Mozilla Is Working On a Big Firefox Redesign (neowin.net) 99
darwinmac writes: Mozilla is working on a huge redesign for its Firefox browser, codenamed "Nova," which will bring pastel gradients, a refreshed new tab page, floating "island" UI elements, and more. "From the mockups, it appears Mozilla took some inspiration from Googles Material You (or at least, the dynamic color extraction part of it) because the browser color accent appears influenced by the wallpaper setting," reports Neowin. "Choosing a mint-green desktop background automatically shifts the top navigation bars to match that exact shade."
Mozilla has a habit of redesigning Firefox every few years. Before "Nova," there was the "Proton" redesign in 2021, the "Photon" redesign in 2017, and the "Australis" redesign in 2014. Nova is still in early development, so it might take a year or two before it appears in an official stable Firefox release. Neowin adds: "Not every redesign project ends well for Mozilla, though. You might remember 2012's Firefox Metro, an ambitious attempt to build a custom browser for Windows 8s touch-first interface. The team built it to operate both as a traditional desktop application and as a touch-optimized Metro app. The whole thing was scrapped in 2014 after two years in development due to a dismally low user adoption rate (a preview version of the software had been released a year earlier on the Aurora channel)."
Mozilla has a habit of redesigning Firefox every few years. Before "Nova," there was the "Proton" redesign in 2021, the "Photon" redesign in 2017, and the "Australis" redesign in 2014. Nova is still in early development, so it might take a year or two before it appears in an official stable Firefox release. Neowin adds: "Not every redesign project ends well for Mozilla, though. You might remember 2012's Firefox Metro, an ambitious attempt to build a custom browser for Windows 8s touch-first interface. The team built it to operate both as a traditional desktop application and as a touch-optimized Metro app. The whole thing was scrapped in 2014 after two years in development due to a dismally low user adoption rate (a preview version of the software had been released a year earlier on the Aurora channel)."
Feature vs Design? (Score:5, Interesting)
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n33DS m0RE aYE eYE
Re: Feature vs Design? (Score:2)
Failure, Fail, and Failure (Score:2)
Mozilla will spend their time making already usable and a visually decent browser a YAGNI reskin.
Instead of lobbying and getting Google, Microsoft, Apple and others on-board to FIX the mess that is based on 25+ year old defective JavaScript standards, XML based layout and CSS styling
How about pushing for and getting a new web programming language which is not a patch on top of JavaScript? A language with compilation, type checking at compile time, multi-threading built in, and everything is not a dynamic d
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They used to be a great browser. Until they abandoned it in favor of copying Chrome
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Re: Failure, Fail, and Failure (Score:2)
tbf It took me a while to grok it, but once you get it and start to use prototypal inheritance properly (instead of trying to fight it and force it to look like classic class-based inheritance) you'll find it a lot more rewarding.
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All browsers work well
Speak for yourself. Firefox stalls out for 10 seconds at a time on infinite scroll content after a certain amount is loaded (most obvious on Reddit), while Chrome does not.
There's plenty Firefox can still do before I consider it to be "working well".
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Servo was meant to be groundbreaking. It builds a rendering engine which is multithreaded.
None of the competition have that. And since virtually all clients have many many cores, this holds the promise of being many times faster than anything existing right now.
Mozilla invented Rust specifically for this. They started rewriting Gecko in Rust and alas, pursuing bells ans whistles, they ended up dumping the project.
What a bunch of morons.
Re: Feature vs Design? (Score:2)
Re-writing software is expensive. At best, it introduces new issues and denies you time to work on improvements. This Rust thing sounds like politics or religion, which is very naive when it comes to software development.
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Religion? Rust? What are you talking about.
Rust is a programming language. It is groundbreaking in that it offers one feature that no other language has: It can guarantee thread safety.
In thew modern world of multi core everything, even on phones, it it a pretty big deal.
There is no religion involved.
Re: Feature vs Design? (Score:2)
I think Ada does as well, but it's been a long time since I've used it and perhaps it requires certain coding constructs, rather than a general guarantee.
Newage Programmers Need Adult Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
My college professor in a user interface design class back in the 90's said it best after telling us a story about the NASA space program and it's UI design for Apollo:
If you can't train a monkey to use it, you can't train a human to use it.
I'm sick of apps that look good. I want Apps that WORK GOOD!
