Mozilla Plans Major Design Overhaul With Firefox 25 Release In October 250
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla is planning a major design overhaul of its flagship browser with the release of Firefox 25, slated to arrive in October. The company makes a point to discuss its plans for changes openly, and this upcoming new version is by no means an exception. In fact, even though Firefox 22 is in the Beta channel, Firefox 23 is in the Aurora channel, and Firefox 24 is in the Nightly channel, Mozilla has set up a special Nightly UX channel for Firefox 25. Grab it here."
Finally looks exactly like Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
For a certain definition of "design" (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on the headline, I mistook this story for something that might interest me.
From TFA, it's clear that the design overhaul refers to design in the sense of "graphic design," i.e., superficial appearance, not design in the sense of software architecture. So the headline would be better phrased, "Mozilla is planning changes in how the browser looks."
From experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't redesign the UI once it's accepted by the users, you can't possibly improve it, it's already been accepted... just add features as you need to and stay within the design constraints of the UI.
However, if their goal is to have new devs join their team and venting their frustration, then... score!
Re:Finally looks exactly like Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they made a lot of bad stuff fashionable. The only thing they did right was "Paste & Go" on the location bar context menu.
Re:Finally looks exactly like Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
The address bar is for addresses. It is a horrible horrible UI mistake to have turned it into a search feature. The url is correct or it isn't. Don't bullshit around with it.
Kill off the add-on bar? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a balance between clutter and functionality. They're obsessed with what they must consider to be a "clutter problem" where there really isn't any; it's not clutter if the user wants it that way. Clutter is in the mind of the beholder.
Booo, hissss (Score:5, Insightful)
First: Search for the addon Status-4-evar [sic] to keep/replace your status bar.
Second: Product manager Asa Dotzler, is this the same person responsible for some of the abominable changes in 4.0?
Third: "Separate Bookmark Star from locationBar and merge with Bookmarks Menu item", well that sucks. (Also, if you hate having stop and refresh as one button, edit the tool bar and drag stop to the left of refresh. Who's bright idea was it to combine those two? I want to hit stop, and if I hit it more than once, it starts to refresh the entire page. The exact opposite of what I want!)
Fourth: Tabs under the address bar please. I don't care about your ideas about how it's illogical, I am more likely to want to change tabs than to click on the address bar, and if I need to get to the address bar I can use ctrl-L or alt-D.
Fifth: I hate the Chrome UI, the new MSIE UI and similar. Don't do it to Firefox as well!
Sixth: From the article: "In this vein, there is a discussion of removing the Add-on Bar completely, killing user-created custom toolbars, and having the main toolbar feature a dedicated area for add-on buttons and widgets instead." What a bloody awful idea. What will I do with my Web Developer toolbar [chrispederick.com] than?
Seventh: It doesn't matter what anyone thinks, Mozilla will push these changes through regardless. Just because. We can only hope that addons will be developed to revert the more moronic changes (like getting rid of the status bar).
Re:More change for change's sake? (Score:3, Insightful)
I came here to post a similar comment. Keep your damn fingers off of my Seamonkey, you god-damned dirty apes. It's the last bastion for those of us who want an old-school browser.
Also, "What, another major design overhaul? How many is that so far in the past 2-3 years?"
Why Do Users Need Two Chromes? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's been widely known for sometime that Firefox developers have been suffering from a terrible case of Chrome-Envy. When Chrome started gaining market share, and Firefox stagnated(market-share wise) there was great gnashing of teeth. What did people see in Chrome? They couldn't figure it out, so their answer was to slowly but surely turn Firefox into a Chrome clone. Rapid release? Check! Remove most of the UI? Check!
Much to their shock, however, this strategy hasn't increased their market share any as users continue to defect to Chrome over Firefox.
In the very near future, Firefox will be almost completely indistinguishable from Chrome. Oh, sure, Gecko and Blink will still have some differences in the way they will handle things, there will be some minor differences in the browsers themselves-but these will be the kind of differences that are completely non-apparent to your average user.
