - though I fear that Opera introduced tabs as they were cheap windows more than anything else.
Such changes include the inability to edit any of the UI except a row of buttons on the top left, shockingly just like chrome!. I'm sure these changes will help focus their design vision, or something.
So in short, no, you wont be able to configure your client to look exactly like it did before.
Just as in Sublime Text (and even with a proper titlebar), I really dislike those Chrome-y tabs. They take too much real estate for my taste.
Lion scrollbars finally landed on Aurora and I was hoping to move back to Firefox again when it would land in Beta. The move towards consistency with the platform was very welcome around Fx4. Now, striving for uniformity, they make it feel foreign again.
Here's the agenda: Firefox as a brand has to grow and make a show of itself. Indeed the Chromification goes much deeper than simply tab looks: as the OS is relegated to a platform/hypervisor, the browser becomes an OS in itself, so that Firefox OS makes sense for people. They're moving to make phones, which will soon call for services (unless they plan to rely solely on third parties such as WhatsApp). Mozilla's product may increasingly end up looking like yet another vertically integrated software platform.
I didn't see it in the linked article, but what happens when I do Alt-V, z, r in the new UI (to pick one at random) to reset the zoom level? Will the rest of my memorized shortcuts cease working?
It used to be possible to use Firefox on Mac OS X to do a presentation with HTML and have the web page, and only the web page, fill the whole screen. (It was an option in the "View" menu.) That feature disappeared several versions ago, and now if you want to use it, you have to switch to Chrome.
Furthermore, Firefox implements the HTML5 Fullscreen API, which gives the ability to websites themselves to request the full-screen mode, with a dialog pop-up that allows you to either deny, or to temporarily or permanently give this privilege to a website: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/DOM/Using...
So basically your full-screen HTML presentation can load in full-screen mode by itself, without the user having to make an explicit View action for it.
I find it hard to believe that you don't have it. If it's true, maybe it's a problem on OS X that will likely get fixed.
It has been this way for a couple of years, if I recall correctly, and it is only a "feature" on OS X. Nothing is being done to change it, AFAIK.
I'm using this add-on in the meantime, but it has other issues: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-lion-full...
It turns out I'm not the only one complaining. It has been a known issue since at least early 2012. Apparently, some of us think full screen should mean FULL screen. Nobody at Mozilla is working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=740148
In addition I'm running the Tree Style Tabs addon, which moves all tabs to the left. While I look at a full screen Firefox I can move the mouse to the left side of the screen and the list of tabs will show up -> There's no way to get better screen estate usage, imo.
"I am not using firefox again until they reinstate the back button!"
I see this kind of stuff on reddit and slashdot all the time. Is it some sort of FUD campaign against Firefox?
Click view > Enter Fullscreen
You can also use F11, unless you set OSX to high-jack that button. You can also use the fullscreen button in the top right corner on lion versions of OSX.
The OSX fullscreen button does the same thing, leaving me with chrome up top.
But no fear. Once they are out. New stuff will come up.
Time and time again they've gone out of their way to bring the worst of the Chrome experience to Firefox. Much of this revolves around the awful UI changes starting with Firefox 4 that have made it harder and far less efficient to use. It's pretty sad that we now have to manually enable the menu bar, and install extensions to get a status bar, for instance.
Yet at the same time, they just haven't managed to implement any of the truly beneficial things that Chrome offers. Like you mention, Chrome clearly does perform significantly better than Firefox. While the Firefox supporters like to trumpet how Firefox is "comparable to Chrome" in the arewefastyet.com micro-benchmarks, this just isn't observed under real usage patterns.
If the users are going to get the Chrome experience while using Firefox, but not Chrome's better performance, then what's the point of using Firefox these days? They might as well just use Chrome, and at least get some decent performance along with the rather bad UI.
Not under my usage patterns. I rarely have fewer than 30 or so tabs open, and Chrome is simply useless for this.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-...
(Since I'll probably be asked to qualify that, my go to example - The address and search bar. Basic search is confusing already, but typing ahead in the address bar is as if the advances of the past ten years of browser technology never happened.)
Personally, I much prefer the current UI. It's very concise, no space wasted with curves, perfect for people like me who tend to have 10 tabs open at once. I would rather they update the current style with a few of the nice hover effects and bolder colours, rather than change the shape of tabs and the menu location.
Here's a comparison using the latest UX Nightly branch with two windows at the same width that have enough tabs to switch to "scrolling tab mode" (notice the arrows on either side):
Old: http://cl.ly/image/221j3J1j3R2Q New: http://cl.ly/image/1b1j1m2K2k24
The new one shows 12 tabs and the edge of the 13th, the new one shows 13 tabs, the last one being cut off a tiny bit. The new one looks cleaner to me what with the lack of extra noise with the boxes around the tabs.
