Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

I haven't had the time to look for opinions outside of the regular watering holes, but so far it looks like the nos are outnumbering the yeas.

I don't like it either.. asa, lets please keep the original theme.

Good to see someone at moz is willing to sit down and hear critics of new skin; hopefully you guys can make the best choice for your users.

Here's 2 reasons why I believe the new skin is a no-go for firefox

a) It just breaks, in so many ways, the OS integration philosophy you've shown up to firefox 1.5. I remember this used to be one of your selling point when firefox 1.0/1.5 was launched
- The skin simply can't integrate to our OS when your using windows classic (win9x/NT/2k/2k3/winXPClassic) or any current Linux distribution. Buttons can't match the size of the widgets, in linux you get two style of input text box in your toolbar (location bar themed by your os, search bar is a 1px firefox CSSed)

b) It also weakens another aspect of Firefox that mozilla used to be proud of: accessibility.
- Most buttons lost their borders on hover

Here's my opinion on the theme:
I like where it's going...and how it's evolving....but...here are my observations:
-the icons might a bit too shiny
-the forward/back/stop/go buttons seem too dark
-theme looks fine on win XP with: Window's classic style + Windows standard color scheme.....but when you chahttp://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/
MAINnge to the Windows classic color scheme, the tabs/color behind the tabs is too yellow (this is my biggest problem with the new theme and it should be fixed)
-try having this arrangement on the top toolbar (menus, flexible space, searchbar[left to right]) the flexible space would be ignored and the searchbar will float on the left

anything you don't understand...and if you really care...feel free to email me at corevette@gmail.com

On Mac OS X - it is not a "visual refresh" - it is there a "visual disaster"

more specifically notes about the Firefox 2.0 "visual refresh" are on my Firefox theme site: http://www.takebacktheweb.org/

Regards

Ok, some brief comments, based on a few minutes with the new theme (Using Windows XP):

1) If the toolbar buttons are just icons (no text), they are very crammed together, with little space above or below. The buttons themselves feel like they've lost some area, making it feel like more of an effort to "hit" them. the toolbar itself seems very "tight" -- almost too tight.

2) The toolbar buttons themselves seem "dark", even in their "enabled" state. Perhaps a bit more saturation to make them seem more "alive".

3) The toolbar buttons also seem too detailed (the home button especially). Perhaps once they're less crammed together, I won't find this an issue anymore.

4) It seems odd that on the arrow buttons, mousing over the empty space around them brings up the "highlight" state of the button, but the highlight state's border doesn't extend around the empty space where the cursor resides.

5) The default "unfocused" tab appearance makes them seem like they're in a disabled state, and can't even be clicked. Perhaps the rollover state for these tabs (which seems halfway between the focused tab and unfocused tab in terms of tonal value) could be the "unfocused" tab's default look.

6) I'm not fond of having a "go" button next to the address bar that I can't remove.

There's a lot of room for improvement, yet I see no reason to simply abandon this theme yet -- there's plenty of time to address any issues that users have.

I actually really like the new theme (on WinXP).

My only beef (so far) is the home button. I know this is a little thing to nit-pick about but the rest of the buttons look like an upgrade and the home button looks like a step back a few years.

Addendum:

Perhaps if the "unfocused" tab state was done in a hue significantly different from the background of the tab bar, my #5 above would go away...

--chris

Well, since 1.5 the menus have looked awful on Windows Classic. They are Luna styled and thus look ugly. More recently the tab strip has been redone. It to is intended for Luna. It looks flat and just plain ugly. I don't see why they changed it because the tabs were rendered natively. They looked classic on classic and luna on luna. Now they looked luna no matter what. And the go button can't be removed. Other than that, looking good. The new icons look like the originals, only shinier. They rock!

I'm a Windows XP user, and I don't entirely dislike it. I just think it doesn't blend very well with the general UI of the OS. Granted, IE7 does that to an even more harmful extreme.
The theme is too... gray. Window colors in Windows are brighter, and people expect that from their programs. The Home icon is a little too detailed, I think it should be simpler. The search magnifying glass doesn't contrast enough with its background, and the one thing I would change (the throbber) remains the same. I also think the fading of unfocused tabs could be done better.
It's weird because I lots of comments on the style being to XP-ish on the Mac. I think it's too Mac-ish on XP.

