Mozilla launches its most important version of Firefox in a very long time today. After almost two years of work on recast Australis, the company is now finally ready to bring to its stable distribution channel.
After you have loaded for the first time, chances are you'll be a little confused. It's more radical redesign of Firefox, as he moved to his rapid release schedule it a few years ago. The new version looks much more like Chrome than the old Firefox. It has the same three bars on the right and the rounded tabs menu, for example. At the same time, however, it retains the search form separate - something most other browsers have made disappear.
"The point of the redesign is to adapt the design to the way that modern users engage with the web," Mozilla Firefox VP for Johnathan Nightingale told me earlier this month. Altogether, the team made 1300 UI and bug fixes since the first publicly introduced recast Australis it about a year ago.
Users will probably return to the similarities of the UI with Chrome, and some of these reactions may not be exactly positive, but Nightingale seems not too worried about this. «Google did not invent the simplicity', he said. "»»We do a lot of things differently. "
The redesign, which affects many more aspects of the browser just its user interface, is designed to give people the ability to fully customize their browsing experience. "Apart from the basic substance, everyone uses the browser differently", he noted. Some people, for example, do not use the back button (which seems odd, but maybe they use keyboard shortcuts).
One of the main aspects of this version was to make the browser more customizable. Firefox has still many customization options, but those who have always been somewhat hidden, especially for ordinary users who are not always dig the menus advanced their browsers.
With this redesign, the button "Customize" is now still in the new Firefox menu. After clicking this button, the browser is in customization mode and then you can move almost all of the elements of the user interface of Firefox and to organize the browser depending on the way in which they work with it. Customization is easier that drag-and - drop the items to where you want.
Other changes aimed to adapt the browser to all sorts of types of users, including the fact that Firefox now completely off stresses non-selected tabs. They essentially disappear in the background, which allows those of us with a lot of tabs open (and perhaps many applications tabs, also), to concentrate on those that we are considering.
In addition to these changes, Firefox now has an improved bookmarking mechanism that uses animation almost non - Firefox - like when you hold the lead role in a page (Star then falls into the button from the list of favorites to show you where you can find it again).
As part of this update, Firefox also uses Firefox Mozilla accounts for synchronization settings and bookmarks between machines. Instead of his more rather abstruse synchronization system, which most of the time to avoid using cloud computing services to store your information, the new system is based on the services online Mozilla. Previously, Nightingale was told, many users don't even know Firefox has a built-in synchronization feature - and those who did so often did not use everything simply because it was not really easy to use. New accounts Firefox uses the usual combination of e-mail and password instead of random codes.
Nightingale tells me that the team is already looking on how it can use Firefox accounts in other parts of the application. New accounts are obviously already integrated deeply into Firefox OS and it comes from Firefox on Android today, too.
Given its rapid publication cycle , why did it take so long to release Mozilla redesign ? It has been around in one form or another for about two years now , after all. Nightingale said that many of the previous model was hardcoded , and to make the personalization features work, the team had to rewrite large parts of the interface to make it more flexible . He had to test it , too, and ultimately , he wanted to ensure that new users Firefox user will now turn worked well.
Mozilla obviously through an interesting period in its history . He tries to move quickly in the mobile space and released today is one of its most important . At the same time , much of what he is trying to do has recently been overshadowed by the discussion of the short duration of CEO Brendan Eich. Released today will likely focus on the main mission of Mozilla and the product again, but it is also likely to be some version of a somewhat controversial .
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