Once this happens, and Mozilla has successfully eliminated everything that made Firefox unique and valuable, people will ask 'why do we need a browser that looks and acts like just like Chrome when we already have Chrome?'
Re:Finally looks exactly like Chrome (Score:4, Insightful)
not useless for me, it allow me to write things in the URL without sending every keystroke to Google, you know, like which host names I write there. The integrated search and URL field on Chrome behaves for me like the Ubuntu integrated search. I don't want to send everything I write there to Google. You can disable this in Chrome but you loose search predictions, so or you send eveything or we (Google) will not give you predictions. With Firefox I have predictions without sending every keystroke when I write a url
How about OS integratoin (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, nice going making a new look and feel that you carry over across OSs. But how about respecting the look and feel the user chose? You know, on gnome, use gnome-like tabs, and gnome-like menus. On plain linux, try and see if the user configured gtk or qt with some theme, and use that. On KDE, use KDE's theme, etc...
It looks like firefox worries more about branding these days than it does about OS integration. Sure, we love firefox, but why don't you make it more integrated into our everyday lives, instead of making it stick out so much? We already have Chrome for that!
Ahhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you just love change for the sake of change?. Incidentally, can any of you fine /.ers point me in the direction of some Firefox forks so I can be prepared when they force this change on everyone?. I'm not a slave last time I checked, I hate being forced for silly reasons; especially reasons that are the result of jealousy of other browsers.
If they do this, you might as well just use Chromium or Chrome, it would be a whole lot faster at least.
Re:Finally looks exactly like Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Its completely broken with perfectly legitimate local DNS URLs. And can also error on IP addresses entered manually.
Like it or not, it breaks standards. That may be cool with you, but its worth shit to anyone who is more than a trivial user.
Curved Tabs? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not really sure what the point of changing to curved tabs is except to make Firefox look exactly like Chrome. And I'll be pretty annoyed if this takes away the ability to enable the menu bar at all.
Re:From experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Once something has been learned, its really hard to un-learn it. I don't care if your alternative solution is "better" or not its automatically less usable because I have to change my muscle memory. Incremental changes can be good and in places where the "normal" UI hasn't been solidified change can be good! For example, with smartphones and consoles its quite possible to create a new UI that improves usability, because the technology to interface with the hardware is fairly new (capacitive touch-screens for phones, new controllers for consoles), but when it comes to the keyboard and mouse, just keep it the same, Firefox hasn't added anything beneficial UI-wise in the past 3 or 4 "design overhauls" and instead has added a good 15 minutes of tweaks I have to do to any fresh install.
Re:Finally looks exactly like Chrome (Score:3, Insightful)
In the comparison with ls and cat, a unified search/url input in the same GUI element you would basically have to type something like "http://xxxxx" to go to an url ans something like "search://xxxxx" to do a search, wo work like the CLI. There is a huge difference between "ls 30_gig_file" or "cat 30_gig_file" or even "rm 30_gig_file". You have to tell the software somehow to do WHAT action with WHICH object when you want to be sure about the result.
So far in the browser there where two fields for the two different actions ( directly navigate somewhere / search for something. ) The problem is when the software tries to "guess" what you want to do. Either the guessing algorithm is dumb, and annoys the user, or it is really sophisticated, in which case it took probably away a huge amount of developer manpower to implement in a way that pleases both the "I want to shop for something vague" vague user and the "Shit, the system is down, we are losing $100,000 a minute, and this shitty browser is trying to do a search, which he can't do since the connection to the internet is down, and locks up while waiting for the time-out, instead of just going to the web fronted for the NAS!!".
Re:Ahhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you might be making an entire mountain range out of a pygmy molehill.
No, OP is not. OP is voicing a widespread concern amongst users. Obfuscating controls is trendy right now as the web is continuing to morph. Creating reliance on 'cloud' services, 'app stores' and 'search' serves only the providers and removes options from the masses. Call this 'walled garden' mentality paranoia, evolution or behavior modification... the fact is usability is being eroded in lieu of monetization.
This is a concern for me, the customer. Not me, the 'product'.