I'm sick and tired of having to relearn an app or report endless bugs because some just out of college app designer wants to vibe code some fancy app remake so he can say "I DID THIS MOMMY!!" to his parents like he's a fucking kindergartner holding up a finger painting.
Worse, I'm sick and tired of having to retrain other users and clean up bug mess because of said app designer.
I want a program that works. That is all.
I don't care that a program that works looks like something out of Windows XP. I don't care about bullshit features and UI elements that never work. I especially don't need a fucking box popping up every fucking five minutes to tutorial me about your bullshit feature or design that no one wants or cares about with a "GOT IT" button like a stripped down text based new age Clippy.
Firefox has (or at least used to have) skinning. How about working on that so that the kindergartners can play with their crayons and the adults can get work done instead of babysitting your slopcode for the umpteenth time. It's bad enough I had to create a theme so I can easily see what tab was active without having to waste time thinking about it because some idiot in your UI Dept thought white on white for the tab UI was a good Idea because some idiot at Google though it was a good idea instead of white on black or at least offsetting colors so you can easily differentiate like a good functional UI should be. I don't have time to retrain employees or submit endless bug reports and feedback loops because your "My First Sony" obsessed VTech Leapfrog Toddler app team is trying to justify it's existence again by reinventing the wheel for the 15th fucking time.
This is way I miss cutthroat managers like Steve Jobs. I hate Apple products but I have to admit that Jobs kept this bullshit in check at Apple when he was alive. If it didn't make sense, broke things, confused people or wasted time he would shoot it down and if the designer kept insisting, he was fired which kept the other app designers in line. The split second his body was cold you started seeing Apple UI's redesign themselves to the point you have a UI that's more art than function and then you wonder why your customers are bitching because they can't understand or even see your glass looking UI.
And if you happen to work as a manager in a App development studio. Print this post on wallpaper and hang it on the wall in your break room instead of some bullshit motivational speech or word cloud to coddle the kindergartner's safe space feelings. You'll probably be facing a harassment charge from your HR dept afterwards but It will be more valuable to your team and your customer's overall heath than any motivational new age crap you were going to put there anyway.
Re: Newage Programmers Need Adult Intervention (Score:1)
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Can I pay them to stop breaking stuff?
I didn't think so.
Trying to think of a browser feature I want enough to pay for. Nothing is coming to mind. And Firefox certainly isn't asking nicely, but just ramming changes at me at various random times.
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
You had me at pastel gradients.
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Shudder! I absolutely hate pastel colors in Android. I have to run a root app to force them to grayscale since all colors are pastel. It's awful. Pink may complement the colors in my wallpaper, but just maybe I don't want pink. Why can't I choose the colors I want? If they make my eyes bleed with bright, saturated colors, that's on me.
Re: Sweet! (Score:2)
As long as I can keep using the old look (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm using Firefox ESR so that I don't have to do reconfiguration of the customizations at https://github.com/Aris-t2/Cus... [github.com] except about once per year. As long those CSS customizations work then I'm fine with Mozilla foundation spending their money however they like. That addon is magnificent.
My Firefox still looks exactly like it did 10-15 years ago. I still get my status bar, I get my tabs below toolbars & address bar, and icons are still the same.
Yeah, stuck in my ways, I also use Openshell on the Windows PCs I have to use so I get Windows 7 look. I don't mind learning a new UI paradigm if I see a clear benefit and it's going to remain for a long while. Change for the sake of change...bah.
Re:As long as I can keep using the old look (Score:5, Insightful)
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How did you get that to happen? When Firefox ditched XUL they broke Classic Appearance and I've been forced to use the crappy configuration that they provided. I know there are ways to edit the prefs.js but it seem so backwards to edit config files to alter options, like we're back in the 80s.
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I have been bending Firefox to my will with userChrome.css for some years now. It does get annoying having to fix it every year or so. I have tabs where they should be, underneath the url bar, but no status bar, sadly. So far I can live with it and it looks mostly the same as it did 15 years ago. Actually my entire desktop system has looked virtually the same for the last 20 years, ever since KDE 1.1 and Gnome 2, Mate, and now KDE Plasma 6.
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As I said, use the CustomCSSForFx addon at https://github.com/Aris-t2/Cus... [github.com] and enable toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in about:config.
All you have to do then is edit a single configuration file, and in that just comment out/in the options as you like.
