A New Firefox Look
Firefox is evolving with a refreshed design that makes the browser feel more modern, approachable, and consistent across desktop and mobile. The refresh also extends to Firefox’s voice and writing style, making product experience feel more human, direct, and unmistakably Firefox.
Via Jeff Johnson:
Nothing says “consistent” like making your large-screen keyboard & mouse UI exactly like your tiny touchscreen UI.
And nothing says “more human” like a manufactured voice and writing style.
Internally, we’ve been calling this work Project Nova, and today we’re excited to share a deeper look at what we’ve been building and where we’re heading next.
The goal of this work is to create a more cohesive foundation for Firefox: making the browser feel cleaner, warmer, faster, and more adaptable.
Some of the areas we’re working on include:
- Simpler navigation and a redesigned Settings experience
- Easier access to features like tab groups, split view, and vertical tabs
- The return of Compact Mode
- Refreshed visual updates across tabs, icons, spacing, and browser surfaces
- More customization options, including new themes and wallpapers
Previously:
- New Mozilla CEO
- Mozilla Changes Firefox Terms of Use
- Firefox at 20
- The Negative Impact of Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop
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I guess "unmistakably Firefox" means "looks like the Chromium browsers you've been trying to avoid as best you can." Hopefully Waterfox remains very mistakably Firefox then. I don't need my software to be more human. I need it to work like it did 15 years ago.
I can't help but notice a trend this year of so many software updates using terms like "simpler navigation."
Who's the ones who have spent the last decade making it overly complicated in the first place?
I agree with billyok. If they released a browser that looked exactly like it did when it was called Phoenix, but loaded modern websites, I would be just fine.
"making your large-screen keyboard & mouse UI exactly like your tiny touchscreen UI."
Which Mozilla didn't do. The two UIs are obviously very different; making them the same was clearly not what they meant when talking about consistency. Seems like "consistency" is mainly about branding.
I'm getting so tired of this constant anger and cynicism.
Anyway, if you're serious about using the best browser available, you're already using Zen, so none of this should matter to you.
I'm a happy Firefox user on desktop. The one thing I wish they'd do something about is too make it possible to install my own, homemade, plugins.
They only last one session as it is.
Oh god, they're changing it again? Any time I hear about an app I care about changing its UI, it always triggers a sense of dread because it never seems to be for the better.
I'm already using a custom style to reverse their boneheaded decision to make tabs look like buttons the last time they "improved" the UI. Hopefully the heroes who figured out how to do that will figure it out again with what I'm cynically guessing will be another downgrade.
> They only last one session as it is.
This is very easily solved. The initial setup takes a few minutes, but afterward it's pretty quick. You need to create a JWT issuer and secret here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/addon/api/key/
Then you need to install web-ext from npm, then you can just do web-ext sign with your JWTs from addons.mozilla.org.
What I see:
1. These new Firefox "tabs" look even less like tabs now.
Does every control have to be pill-shaped? Blender tried that for 25 years, despite endless complaints, and then finally gave up and fixed their UI, and everybody agrees it's better now that you can tell what a control is just by looking at it.
2. Mozilla isn't saying anything about fixing bugs.
I guess quality isn't on the roadmap. Bugs don't matter as long as it's "evolving with a refreshed design that makes the browser feel more modern"!
Mozilla just reported in June that they hit a new internal bugfixing record. Just because it's not mentioned in this announcement doesn't mean they don't fix bugs.
I'm trying hard to avoid being cynical, but on average, when a developer says that they're changing something to "feel more modern, approachable, and consistent across desktop and mobile," it's not true. We've been hearing variations of that for decades, with very little to show for it, aside from frustration.