Thanks for soliciting our feedback. We appreciate it. Here goes...

THE GOOD - The tab bar refresh is a big step forward IMHO. Not sure about the whole gradient thing, but at least I can easily tell which is the active tab now. I also think the back, forward, refresh, and stop buttons look a bit better than 1.5. And the changes to the integrated search box are nice as well... especially the glow effect when the current site has an engine available.

THE BAD - It may seem minor, but many of us want an easy way to get rid of the new Go button. Yeah, I know we can edit userChrome.css and hide it that way, but a simpler means would be appreciated. I also echo Mathieu's concern about the lack of borders on hover.

THE UGLY - What is up with the new home icon? Was it just an afterthought? It really looks horrible. IMHO, the home icon from Firefox 1.5 is much better and I even like the one from IE6 better than this (though I hate to say that). Something really needs to be done. Just bringing back the 1.5 home icon would be a definite step in the right direction.

Overall, the new theme is an improvement and I would choose it over the 1.5 theme. There's just a little more work left to do.

As with most form-over-function upgrades, I dislike it.

I'm all for upgrades, but Firefox's 1.0/1.5 look is clean, appealing, and overall usable. The new Firefox 2.0 look sacrifices this for elements that are almost completely extraneous and do little to make the interface more intuitive.

On Linux, not only do the new style elements fail to conform with GTK, but some of them are rather divergent from KDE's or Gnome's HIG.

_Please_ stick with the current basic style. It's better for everyone.

k heres my full opinion

the theme isn't too bad..

i would make all the icons darker, and less blurry, in contrast to the default theme i.e. less strain on the eyes when viewing sites that have dark colors,

i would change the orange door on the home button to some other color that matches the theme better, it does have to much detail i think i saw a family watching tv through the window

also also change the go altogether.. i dont like it makes me angry.

also the tabbar is just as fuzzy keep the text black when for the tabs that are not active instead of grey.. ick.

it is nice, just needs improvement.. more on the usability side.

I've been living with this theme for a while and have posted bugs related to the the fixed "go" button, excess padding left and right on the Tab icons etc.
The attitude of the dev's to fixes is very positive, considering all the related issues and patience will see some of these issues resolved.

The poor visual quality of the icons, especially at small size is a real negative against the fantastic improvements to the UI and deserves graphic quality to match.

Opera 9 sets the standard for "out of the box" themes and this current FF one isn't in the same ball park.

Shrade's FF QuBranch theme leaves it for dead.

Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

It'll take a little bit to get used to, but I'm already starting to like it. Firefox definitely needs to look prettier, Windows Vista's key selling point right now is that it looks so pretty.

On Mac. Don't like it.

The long and cuss-laden version of my take is here. You can probably go ahead and skip it. The executive summary is:

1. Firefox is now the one and only tabbed Mac application (out of what, a dozen? More?) that puts the tab-close buttons on the right. This is practically sadistic. I've heard the reasoning for it, and I remain unconvinced.

2. The icons are incredibly washed-out. Hate it, and have been having a really hard time telling what's disabled and what isn't. (Especially with the tab-bar scrollers.)

3. I really dislike the shrink-wrap effect that hits the back/forward buttons on hover. It looks gross, and I don't like having hover effects on Mac toolbars in the first place.

4. Backgrounded tabs are incredibly washed out, and I can't read the text. And yet, it's STILL hard to tell which one is foregrounded, because the black text and saturated icon are the only visible differences. (Black outline? Shadow? It needs something.)

5. The change in icon sizes was a bad one. Large should be large, and small should be medium, especially when the height of the location and search bars is preventing the 16px icons from giving any real payoff in screen space.

Also, the main background color for the toolbars and tab bar just looks really... sterile. I kind of want a warmer gradient, like on the Unified toolbars. Or at least make it as warm as Pinstripe.

I use OSX and GTK themes.

Windows Vista's key selling point right now is that it looks so pretty.

sadly.. i wont be contributing to their poty.