Only problem is that when a new version of Firefox lands, this addon needs to be updated too and then you need to do a diff for the configuration file. That's why I use ESR so I don't have to do that too often.
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I had earlier today been thinking about how much unneeded whitespace there is in FF's address and tabs bars today; this link not only tightens everything up well enough that I can actually see the URL of a site when the window is 60rem wide (half a 1080p monitor width), but I can also enjoy the nostalgia of the UI when the Internet itself was just... better
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Nice of you to mention this, I didn't even know there was such a thing. Googling how to migrate from 'usual firefox' to ESR to genuinely refuse constant updates and meaningless chrome.
Fuck if it gets rid of the 'ai bar' I'll be giddy.
EDIT: hm, first google suggests its more challenging than I hoped.
Anyway, THANKS
Yuck! (Score:2)
I may have to switch to Falkon.
Firefox Alternatives? (Score:1)
Any decent Firefox alternative appeared?
I've long started dreading Fx upgrades. It's an unpleasant feeling. Time to move on.
Is there any Firefox-based browser appeared that is suitable as a "workhorse browser" like e.g. older Firefox/Mozilla/Navigator versions?
Something that just works without idiotic animated everything or sliding menus BS? no pop-ups announcing "new features"(tm)? and please no pastel or gradient BS?
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Vivaldi, but it's based on chrome. Seamonkey is still kicking if you dig the Netscape 4.0 look. Palemoon which is based on the old mozilla code base.
I use Firefox but with 4k youtube videos it uses a lot more cpu and makes the fan spin up. So for that I switch to Vivaldi.
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I couldn't find AdBlock for Vivaldi. I don't trust the built-in stuff from commercial vendors.
Vivaldi has also implemented Google's "manifest v3" for some reason. That's precisely the thing I want to avoid - but Vivaldi apparently embraces.
P.S. Googled it. ... Oof. They use Chrome's extensions?! No own extension store??? So Vivaldi is merely a dressed up Chrome? Disappoint.
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Vivaldi can still use mv2 uBlock Origin.
Vivaldi is based on Chromium, but the team built their own custom UI on top of it so it's unlike the other Chromium-based browsers, in that it's extremely customizable. I think it's a bit unfair to call Vivaldi "dressed up as Chrome".
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Update your jokes. They are too stale. [wikipedia.org]
Re: Firefox Alternatives? (Score:2)
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LibreWolf seems great from what I've seen of it, but I would be wary that it's a way to escape Mozilla's constant UI redesigns. Its focused on removing the privacy invading crap more than the UX changes. The version I've been using lately is almost identical to current Firefox in operation (which is hardly the most optimal Firefox UI) with the exception of, for overblown "avoiding fingerprinting" reasons, not providing day mode/night mode information to websites.
I still recommend it, but it's not going to s
This article is bait (Score:1)
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Make Lynx Great Again!!!!!
You kids and your graphical browsers... bah!
And while you're at it, get off my lawn!
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Bah! If you aren't telneting to port 80 and issuing your own, hand-crafted, headers and HTML tags, you are nothing more than a script kiddie who is coddled by GUI conveniences!
Grasp (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that Mozilla still has no clue why they're getting their asses handed to them by Chrome. They need to stop fucking with the inconsequentials, and spend more time making their browser work. I have a few sites that just don't work in Firefox, but work fine in Chrome.
Re:Grasp (Score:5, Interesting)
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Firefox has 2.3% of the browser market share. It's amazing people bother at all for compatibility.
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Doesn't matter what % what browser has.
If I am involved in a website (regardless making it or planning it out for someone else to make it), I want it to be standards compliant.
So it will work the same on all browsers which are standard compliant, regardless of market share.
Re: Grasp (Score:2)
Thank god for Safari on iOS; itâ(TM)s the only thing stopping the world going completely Google/Chrome.
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It seems that Mozilla still has no clue why they're getting their asses handed to them by Chrome. They need to stop fucking with the inconsequentials, and spend more time making their browser work. I have a few sites that just don't work in Firefox, but work fine in Chrome.
