Mozilla Ponders Major Firefox UI Refresh

CWmike writes "Mozilla is working on a revamp of Firefox to synchronize its various versions — desktop, tablet, phone and Windows 8 Metro — into a single visual style, according to documents posted by members of its user interface (UI) design team. The project, which does not have a name, and the earlier blending of Mozilla's mobile and desktop design groups, is meant to bring more coherence to the various versions of the open-source browser. 'One of our major goals for the year [is] getting Firefox to feel more like one product — more 'Firefoxy' — across all our platforms, desktop to tablet to phone,' Madhava Enro of the Mozilla UI design team, said in a post to his personal blog on Tuesday. Enro posted a slideshow he and others used the week before to present their proposals at a company get-together. According to the presentation, some UI elements will be shared across all Firefox editions, among them a lean toward 'softer texture' and smoother curves in the design."

Comments

Re:No. Please Stop

[d3ac0n]

THIS!

The change over from FF2.x to 3.x was bad enough (I hate you "awesome" bar!) We don't NEED another major UI overhaul. I personally won't touch the Chrome browser with a thousand-foot pole, precisely because it's more a TOY than a browser.

Focus on making FF faster and lighten it's footprint while retaining the nice BOXY, MODULAR look of the browser.

Freakin' UI designers are out of control. Stop making everything look so damn minimalist and shiny! I want my browser boxy, ugly and crammed full of useful features that I can access with a MOUSE. I don't want to have half the features stripped out, and then half of what's left buried under a set of complex and obscure keyboard commands. This isn't the DOS days. Keyboards are for TYPING. The mouse is there for navigation on the PC. DESIGN FOR IT!

Oh, and NO software designers should design for the Win8 PC Metro UI. That POS should be starved to death from lack of software and allowed to die a Vista-esque death. Seriously. Think of the users, IGNORE the PC METRO UI when you design your software. Pretend it doesn't exist. If enough designers do this then Microsoft will be forced to drop this horror and get back to a proper desktop UI.