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sho_hn

Web-based live demos of the new UI:

Linux: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

OS X: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

Windows 7: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/files/australis-design...

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I guess this goes without saying, but view them in Firefox. At least the OS X one looked thoroughly screwed in Chrome.

No wonder since it is full of -moz-* vendor prefixes.

Thank you for the links, as I wasn't going to visit the brain dead extremetech site on my iPad.

OS X mockup: the window control traffic lights don't line up vertically with the toolbar/tab bar icons, looks jarring. The close tab button is still on the right, tab titles are still left-aligned instead of centered, not impressed.

Firefox team: stop trying to ape the Chrome UI and think for yourselves for once, put the tab bar on the left or right side.

In these screenshots, the borders of inactive tabs disappear. This doesn't seem like a good idea. Wouldn't it be hard for users to identify them as tabs?

I'd really like tabs to auto-hide. I'd really like a bunch of the UI to be auto-hiding.

Just hiding the tab borders does seem sub-optimal.

Note that these demos are early mockups from September 2011. Some details of the UI are bound to have changed since then.

Are you sure? I do remember a mockup from that timeframe that showed all platforms on one page, and was static rather than interactive. Given the greater sophistication in these and the fact that they're still linked from their wiki (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features/Theme_Refinement_a...) I had assumed these to be recent.

Edit: The older set I was referring to: http://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pre...

Edit2: The OP links were added to that wiki page in an early March 2012 revision.

Hmm, in the new ones I was derailed by the icons of background tabs being not lined up with the OSX color pills. Yet the old mockups show a curve similar to the tab shape that creates a very welcome break in the design, explaining that "here are the tabs", and "here are the window controls", while the curve slant explained the height position difference between the pills and the icons/text (notice how the line linking the green pill center to the home icon center looks perpendicular to the centermost part of the separator curve, which cuts this segment in half). Without that curve, the new design simply feels broken. What's worse, since it's right there on the top-left, this is the absolute first experience of the software from the user's eye. It does not feel robust at all.

Ah, I must have been confusing these with Stephen Horlander's early mockups. Thanks for the detective work.

Ooh, cool -- will add those links to the story.

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