Agreed. It can't be that they don't have a lot of other things to work on that they have time (and money) to dick around with making more rounded corners, floating things and the color scheme matchy-matchy . (a) who really cares about any of that and (b) how does it make the actual browser and the browsing experience better? UI designers don't need to be constantly employed. :-) As for the New Tab page, maybe some people use it, but I have mine set to Blank - I don't like, need or use clutter - I also
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Their idea of "keeping up with Chrome" seems to be following every dumb UI update they make. You know, the shitty parts. They could very easily distinguish themselves by simply not doing that. Then, maybe those programmers could spend time on more important stuff. Or just stop coding entirely, that would do it too.
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It seems that Mozilla still has no clue why they're getting their asses handed to them by Chrome.
Disagree, they know fully well and there's nothing they can do about it. Chrome is popular due to lock-in and cross marketing. The only other thing Chrome offered was "fucking with the inconsequentials". In many ways all Mozilla is doing is the same thing as Chrome these days. Since the Quantum back end changes it's essentially just as fast, and the rest is just a bunch of bullshit side features that each browser is copying from each other.
Chrome is a green car. Firefox is a blue car. They are the same mode
Re: Grasp (Score:2)
Springtime on Open Source Island (Score:5, Funny)
This year, however, special. It is Mozilla Molting season.
These can be difficult times for Mozilla. Shedding its skin and forming a new one doesn't happen easily or painlessly. Frequently, vestigial appendages unexpectedly burst forth, like VPNs and LLM buttons. Sometimes it is more subtle, with Mozilla's own extensions failing to recognize its new visage.
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I loved that part of Attenborough's Life of Programs! But my favorite scene was when the batch pipelines were crossing the network at night, and they had to dodge all the traffic from the backups.
Re: Bring back Sunbird, not a new Firefox (Score:2)
Give me the Netscape pulsing N. Everything will be ok then.
Window dressing (Score:2)
Look at email clients.
Email readers essentially look like spreadsheets with 3 different panes, accounts, messages, message details.
There is no other way to do it.
If you try, you always end up back at the same functional place.
Redesigns like this are just what graphic designers suggest... because... designers gotta design.
NO. We don't need it.
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Ah, you must be one of those young people who only cares about looks. Behold:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I admit a list of accounts is somewhat handy, so long as it can be hidden somehow. Having a pane for the message subject and another for the message itself has annoyed me ever since it was foisted on us in the early 2000s and then became non-optional in most so
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ha ha great reference... I actually remember Elm, after looking at the screenshot.
Personally, I think the 3 pane layout is where email ends up.
I actually worked on software product design a lifetime ago, and one of my tasks was to mockup an email client.
3 pane design was what made everybody happy.
Why? (Score:2)
But why though?
The current one works fine?
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Low adoption rate you say? (Score:5, Interesting)
Browsers are, for most people, a white (or black) empty square that gets filled with whatever website is trendy. The least intrusive it is the better.
I'm not sure focusing on a redesign with flashy elements and bigger (and emptier) components, alongside with color-changing and other bells and whistle is improving the experience for anyone. It certainly won't help with less tech-literate users that are lost every time anything change. It won't help with power users, because they tend to have functionality over excessive design, and that sounds like it. It won't help with people that like "slick" design because, again, most of the time a web browser have very little element of its own UI on screen *by design*.
At best, the tab bar is there but if they decide to make it bigger and flashier and choke-full of extra features that nobody asked for, I'm fairly certain that adoption will not skyrocket this time either. The only people this would have a notable impact on are people that don't use their web browser as a web browser, I guess.
And in the meantime, there's two distinct "profile" features, bookmark management is abysmally bad, the side panel remain mostly unusable except for the handful of thing mozilla deemed worthy of it, performances are spotty on a beefy gaming PC, some long-standing compatibilities issues remain open I did not know that Mozilla was rolling in so much money that they could divert development resources to "shiny things nobody will see most of the time".
Fix bugs FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough with the UI fluff already. You have bugs to fix and memory leaks to patch.
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But that's not sexy.... (and yeah, I'd switch out of FF as well, if I could find anything that wasn't Chrom* based that didn't suck and was actively maintained....)
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I've been with Firefox since the beginning for the same reason. But wow Mozilla has made some boneheaded moves along the way.
Re:Fix bugs FFS (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention Firefox is really the only browser left that can run uBlock Origin, making it safer to just browse the internet. I use it on my Android phone because of this. All other browsers now have to use the Lite version which doesn't work as well.
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Yes, things aren't peachy regarding Mozilla's management of Firefox development.
But it's still the best we got.
