Mozilla has begun work on modernizing the Firefox interface. The updated design is being developed by the Proton project and covers the appearance of elements such as the address bar, dialogs, tab bar, main and context menu. The new interface is slated for the release of Firefox 89, slated for May 18.
The changes in development include new tabs and tooltips that will start showing site thumbnails and rich text.
Sets of tabs (containers) will be grouped and presented on the panel as a separate widget that looks like one tab. Changes the names of the menu items – only the first word will be capitalized (for example, instead of “Other Bookmarks” there will be “Other bookmarks” ).
compact mode will appear, in which the list of tabs can be placed on the side to save vertical space (taking into account the fashion for fixing site headers, there is not enough space for content on laptops with small screens). Planned holding simplifying the context menus of the content area, panel and tabs, which by default rarely used elements will be hidden (at the bottom of the menu an icon with an arrow down will appear, when clicked, a block with additional elements will be expanded).
There will be redesigned modal dialogs with warnings, confirmations and requests, limited to a separate tab. The design of such dialogs will be unified with the rest of the dialogs, and the implementation will be transferred from the TabModalPrompt handler to a single SubDialog implementation. Dialogues will be vertically centered and content will be displayed at the top.
To test the new look before it is widely rolled out in Firefox test releases, the about: config is already added the “browser.proton.enabled” setting, which has not yet led to any changes (testing of the new design in nightly builds will begin in March). Nevertheless, published initial layouts, by which you can generally judge the upcoming changes.
