The Mozilla Firefox development team seems to be dead serious to change the look and feel of the popular web browser. The next big installment is up for an interface change. To stay true to their philosophy the development team has posted the second revision of Firefox 3.7 mockup themes on their website inviting Firefox users to join the discussion. These new revisions have been changed in several key areas. Currently only designs for the Microsoft Windows platform have been posted.
The most obvious difference between version 1 and 2 of the design mockups is the loading bar that has been placed above each tab in the Internet browser. That’s actually a clever way of indicating the page loading status to the user. The current release version of Firefox displays a loading icon but no progress bar.
The bookmarks toolbar has also be added again to the Firefox interface. If you remember it was not included in the first design mockups that have been posted a few months ago. The menu bar has been replaced with a single page button that leads to the menus. That’s a big change for users who do not use add-ons like Tiny Menu which offer this functionality more or less in current versions of Firefox.
You can check out the new Firefox 3.7 design mockups for Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows XP at the Mozilla Wiki.
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5 Responses to “New Firefox 3.7 Design Suggestions Posted”
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So tired of seeing GUI updates that take up yet more space – usually by adding yet another handy dandy toolbar – with chunky buttons. I use my menu bar. It is small. I don’t use bookmarks. I have a bookmark manager. Doesn’t everyone? The new improved version allows for keeping the menu bar does it allow for ridding oneself of that extra toolbar? I like to see some of a website’s page.
How about thinking slim.
I’m sorry, I missed the part where M$ bought out Firefox. Doesn’t the Mozilla team realize that Firefox users are using Firefox because they DON’T want IE 8?
i use a add on that i forget the name off but it emulates the way safari has a progress bar behind the url…
it’s great – it takes up no more space and i have added the little blue fade graphic instead of the default plain colours so it even looks as sexy as safari.
Why add more crap – this is a step back rather than fwd.
Aslo i run a minimised ff install with no bookmark bar.
One thing i alway do though is creat a new bar with the url and search bar in it as those are the two most important things.
Oh i always add the new tab icon to the far left before the back button as well.
It seems to me that the most radical AND beneficial change to Firefox would be a dual-window interface. On the left would be the FULL navigation suite of menus, toolbuttons, bookmarks etc. On the right would be a single bordered (think resizable dialog box) browser window that would go from top to bottom of the screen. No caption bar. No min/max/close buttons. No statusbar at the bottom. Just a maximization of the screen depth to limit scrolling as much as possible.
The totality of the controls would be in the left-hand bar (adjustable to right side for those so-inclined, of which I would be one). The menu would occupy a button in the upper left. Major buttons would be beside it and below it on a user-configurable basis. Then would come the url field and then the active bookmarkbar, configurable as scrollable, wrapped or non-visible. Then you would have a bookmarks area and finally a stacked statusbar.
This design acknowledges the wide-screen format’s growing domination. The major issue would be the diminution of the url bar, but that’s what tool tips are for. Scrolling is, and always WILL be, the major bane of web browsers. Wide screen monitors are fine for viewing movies, but I find myself perennially wishing just a little bit more of the site would show, so I could click the NEXT button in Google, rather than scrolling to it first.
And besides, SOOOO many people seem to maximize their web browsers on wide-screen monitors, despite the fact that the reading area is either way smaller or that trying to read anything written across the full width of such monitors is an exercise in ping-pong headache-making.