thoughts on mozilla

Alex Faaborg – a user experience designer with the Mozilla Corporation – blogged last night about the move from “tabs on bottom” to “tabs on top” in Firefox 4. In the video Faaborg made, he outlines a number of reasons why this change makes sense and one drawback from it.

Specifically:

1. The conceptual model makes more sense with tabs on top.
2. “App” tabs, coming in Firefox 4, are more logical when a user doesn’t see the browser UI.
3. More and more of Firefox’s UI will be moving to tabs instead of windows. Examples include Preferences, the Add-ons manager, and Downloads.
4. Notifications can be tab-modal and not app-modal, something that’s challenging with tabs on bottom when such notifications will block other tabs.

The one drawback Faaborg mentions is that the distance a user has to move their mouse increases considerably. Mozilla intends to study this in their betas using TestPilot, which will soon be built-in.

To watch Faaborg’s entire video, head over to YouTube.

Jennifer Boriss – user experience designer with the Mozilla Corporation – has been discussing the removal of the status bar on her blog in a three part series.

In the latest and final proposal, Firefox 4 loses its status bar in the majority of cases, allowing some add-ons the ability to place their bottom-anchored functionality on an automatically resizing status bar, much like the status bar in Google Chrome, which appears only sometimes. Not proposed by Boriss is the ability for the status bar to move below the window chrome when hovered. Without such an ability, content could become unreachable by some users. With such ability, the status bar becomes less usable and more finicky.

Overall, the removal of the status bar is a welcome change, which gives users and websites a larger usable content area.

As part of his ongoing work to redesign Firefox for Firefox 4, Stephen Horlander has uploaded new mockups of Firefox 4 for Linux.

The theme is very much in line with the Windows and Mac themes while keeping a very Linux look and feel.

The timeline for implementing the new theme, while very out of date, is available on the Mozilla wiki.

Firefox 4 will contain quite a bit of new features. One of the major areas which the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) is looking to improve is the visual theme.

Throughout the last few months, MoCo’s Stephen Horlander has been publishing mockups and design ideas at his blog on the direction the Firefox team is taking with the theme. Overall, the theme is quite incredible. Its Windows design is one of the best of any browser on that platform, maybe of any application. The Mac platform design doesn’t quite hit the same level of beauty, but won’t stab you in the eye either.

Today, Horlander published new mockups on the proposed in-content UI. The Firefox team decided long ago to remove most dialogues and panels with in-content UI, meaning things like downloads, add-ons, and even preferences will be moved to the content window, instead of living in their own windows. It’s understandable that the Firefox team would want to go this direction. There has long been a problem with OS consistency in things like the preferences window and it has been nigh impossible to improve the situation.

However, screenshots like this one make me wonder about the long term OS integration goal. Firefox has always looked out of place on Mac. Making sweeping changes like this one will only push it further away from looking “right”, not closer.