An update on the Australis tab shape for Firefox
18 June, 2012 § 13 Comments
Australis is the new theme we’ve been working on for Firefox. It brings with it more customizability in a cleaner and fresher user interface. One part of this work is a new implementation of our tab shape. Over the last few weeks I worked with Frank Yan on the new tab shape for Australis (specific to Windows now). We feel that we’re pretty close, although we want to see if we can draw the tabs using an approach that will lend itself better to platform integration.
Over the last few days I have handed over my work on the Australis tab shape implementation to Frank Yan. Frank will be leading up this effort now to get the Australis tab shape implemented and landed in mozilla-central.
I am now going to focus my efforts on our SocialAPI project. The first step of this work is to implement a recommend/share command. I have begun work on this now and I plan on posting more updates as they become available. You can follow along at Bugzilla bug #765874.
JAWS 
is there a nightly/UX build where this tab shape is prototyped, i wanna test my ModestTab extension with it (i expect it to be extremely ugly)..
I just sent the patches to our build server. You should be able to get a build of it at this location when it finishes building (maybe in 6-7 hours depending on server load): https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/try-builds/jwein@mozilla.com-3e1b9d26e273/
You can check here for progress on the build: https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=3e1b9d26e273. If the “B” is green then it is ready to download.
I always welcome a better default theme, but I’m a bit torn. On one hand, the style screenshotted looks beautiful, but on the other hand, it looks nothing like the blocky tabs my GTK+ theme uses and you did mention better platform integration being a goal.
I actually don’t really mind that (I’ve always found browsers to be the one thing I don’t mind theming themselves) but I hope that it won’t break the extension I use to set a smaller minimum width on my tabs to prevent the tab bar from needing to scroll.
Thanks for the feedback. Just so you know, these new tabs should not break your ability to reduce the min-width of the tabs.
This looks great. Waiting warmly for the time it lands on m-c.
The social garbage, not so much. I hope there’s a master-switch to disable them in about:config, or that they are shipped an an extension.
Thanks. You’ll have the ability to enable and disable the social features.
Be more respectful dude!
This new theme looks great.
[…] developer Jared Wein has been building the Australis tab bar style for Windows. He generated a test build on Monday that users can […]
[…] del navegador de Mozilla Gerardo 19 jun 2012 Firefox Firefox: Jared Wein, desarrollador de Mozilla publicó un adelanto del rediseño de Firefox, él identifica como “Australis” y si bien no hay […]
A web browser should be as much service-agnostic as possible. All the social features can be are a pain for Fx’s loyal audience, especially in markets that distrust Google (like Germany), while I on the other hand, If I am to make a prediction, the feature will be sparsely used from the average user.
In any case, one cannot have respect for diffs, source files features or programs, only people. In such cases, I only judge future features on their perceived usefulness and present my honest opinion.
A few things as feedback:
– If you’re aiming for OS integration, visually, then the new tab shape will definitely not blend with Windows 8 — where square is the new round.
– If you’re using a light background or light persona in the new theme, the active tab does not, at all, stand out and it’s almost impossible to discern which tab is active unless you look for the curvy lines. I think that seriously needs to be looked at.
– Social integration in the browser? Why don’t you leave that in the realm of add-ons and/or pinned tabs for the people who want it? Let people retain their freedom of choice…
I would really love a better platform integration. The current firefox in ubuntu, and other linux DEs looks mediocre compared to the Windows counterpart. It was almost as if nobody cared for looks on linux.
Having firefox’s own icon set might be good too. The humanity icons and other pre built icon sets dont go well with the current UX.
I agree. As a Linux user, I had to put quite a bit of work into custom Stylish userstyles (and some Openbox tweaks to strip away the window border) to get a Firefox that can compete with Chrome outside of Windows and MacOS.
(I’ve also written the odd blog post on things like why removing the border on the reload button in the address bar was the wrong thing to do)
I’m on Lubuntu, so I’m using Elementary icons, but I still agree that pursuit of the system icon theme without proper consideration is bad. I still haven’t figured out how to revert to the old reload icon that’s designed to look good in an address bar rather than as a toolbar button.