Are we browsing appropriate things via browser? Mozilla’s VP of Firefox engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me a few days ago.“‘Browser’ is really an antiquated word. People don’t really browse all that much anymore.” Instead, he argues, we now mostly use our browsers to access sophisticated web apps, web-based productivity tools and social networks.Now it’s chance for browser developers that they should rethink what the browser should actually look like because the majority users are well experienced in using today’s browsers.
Australis is the guiding platform for Mozilla’s exploration to have a modern browser, and the fruits of this project will soon find their way into the Firefox release channels. After that it will be a usual release channel where the team may hold it back from stable channel a bit stronger to ensure that everything works smoothly.If you feel really adventurous, you can already install a version of Firefox from Mozilla’s relatively obscure UX branch and test it in its current state (but don’t blame us if it crashes a lot or shreds your hard drive).
How the Australis will look now. To see it on the first sight chrome get strike in our mind than the firefox we use it today. Australis theme features will round corners for tabs and same three-bar icon to the right of the URL and search boxes to bring up a drop-down customization and settings menu.
Nightingale says that the idea on Australis is to design a browser which is capable and simpler to use it today. The team also concentrates that people should get the experience of latest version where it will give more user comfort as for today’s firefox. He believes the new design will be cleaner and more intuitive.
One example he cited is that in the current iteration of the design, unselected tabs basically blend into the background and don’t even have the usual tab borders around them. Instead of just shrinking tabs as you open more of them, even though you can’t even see the individual tabs’ icons anymore (the way Chrome does), the Firefox team has also decided to set a minimum width for tabs and then move to a scrolling tab bar once the maximum number of tabs has been reached.