14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla's mission is to make the web accessible to anyone and this means going where the users are. Lately, many users are on phones and tablets and Mozilla has been pushing Firefox for Android. So far, there's only been a phone version, but Mozilla is working on tablet version as well, also for Android.
It's not available to the public yet, but the developers working on it wanted to let people know how far along they are and also showcase some of the UI design choices they've made.
"The Mozilla Mobile Team is working tirelessly to make Firefox awesome on tablets, and I wanted to take a moment to share some of the design decisions we’ve made with the UI thus far," Ian Barlow, a Mozilla UI designer, wrote.
"Firefox for tablets is an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet’s larger screen size," he explained.
Firefox for tablets is aimed at the Honeycomb flavor of Android and borrows some of its design elements and style to make sure that it doesn't feel out of place.
The overall design is minimalistic, but the larger screens on tablets enable the team to add more visible UI elements, things that got cut in the phone version of Android, like permanent tabs.
Still, the tablet version, like the phone one, draws from the desktop Firefox and has some common elements, such as the navigation buttons, the bookmarks star and so on, making the transition easier for users.
Some of Firefox's best features are also available in the tablet version, the Awesomebar for example. There are some changes to it, you can filter the suggestions to show only results from the bookmarks or history.
Finally, the biggest change from the phone version, perhaps, are tabs, which, in landscape mode, are fully visible as thumbnails on the left side. In portrait view, the tab list can be brought up from the tabs button.
