Cow’s Blog

March 1st, 2006

The next major version of the popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox, will feature a UI refresh which will change the look and feel of the browser.

The goals for the UI refresh include: 

• remove UI elements that aren't useful to majority of users
• increase usability of elements that are useful
• increase focus on web content

There has been a post in the Firefox newsgroups from Mozilla's user experience dude describing the changes.

Proposed changes to the UI include:

• Replacing the "Go" menu with a new "History" menu. I'm a big fan of this since the Go menu is useless and probably the least used.
• The Refresh/Stop button will be merged. I'm not a fan of this personally. I don't like it in Opera or Netscape. I guess it's possible to get used to it but I like having both buttons especially as for some reasons, some pages never seem to finish loading.
  EDIT: It seems like I was incorrect; the Stop and Go buttons are being merged, not Refresh and Stop. Not against this change.
• The reload/stop button and go button move inside the address bar. This is supposed to emphisise the relationship between the buttons and the page. It sounds like they want to effectively extend the white background color to include the refresh/stop button and the go button. I hope the refresh/stop button doesn't become smaller, like what happened in IE7.
• The throbber (that strange thing with eight circles in the top right of the browser window) will become the status indicator and will show a pie chart. This will replace the indicator in the status bar.
• Home button moved to the bookmark toolbar. I have the bookmark toolbar turned off.
• Close buttons on the tabs. Only displayed on active tab. Yay!
• Status bar hidden by default. Are you crazy!?!

A full list of changes, a mockup and some thoughts from others can befound on the newgroups.

Firefox 2.0 is due in the 3rd quarter of this year. 

• Browsers , Firefox
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