I like parts of it, but I think it really needs a lot of work. Running Win XP, beta2. I like the shininess, the glow when you move over buttons. I don't like how tiny the actual buttons are for forward and back! That's my number 1 issue. I think the tabs still need some work, but I tend to have near or over the limit of tabs, so I'm often in overflow mode. I like the wider search bar, and the search engine buttons there. At the same time, the buttons seem a little schizofrenic as to whether they're in, on, or not attached...

I don't really like the new home button, though I don't use it much. I think the old padlock was clearer than the new one, though it doesn't matter too much to me - I'm enough of a nerd to not be affected by that change in icon, but it does seem less clear to me.

I do really like the close button on each tab, though I sort of wish they were displayed on all tabs, not just the active one at the moment. The overflow works ok, I hope the team still does some tweaking on it. It's not always clear whether there's overflow, or when you're at the end. There's more there, but it'd be hard to explain here.

I think in general the buttons seem to be too washed out, and the difference between inactive and not available ('grayed out') doesn't seem to be nearly strong enough.

There's all my complaints, but there are a lot of good things too. I think the nature of the business is that the good parts of the design aren't going to get noticed much - that means the design is working. So I guess everything I didn't complain about is good. ;)

Hope that helps! I'm really loving all the other features - I'll be really happy when 2.0 is released!

Personnaly I don't like it for the following reasons :

-it's too washed out, icons look dull and difficult to see as "activated" or "inactivated" at first sight. I am never sure that there are pages in the history when I look quickly at the back arrow.

- FF2 doesn't fit neither my XP-Luna environment nor my Gnome environment, Firefox 1.5 does a much better job at it and yet was criticized for not doing enough... FF2 looks broken with Windows Classic mode, which is the theme W2K users have. W2K users won't have IE7, they shoud be a direct target.

- icons look blur, with two many details and colours bleeding out of the icon limets. shining effects, small details and whashed out colours are not compatible with usability

- the Home icon is looks like a refreshed Netcape 3 icon...

- most of the other icons just don't make sense to me at first sight, copy and paste are the same, the printer is... "something with white on top" in small icons mode, the download manager looks like a CD-ROM drive with an arrow

- small sized icons are of very bad quality, it really looks like they are 50% resized versions of the full-size icons instead of redesigned icons like in Winstripe.

- tabs titles in the background are difficult to read because they have too much opacity, the background colour looks weird

On the marketing side:
- we have built a great image with Firefox 1.x, just like Nike, or Ubuntu, you can see from far away that a screenshot is a Firefox screenshot, it is very distinguishable. Just step back 3 metres from your screen and look at the browser, with Winstripe you know it's Firefox, with FF2 you don't even distinguish what icons are in the navigation toolbar, too bad for brand recognition...

- we have now hundreds of extensions that provide icons that all just look out of place with Firefox

- apparently these theme changes would be to target Vista. An OS that i not released yet and won't have more market share than XP anytime soon. Being compatible with the future is good, but not when it is at the expense of the 2006-2008 userbase who all use XP/Luna. Such changes should be for Firefox 2.5 or 3. XP users who will not benefit from the full IE7 feature set since some features or reserved for Vista or just won't be able to install IE7 (SP1 users, illegal versions of XP) should be the main target in the year to come.

- it doesn't have a "wow" effect, I showed it to 4 end-users (family members), totally computer illiterate but Firefox 1.5 users. All of them said it was worse than the 1.5 theme (but they loved the new features), the words "cold", "dull" and "blurry" were prononced...

I know that there was a lot of work put in this new theme, but to me it is disappointing and from what I heard and read around me, I am not the only one. I do hope that some of the critics will be taken into account for the final design, especially about colours and OS integration. So far, I have read very little positive feedback, which is quite a contrast from what I read when Winstripe was prepared for 1.0 and people were quite enthousast about it.

Basically, I expect a refreshed theme to look prettier and be more usable than the previous one, not the case here. Add to it that it breaks OS integration badly and as they say in my language "you are handing to your enemy a stick to hit you".

If all the feedback from the community is taken into account (which probably means forgetting some of the shiny effects), I think this theme can be fixed and improved to meet it's refreshing goal, but that's a big if ;)

I was looking forward to 2.0, thinking that, along with the Gecko improvements, the theme would look even more _native_ than 1.5. Currently, I hate it. It doesn't look native at all, the tabs aren't native, the dividers don't look native (they've never looked native), the tab bar looks ugly on any visual style aside from Luna, and the native bevels are non existent.

