Mozilla calls the new UI Australis, and if you’ve used Firefox on an Android phone or tablet recently, some of the elements should look familiar. Part of the goal is to provide a more unified experience across devices.
But the desktop version of Firefox maintains support for a wide range of plugins and gains a number of new customization options that helps set it apart from Firefox Mobile… or Google Chrome, for that matter.
On the one hand, Firefox has been looking more and more like Chrome over the last few years, with the disappearance of a dedicated menu bar and a move toward icons over text menus.
But even with the new Australis UI, Firefox is much more customizable than Chrome. For instance, when you first run the browser you’ll notice that most of the menu items you don’t use very often are hiding behind a settings icon in the far right corner. But you can drag and drop any of those items onto the toolbar if you’d rather have them always available.
Under the hood, Mozilla says Australis also has a more extensible interface model which will help when it’s time to add new features while continuing to support browser add-ons and themes.
Source: http://liliputing.com/2013/11/meet-new-firefox-australis-user-interface-hits-firefox-nightly.html
Intro to Australis from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.
A very exciting set of changes is landing in Firefox Nightly. We’ve been calling the project Australis, but, simply, it’s the next iteration of the Firefox user interface. It’s not quite finished, and it needs more polish, which is exactly why we’re so eager to get it out to a wider set of the community.
So, what is Australis?
1. It’s the most beautiful and detail-obsessed iteration of Firefox’s visual design yet: modern, clean, and comfortable.
2. More fundamentally, it’s a streamlining and simplification of the default interface, to declutter and better focus on how people use a browser today.
3. Finally, it includes a new simple way to customize the browser and make it your own.
There are also many side-benefits: a better more extensible interface model that will accommodate future features and additions; a simpler presentation of add-ons as equals to built-in browser features; and a familiar look and feel across all our platforms so that Firefox feels like Firefox everywhere. We’ll be writing more about all of these in future posts.
Need a quick concrete demonstration of what we mean? Here’s a two minute overview and walkthrough:
1. Detail and beauty
Australis is largest refinement of the Firefox interface in a long time, and it touches almost everything, from the big picture of overall layout to the tiny corners of icon design.
One of the most noticeable changes is our tab shape. Ours is Firefoxy — organic, friendly, and fluid — and a good fit for the general feel of Firefox.
New curvy tab shape. Background tab in cursor-hover state.
Incidentally, the less cluttered tab bar means that lightweight browser themes look the best they ever have.
2. Streamlining and simplification
Firefox has grown with the web, bringing new tools and capabilities — tabbed browsing, one click bookmarking, download management — to the forefront the whole time. But you can’t just keep adding without pausing, taking stock of what’s broadly used and what’s not, and cleaning up. Firefox, like all software, has accumulated baggage over time, but our users have become seasoned light travelers.
Where does this simplification show up? You’ll see it in the streamlined way that Firefox’s tabs sit higher in the titlebar, getting out of the way and leaving more screen space for web pages.
You’ll also see it in how carefully and sparingly the default toolbar is filled. Some examples have already landed in earlier releases, like the forward button that only appears when there’s somewhere to go forward to, and the download button that shows progress when that’s relevant and hides it otherwise. New, landing in Nightly now, you’ll see this in a more prominent one-click bookmarking button paired with a button to get at those bookmarks.
Left to right: forward button, download progress indication, bookmarks list.
3. Easy Customization
Firefox can’t simplify by just removing things and still be Firefox — the same less isn’t more for everybody, and Firefox has been successful by being the browser that does things that people, including power-users, want. It’s even in our Firefox Design Values (PDF) (see You Help Make It).
We realized that Australis was the perfect time to make browser customization easier and more discoverable. This provides power and control to people who have specific feature needs and allows them to create their own perfect setup while giving new users an understandable starting point.
To this end, a new, easy and fun-to-use customization mode is very prominent in the interface. We’re hoping that it will serve as an on-ramp for more users than ever to make Firefox into exactly what they need. It works with features we ship by default as well as with features that people add through add-ons. We’ll dive deeper into the customization mode in a future Firefox UX blog post.
Entering and using Customization Mode.
What’s landed in Nightly is enough for intrepid users to have a solid day-to-day experience and help us finish Australis off — there’s more to come (interactive mockup!), so please keep trying it out!
Hands-on with Firefox's revamped 'Australis' interface
The revamp isn’t a drastic change, but it is still fairly significant for longtime Firefox users. Any Chrome users looking to switch browsers should also be right at home with Australis, since it borrows key design decisions from Google’s browser.
Chrome sleek
The orange Firefox menu bar, first introduced in 2010 with Firefox 4, is also gone from the upper left corner. Instead, Mozilla replaced it with a menu button in the far right corner—again, similar to Chrome. If you prefer to have text menus running across the top of the screen, you can still do so by right-clicking on the Firefox toolbar and then selecting "Menu Bar."
Not just about relocation
Firefox has always offered drag-and-drop customization for toolbars, and this longstanding feature has been expanded to embrace new drap-and-drop menu customization under Australis.
Bookmarking will also be a little different with Australis. The star icon used to favorite Websites now sits in the browser chrome instead of the address bar. A bookmarks menu icon lies just next to the star for accessing and managing your saved sites.
Those are the biggest changes so far with Australis. The add-ons manager looks the same and the new tab page showing your recent history also hasn't changed. Overall, the tweaks with Australis feels like an attempt to modernize the look of Firefox and do away with a lot of the Windows 7-era design decisions, like the orange menu bar.
If you'd like to try out the Australis UI yourself, head on over to Mozilla's nightly builds page to download the browser for your system. Keep in mind, however, that Mozilla is still working on Australis and the UI we're seeing now could change before the official Firefox release.
Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2064696/hands-on-with-firefoxs-revamped-australis-interface.html
