Firefox 2.0′s visual updates have polarized the community. The visual refresh was one of the most highly anticipated features of the version 2.0 and so far most people don’t seem to be fans. The good thing is the guys at Mozilla have been listening to feedback and made some changes!
I’m not sure exactly what has changed, but this is what Firefox 2.0 looks like on the latest build:
The refresh and home button certainly look different. I really love the new home button; it’s nice and elegant and pretty beautiful. The refresh button departs from it’s normal shape and instead of two arrows, there is now just one. I don’t know whether I like this, but it doesn’t bug me too much.
The tab bar has also had a makeover. It looks much more native and generally looks better. The page icon on the tab looks different too.
I’m quite pleased at the direction this theme is moving in. At the moment, I’d be happy to use this theme everyday but I certainly don’t think it’s any better than the 1.x theme. No doubt there will be more refinements and we’ll have a beautiful new theme for the final version.
Oh, I also noticed that you can now disable search suggestions! Search engine selector > Manage search engines and untick "Show Suggestions".
The tabs now look more like those in the original mockup, which is a good thing
However, are they still letting the current platform draw everything else? Because if they are the only platform that I’ve seen which it looks good on is Windows XP with one of those awful "candy" themes…
I guess I’ll have to try it myself…
Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering, I’m The Wolf/Rowan.
hopefully I can get rid of that stupid "go" buttons taking away my precious toolbar space….
That really puzzles me, the buttons are a mere 25 pixels in size, thats 50 pixels in total, how does that count as "taking away precious toolbar space"?
Lets do the math: 1024 – 50 = 949
Now are you complaining about something valid? Or because it suddenly became cool to diss the new theme?
I think this picture sums up my issues with the current theme:
When you’re going to use a custom style on half of a window, you must apply the same styling to the rest. Sure, you can use the systems colours so if the user has a high contrast setting, your windows will also be high contrast, but you simply can’t go around assuming everyone has the same theme, letting the platform do the drawing.
You must have a standard interface across the platforms, or you abandon the custom styling altogether.
Given that you need to go from Point A to Point B, would you take the direct way or just walk around in town for hours? Given that both ways are of the same quality, you’d use the shortest. Like probably any geek I use the enter key to submit my search- or URLbar so I for sure don’t need these buttons (takes longer to activate them anyway). So why should I have these useless artifacts on my toolbar? Would you take the longer route just like that?
Ah of course, 1024pixels are so wide that 50 pixels won’t matter. I agree. Right now, I’ve even got 1280 pixels in width (well almost that is, the taskbar needs some horizontal space as well). I wouldn’t fucking care. However, on my notebook which only got 800×600 minus the space the taskbar takes minus 50 pixels. These are at least 5 letters (given that only capitalized W are used, quite a bunch if it’s "normal" text, even more if there’re a lot of dots and/or slashes). Consider the searchbar which takes up space as well depending if I just typed something in or not. Consider that the "small buttons layout" just makes the icons smaller but they take up as much space as before (or did they fix that?). It adds up and in the end, it counts.
If I remember correctly, it’s possible to style the button depending on where it is… given that it’s behind the URLBar it would look like it looks now, if not it would be normal button. I can remove the button easily and whoever wants it or doesn’t care can leave it in place. Themes might be able to hide the button, but making it theme independent would be best in my opinion.