Just because IE7 makes these sort of mistakes doesn't mean Firefox has to follow suit. Please revert.

Having worked in the typesetting book design field for many years I have to say the worst things about the new theme are A: It's just to faded for aging or weak eyes.
B:It just has no eye grabbing quality, "Bland" would be my best description and I am not one for eye candy, but it just has no visual appeal at all.
Mal

After using it for a while, I've gotten used to it and really like certain parts of it. Overall it needs work to make sure it works in all OS variations and with different themes.

1. Buttons need to look like buttons, where did the borders go?

2. In Classic and probably other themes, the url and search bars don't match the go and search buttons at all. I added some style rules in userChrome to make them match, that may be the best option, although I'm sure some people wouldn't like it.

3. The tabs look a lot better in recent builds, many of my concerns have been addressed. I've played around with the non-hover state of background tabs being semi-transparent, I like it but don't know if others would.

4. Still waiting for menus to be natively themed, but I guess that's not coming until at least 3.0.

5. I really didn't like the icons at first, but I'm used to them.

the new theme was a huge waste of mozilla's money, just read any negative comments here or on mozillazine and you will see why. nuff said.

I should have just said "yeah, what everyone above said, especially Chris Nelson and Villa."

I don't think you guys should dump the visual refresh, though, like some have suggested (not that I think there's a snowball's chance you'd do that anyways). But there are some major tweaks needed to get this theme a lot easier on the eyes, and easier to click / navigate with.

Good luck!

The theme is nice, just needs some usability tweaks.

1) Home toolbar button is miserable, so hard to distinguish from grey background when using Windows XP and with theming off and Classic style. This is especially true when viewing as small icons.

2) custom/extension based toolbar buttons no longer have hover highlighting, I think it when they have a class = "toolbarbutton-1" assigned, like all toolbar demos demonstration to do.

3) All but the back and forward toolbar icons are extremely flat and drab, need some color to make them a little more distinguishable.

I like the new icons, except for one thing: the New Tab icon. It's too busy and doesn't fit in with the rest very well at all.

Next, the tabs still aren't quite perfect. Things still need to blend in with the OS theme more, and look like the original mockups more (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Image:Fx2-new-theme-in-xp-v1.jpg).

The inactive state of the Close Tab buttons irritates me, because it makes it appear as though those buttons are disabled, when they are actually quite active. Makes for an easy way to lose a tab.

The whole "here, have a go button and keep it" thing bugs me.

And the one that's irritated me since 1.0: WHY NOT HAVE THE NEW TAB BUTTON IN BY DEFAULT? It's the one button that most people NEED to see for them to realize, hey, tabs are nifty!

There seems to be a pretty strong consensus on most points here, but I would just like to add an observation:

The current (1.5) Firefox theme is quite plain and simple, but that is part of the reason that it is an excellent theme. The (back, forward, ...) button look, sizing, padding etc is damn near perfect. Also, it is very robust in a number of arrangements, such as my 'combined' style.

I get the impression from the new theme that it leans towards trendy UI - unified buttons, glassy effect, etc., which make usability a little more flaky. I'm not going to be one of those people who say "please leave it as it is" - improvement is good! But I think the current set-up is very solid and suffers no major flaws, whereas the new theme might be pushing the envelope a bit too much.

Cheer cheer.

I've found that most people who don't like it generally seems to share similar concerns. Jed Brown did a good write up and had some comparison screenshots, which I also had a go at doing before I read his post. I also think IE7 should not be forgotten as far as looking for ideas goes.

Even just on Windows XP using the Royale/Media Center theme, which is glossier than any of the other XP themes, the glossiness on the new buttons looks terrible. There is a lack of contrast on all of them, they look quite poor when shrunk, and frankly, of the extra icons (such as the SSL lock in the address bar, the print icon, downloads, history, etc...) all look more complicated and harder to see than the originals.

