David Emery Online

What's up at Mozilla?

31 August 2006

Today the Mozilla foundation released Firefox 2 beta 2 . Sadly, it’s not very good and not only is it not very good it seems to be not very good on purpose.

The main issues I have with the current version – and I must stress that it is still in beta, so hopefully some of it will change – are with the numerous GUI changes they’ve made. Now, Firefox has never been the best Mac OS X citizen but the latest changes they’ve made have moved it even further off the beaten path.

For a start, a new range of toolbar icons have been introduced that are, quite simply, not as nice as the old ones. They’re too dark, lack the photo realism that other Mac toolbar icons have, have little contrast and by on large just look amateur. Quite why they’re using them above the old ones is beyond me.

Next, the tabs have had a similar unsuccessful aesthetic overhaul – they now have small, windows-esc close buttons (the concept of which is good, but the look is lacking), the background tabs text is faded out making it difficult to read and the shading on the line that runs under the tabs is confusing – making it look like the tab bar background is above the tabs with a slight shadow. In addition, the menu on the right showing all tabs is ugly (but useful) and the new tab overflow system has similar aesthetic issues.

The other things they’ve changed are some of the accessory chrome around the search box and the address field; in both cases unnecessary buttons have been added (with no way to remove them) that look pretty awful.

I have to say; I’m worried. Firefox 2.0 has to be perfect as it’s going to be going up against IE7, and it’s going to be really very difficult to fight against. IE7 is looking as though it’s going to be good enough – not great, but good enough so that people using windows don’t need an alternative.

Firefox 2.0 is – at the moment at least, based on this beta – not a compelling enough proposition when compared to the new IE – they really need to pull something out of the hat so that we don’t end up in the same position again in 3 years. Based on the changes they’ve made though, they’re may be in the process of shooting themselves in the foot.

Here’s hoping they’re not.