14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 is now available for download, get it here. With the first Beta development milestones of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla brought to the table the complete overhaul of the browser’s graphical user interface. This revamping continues even with Firefox 4.0 Beta 4 and Beta 5 cooking.
New elements of design have been introduced into the latest nightly releases of the next generation of the open source browser, as you can see in the screenshot accompanying this article.
Essentially, a very early preview release of Firefox 4.0 Beta 5 features what Mozilla refers to as a 2-tiered menu.
Alex Faaborg, User Experience Design at Mozilla, and the architect of the Firefox 4.0 UI redesign, is also responsible for the new expanded Menu that early adopters will get to test either in the nightly Builds or the fully-fledged Beta 5 for Firefox 4.0.
“Alex filed a bug with the design, which included several new UI concepts that had not been previously implemented using XUL, such as a two-tiered Windows Vista-esque menu, and a menu that had buttons in it,” noted Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox.
“At the time the bug was filed, we weren’t sure who would have time to experiment and implement the changes, and considered some of the design items to be at risk for Firefox 4,” Beltzner added.
Users unfamiliar with the development process of Firefox must know that Mozilla developers fill bugs even for the new features planned for introduction. The particular bug associated with the evolution of the new Menu in Firefox 4.0’s redesigned UI was resolved by a new contributor.
“Joshua M (who also goes by SoapyHamHocks on IRC) created a Bugzilla account on August 12th, and put up his first attempt at an implementation the next day".
“Working with the Firefox team in IRC and through Bugzilla, several iterations of his patch went by, and on August 20th, the patch landed in Mozilla’s codebase".
“There are some bugs and issues to work out, but thanks to Joshua’s contribution, our Windows Vista/7 users will all be able to look forward to a much more native, and better user experience – and of course, if Windows XP users want to try it out, they can customize their UI to do so! It should appear in a future beta revision, and of course users will be able to give us feedback about it at that time,” Beltzner explained.
The evolved Menu in Firefox 4.0 now features two columns. The first is designed to house items such as New Tab, Start Private Browsing, Edit, Find, Save Page As, Send Link, Print, Developer, Full Screen and Exit. The second contains such options as Bookmarks, history, Downloads, add-ons, Options and Help.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 3 for Windows is available for download here.
