Firefox is getting a massive redesign, but it's still a few months away

Jul 19, 2012 19:41 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla has been working on a revamped UI for Firefox for a while now. It's codenamed Australis and it's a major overhaul of what you see when you fire up Firefox.

There are rounded tabs, nice effects, smarter buttons and so on and so forth. The initial design looked quite sleek, but that was several months ago and it was just a bunch of sketches of what Firefox could look like.

Since then, Mozilla has been hard at work turning those concepts into reality and improving on them with feedback from real use. But the Australis UI is nowhere near finished and you're not going to see it in action in any Firefox at this point, not even in the UX builds that are put out by the user-experience team.

You can check out the pseudo-interactive demo pages for the current versions of the Australis theme for various OSes, Windows 7 Aero; Windows XP: Luna Blue, Olive, Silver; OSX and Linux.

But, interestingly enough, you can also check out Australis, in action, in the latest Thunderbird beta.

Perhaps the best evidence that Mozilla is not abandoning Thunderbird (yet) is going to be a revamped UI. The Australis version of Thunderbird is on its way and will land in the stable channel in six weeks' time.

Granted, it's not the same as the Firefox Australis theme, the implementation is different and shares little, outside of the exterior look, with the Firefox code. The constraints of Thunderbird, there are only a few tabs, they never get too small, etc., also made it easier to implement.

But that's only interesting to developers, in practice, the Thunderbird Australis implementation should be indistinguishable from the Firefox version. So if you're itching to see what Firefox will look like soon enough, this is your only chance.

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Thunderbird 15 with Australis
Firefox with Australis
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