On mobile (F-Droid Fennec) and desktop, it works great for me. On desktop, containers are fantastic. Solid ad blocking makes the web bearable. Not handing my data to one of the big 5 is the cherry on top.
It's good to complain loudly internally. Externally, it's up to us to help people find the way. Ad blocking and containers are 2 features that sway Chrome and Edge users.
It'
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The problem is it didn't matter. Most users switched to uBlock lite and still don't see ads and therefore think there was no difference and the hype over the Manifest V3 change was just some senseless nerd rage.
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We have a long way to go before LadyBird is ready for the public, but I hope this will be what open source advocates suggest/switch to since Firefox seems to have a lot of technical debt in its engine/code.
We just want (Score:5, Interesting)
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So, lynx?
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So, lynx?
Emacs has a browser package. :-)
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We also want it refactored so that it's not such a nightmare to work on in general, or even to build, which could be a big part of an efficiency makeover as well.
Re: We just want (Score:2)
z-negative borders (Score:2)
Since when are z-axis negative frame borders a thing?
This design appears to require "frame borders" to be bigger to actually visually separate elements using the background, and the elements themselves still do have z-positive borders...
I also wonder how this design will work with setups that have no titlebar (in fullscreen mode - think kiosk usecase)
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Since when are z-axis negative frame borders a thing?
When you're trying to out-browse Khan Noonien Singh. :-)
He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two dimensional browsing.
Time to fix it (Score:2)
Make it look like Netscape 4 but with a modern HTML rendering engine. Bring back scrollbars, the status bar, menus, buttons, and the throbber.
Dam! One can only image (Score:2)
But then with expectations lower than low, maybe they could spring a surprise!
Can we ... (Score:2)
Just put the Ublock Origin people in charge (Score:5, Insightful)
Just make it look like Netscape Navigator again (Score:5, Insightful)
Again? Why? (Score:3)
No doubt this will be one of their crap UI changes that doesn't actually improve usability nor attract new users as their market share continues to decline. Why about fixing some real issues? Or how about invest in maildir support in Thunderbird? How many years has this page [mozilla.org] said it's experimental? There are two warnings on the page telling you that you will lose your data if you use it, FFS.
Looks terrible (Score:2)
Oh goodie. Hiding more things from the user. (Score:5, Insightful)
There used to be a time when you could go into Settings and easily find what you wanted to change, check or uncheck a box, and you were done. With the current version you have to dig through nebulous sounding locations with unclear nomeclature and hope you found what you're looking for.
For example, if you wanted to manually remove all the saved cookies and such for specific web sites, you could go to Privacy and Security then open the Manage Data area. Everything was there in one location. No muss, no fuss.
Now you have to dig through at least two other boxes to find the same thing, and it doesn't even work the same.
Are people trying to justify their existence, because that's what it sounds like. Instead of keeping things simple and usable we're now forced down the path of shiny for shiny's sake.
Here's a question: with all this reworking and "updating", will we once again have the ability to check a checkbox and never be harassed about updates ever again? Is that too difficult to implement, because it used to be like that for decades until someone needed to show they were being "useful" on the project.
Are they going to simplify it, so that ... (Score:1)
Guys No. Simply no. (Score:2)
inventing the wheel... again (Score:2)
More of the same (Score:2)
Glide browser (Score:1)
Performance (Score:2)
This is a canonical example of tone-deafness (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla: we're taking away the status bar.
Users: we need control over Javascript (a la NoScript)
Mozilla: we're changing the UI.
Users: we need privacy protection/anti-fingerprinting/anti-tracking (a la Privacy Badger)
Mozilla: we're adding AI
Users: we'd like you to fix the bugs and performance issues
Mozilla: we're redesigning the UI for the N'th time even though the one we had 10,15,20 years ago was pretty much ok
Users: have you noticed that your market share is in the single digits?
Mozilla: give us money!
UX (Score:2)
After a careful UX study, Firefox has found that entirely too many users had finally figured out how to use the latest changes in the UI, thus necessitating a complete change.
Enshitification! (Score:2)
Remember Lightspeed? (Score:2)
I still haven't forgiven Mozilla for proposing Lightspeed.
The new Firefox UI looks like Thunderbird. Big surprise. Setting up Thunderbird was a royal pain and didn't make any sense whatsoever, and I don't suspect the new Firefox to be any easier.