I also can't stand the tabs. They should not be faded when unselected - it makes the text harder to read, and doesn't really fit in with anything else in the interface like Winstripe's tabs do - those look native and fit perfectly. As for the close tab button, now that it's on each tab it is seriously overbearing, and this is where I think IE7's close tab button is better. It's small, uncoloured, and doesn't get in the way. And works fine. Firefox's is this big ugly red box.

Also, in Royale, grey areas and scrollbars and such are much like the WinXP Silver theme, but with a very slight blue hue. This makes the background of Beta 2's tab bar look quite out of place, because it's yellow-ish. Again this is something that just wasn't an issue in Winstripe before. I don't get why the tab bar's look even needed changing. All it needed was adding a subtle close tab button on each tab.

I also agree with others who have pointed out that hovering over a button doesn't cause it's background square to become a gradient (giving that slight 3D button look) as we see in the Windows interface now, and in Winstripe. It feels unresponsive without it.

Currently, I plan on using Winstripe for 1.5 as a downloadable theme once Mr Gerich has finished tweaking it for 2.0. I know that when we first moved from Qute to Winstripe everyone said something similar, but Winstripe was something made essentially from scratch, and got a lot better over time. I like it much better than Qute now. But this new 2.0 theme... it's starting point is meant to be Winstripe 1.5, and yet it's "improvements" all seem to make it less usable, odd-feeling, and force me to squint. I can't see it growing on me.

The only things I like are the new Go buttons for the location and search bars - but while I like how they look, I don't like not having the option to remove them, but I figure that's just something that hasn't been added yet, rather than a design fault.

Here's my big list of evil:

- The Firefox 1.x icons were great in that they were easily recognizable geometric shapes with no distractive fanciness. The proposed Firefox 2.0 icons have too much weird shading and gloss going on, distracting from the basic shape of the icon. I also liked the inner border highlight look (whatever you call it) from the Firefox 1.x icons that seems to have mostly disappeared from Firefox 2.0. Strange, considering the look is gaining more and more adoption elsewhere.

- The house icon is plain ugly. And I suspect any forward-facing house icon would be the same. Yes, the angle of the icon on Firefox 1.x was different from the other icons, but to me it never really looked out of place. Maybe it's because the icon had a sort of flat feel to it and kept a distinctive shape. Also, the color choices in the Firefox 1.x theme were great: green, blue, red, and yellow. In Firefox 2.0 it's green, blue, red, and... uh... white/grey with a dab of blue and red. Think if Google decided to permanently change their "o" to white, or if the Windows logo had a grey pane in place of the yellow one. It's a bit out of place.

- That thing that comes up behind the back/forward button looks weird to say the least. I don't know of any other UI design that does something like that, and probably for good reason.

- The new tabs aren't bad, but I don't see the point in the change. I don't see how it's an improvement over the system default tabs, and it's a deliberate departure from what I'm used to.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment overall is that the UI seems to have lost its "fun" feel in favor of a rather cold look. That's really not a good thing when the product is mostly marketted by enthusiastic users. Image means a lot, and the current proposed Firefox 2.0 theme just doesn't project a fun image. Firefox 1.x managed to look both fun and professional at the same time.

That said, I think I actually like the changes to the Go button and the search bar.

Although i can see the designers have tried to meet the style of XP and OS X half-way, it really, really just doesn't 'work' very well. Many of the previous posters have pointed out the home icon, however, i think the home and new tab icons both share having too much white-space in them, essentially making them disappear by seeming too opaque.

Actually, the thing that truly creeps me out is how close to Kevin Gerich's original iconset the new versions are in form, with an amped-up palette and washed-out colours. For example, the mentioned new tab button's green + is virtually invisible compared to the previous version. The blue refresh button is, well, gaudy compared to everything else.

I like it, with reservations. There is too much space between the buttons, which for people wanting to minimise toolbar space (i.e. maximise webpage space) makes it all rather cramped (I have just the one row with (from left to right: Menus, back, forward, refresh, stop, address, five bookmark icons, search bar). Furthermore, the Go and Search buttons should be removable (I have a Userchrome hack for both).

I'm on OS X Tiger, default OS theme.

The theme change seems unnecessary. Yes, it's Version 2, and a theme change does herald the New Version. But I don't find it an improvement. The lighting gradient and more pastel colors on the icons give the theme less of an OOMPH. I liked somewhat larger icons. The go button attached to the location bar looks funny, same with the search bar. The options icons are good, but again--the colors aren't bold--very subdued and dull. Monochromatic and with the gradients perhaps more "hip" than immediately and lastingly agreeable.