(Of course the rest of your comment may still be valid, but the curves/wasted space in the tab bar in general doesn't hold up IMO.)
Current setup that I'm happy with: http://i.imgur.com/lf99vO3.png
FF's heavily rounded ones seem to waste too much space in the in-between areas.
Minor nitpick though, won't affect my use of it.
It looks less awful than the current theme in Linux, thanks to the menu button (which usually occupies the position of the leftmost tab in Linux and isn't even orange) being moved to the same location as where Chrome has it. But there still seems to be a lot of wasted space in the titlebar of the Linux theme.
I remember reading that this is because certain opendesktop UI guidelines (can't remember which one) prohibit apps from encroaching on the window chrome. But Chrome doesn't care and puts tabs at the top of the chrome anyway, and this is quite useful because you can just push the mouse to the top edge of the screen to click on a tab. With a thick titlebar occupying the edge, on the other hand, you need to aim more carefully.
I'm using it now as my primary browser.
My Firefox currently looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/93yRvie.png?1
A browser is the software I use most often, every UI change has great impact. Can't wait to see what they are bringing.
(Offtopic: Oh wait nobody wants a taskbar anyway, ain't it so Windows 8? :P)
It's crazy that you would say Mozilla doesn't have any focus because of a few petty features. C'mon now.
It's true that we've been behind on some of our OS X integration, but we're very hard at work fixing that situation. I hope you will like our future releases better.
If you want, you can test out Firefox 23 today by downloading Firefox Aurora, http://aurora.mozilla.org
From my perspective, not making that nonsense priority #1 demonstrates Mozilla's focus on features that actually matter.
Also, patches welcome, write an extension, etc etc etc.
The "Tabs on Top" menu item has been hidden since Firefox 15. The about:config pref "browser.tabs.onTop" is the only way to toggle this feature.
Firefox is slow ( Comparatively ) , I hate opening Chrome from time to time keeps reminding me how fast Chrome is ( Although that have gotten slower in recent release ).
Edit: And God they drop the Firefox Menu Button! Do they have to copy chrome on every god damn thing? What the heck is happening with Opera and Firefox UI design team?
Detailed mockups broken for me, or perhaps I fail at grok-ing it. Here's what I found easier:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/images/0/0c/Australis-i02-Tabs.jpg
And menus:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Desktop/Panel_Menu#Stage_2...
Just swipe over the menu, its simply to much contrasts and far away from being gently to the eyes. I also don't want to imagine that with a darker theme (if it cant be customized).
And again minimalistic and ribbon like menus what was the worst feature introduced in some more or less modern applications (on windows). I want to see a menu for several reasons (perhaps a long time user habbit) but, please, dont remove that if I dont ask for that. Just noticing the min, max and closing button on the top left(?) of the main window - I really really hope that this is only for preview.
In addition, will there by any chance a way to customize the colors used for general UI elements (browser textboxes, find dialog, titlebar) besides the system one? For example to allow the use of theme colors over the system ones. Changeable dialog colors would also be warmly welcomed.
I currently use Tab Mix Plus [1]. It's awesome.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/
So wathever new defaults you choose for Firefox, please always provide a way to revert to what we prefere (even if that requires to use about:config).
Here's my current Firefox setup : http://i.imgur.com/PwiPeDM.png . I'd like to be able to keep it that way. I seriously don't care about round corners and stuff like that if that means I loose some control over how I can configure Firefox the way I like.
Of course, the authors could figure out a new way to do it, but for now it breaks the add-on.
I find it slower than Chrome, not page loading but in terms of being responsive.
Sometimes there is an issue when I drag a word into a new tab, I would like it to search google, but it tries to go to the site.
I had to reload the page a few times to listen to the changelog today and gave up and just switched back to Chrome.
I feel like a problem with UI designers is that once they made something they feel like they have to change it else they're useless. So they change stuff for the sake of it or something.
Real changes in australis: - tabs around more round. - main menu move from far left to far right, slightly lower, and has a new icon
arbitrary much? Save 3px?
I can tell you, all the non-techies will be lost (there's no point even arguing tat), and many of the techies will be pissed (you can argue on that, but im pretty sure it'll be a large amount)
It could just as well be the growth team, experimenting with different designs to see if retention of new users picks up.
Because I'm not trying to be sarcastic here, that's what the choice is when you test on release.
- master password mechanism
- secure/insecure site dialogs (ALL the dialogs for various cert status)
- RSS
- Sync
- search through a page (thats somewhere copying/inspiring chrome would be a pretty good idea..)
etc.
but no.. its always menus, tabs, and icons from the main window instead..
I don't know about that. The new UI looks more like Chrome, and there are plenty of non-techies that use Chrome.
The rest seems fine, although I didn't see the personal bar ?
sigh