The Mozilla developers are doing a lot to keep the community informed about design and interface changes that they might implement in the upcoming Firefox 4 web browser. But nothing beats trying out some of those changes in the latest pre-alpha builds personally.
Firefox 3.7 Pre-Alpha 6 was released yesterday by the developers. And while we would not recommend using it in a work environment it does showcase some of the recent interface changes that may make it into the beta and final builds.
Especially Windows Vista and Windows 7 users can enjoy the new Aero Glass interface. It does seem that the Firefox developers need to fine tune that interface a bit as it made the menu texts almost unreadable on certain backgrounds.
firefox 4 design
The tabbar now integrates some of the navigational toolbar elements. That’s in theory not a bad thing especially for users who like their browser header to be as small as possible. The elements at the right side of the tabbar however seemed to mess things up a little bit. Most users are used to seeing a close tab button there. Mozilla have now placed five buttons to the right of the tabbar of which two display an X.
Even more confusing is the fact that the rightmost X stops loading a page while the X on the left side of it closes the active tab.
The other buttons from left to right are reload, display all tabs and open a new tab. The layout of the buttons can be changed so that it is possible to move, remove and reorder the buttons.
The bookmarks toolbar does not seem to make use of Aero at all, the tabbar only if it is placed right underneath the menu bar.
Removing the menu bar from the layout will now display a single menu button in the browser’s interface, much what Opera have done in Opera 10.50.
firefox 4 menu bar
The latest Firefox 4 builds, still labeled as Firefox 3.7 currently, are available for all supported operating systems from the Mozilla ftp server.
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It looks just terribly, almost as bad as IE and Chrome, and Aero is pure crap. I can already see that I will stick to my current Firefox version without testing the new one. I have never expected that form Mozilla would copycat IE’s unbearable GUI. What a disappointment.
The Aero feature can easily be disabled in about:config and one may also use a ‘Persona’
Personally I can’t stand the ‘new’ toolbar buttons or the Minefield button, fortunately the toolbar buttons can be changed and the Minefield button removed along with the menu bar with two lines of CSS in userchrome.
The really interesting stuff is yet to come…
if this is what it’sgoing to look like
I’ll stick with my older versions.
I already use other browsers instead if newer FF
It’s odd to see you reviewing a nightly build as if it were a release version. If you compare these shots to the mockups at mozilla.org then it’s obvious it’s a work in progress. Try keeping yourselves in check until there’s something worth criticizing.