The close button on the tabs should be on the other side in OS X. The inability to see favicons in the Bookmarks Toolbar is another downer.

I like the new tab scrolling arrows and the hand grabber is a nice way to hint the moving tab feature.

Dull colors and lack of OS theme integration: bad. Tab scrolling and hand icon: good.

I won't rehash what everyone else has said already but I feel that the Firefox 2.0 theme could have been done much better if the relationship with Arvid Axelsson hadn't gone sour. Qute was always a far better theme than the Winstripe theme that you eventually went to.

Now Arvid has created a new theme called Kempelton for Thunderbird 2.0 and it is just gorgeous. Arvid has talent, the guys you hired for the new Firefox 2.0 theme really can't compare.

It would be nice to see the Thunderbird theme and Firefox theme match. Check out his work on the Thunderbird by using the Thunderbird 2.0 nightlies or just go here to take a peek: http://quadrone.org/projects/mozilla/

I never cared for the old theme either. The theme that it replaced was much better (had a more talented designer). Anyway, the new theme has a few design flaws (on windows):
- Lack of contrast in the icons. I think most criticism agrees on this one. It's a usability and accessibility problem. Treat it as such and don't ship with this problem unaddressed.
- Overly detailed icons. Icons should be minimalistic and clearly recognizable. Many of the icons don't meet these criteria. Good icon design is hard and there are a lot of bad icon designs.
- Non descriptive icons. The new tab icon has been compared to a toaster by one blogger (a fair comparison that summarizes the problem well IMHO). At least a few of the other new icons are also not an improvement over the old ones (e.g. history, print, download icons).
- Visual style breaks consistency with most extension contributed icons which now stand out as a sore thumb. This is largely due to the first problem and yet another reason to address that one. BTW. this problem extends to several firefox icons as well: the logo, the mozilla favicon (used on the link bar in the default configuration!)

Minor issues:
- toolbar with small icons is the same height as toolbar with large icons
- small icons contain way too much details
- tabs no longer have windows look and feel

I recall the last time a new theme was rolled out there was also a lot of criticism. Also it was during a similar late stage of development. I.e. it was to late to properly beta test and fix most theme issues. These issues remained undaddressed during the 1.x cycle and now just before the 2.0 is done, the same mistake is made again. So roll back the icon changes and redesign them from scratch for 3.0. That will take time + a more competent icon designer.

I don't like the new icons, I hardly see them... And I test beta 2 on Windows XP and Linux, I don't see a difference. I prefer beta1 icons.

I think it lacks the contrast that the other theme had. It's too bright in many of the icons and makes it hard to recognize when using small icons.

I don't like the new icons. The old icons were much better -- simple, distinctive and useable, in unison with the Fx philosophy.

The tabs and the tabs bar look really ugly on Windows Classic on XP.

Everywhere I look in the Firefox Builds forum, I see the vast majority of users dumping this so-called "new & improved" theme for something called QuBranch, which just happens to be an offshoot of the famous Qute theme that Arvid Axelsson put out awhile back. Now if THAT doesn't show anybody how much Bon Echo's new theme totally sucks, then I don't know what will.

The bunch that's doing the theme for Firefox 2.0 can't hold a candle to anything that Arvid's put out, and it's amazing to me that they were arrogant enough to think that they were. Just think how stupid they're going to look when the vast majority of users end up dumping their theme for Arvid's upcoming Firefox 2.0 theme, or QuBranch. It's going to happen.

New theme is good, only one thing. Would be cool to have skinning of toolbar in the same way as tab toolbar.

My biggest complaint is the home icon and the overall dim look of all the icons. I always want them to look as dark as when you mouse over them. I like the glossy look but that's just me. I like the go button fine but the search button needs more contrast. I think I'll like the tabs better, once I get used to them.

I don't understand why they didn't include the 1.0 theme as well. Isn't that the point of having a skinnable browser?! I hope they get a new home icon, add more contrast, and include the older theme so people can choose their favorite.

It's a complete usability faliure. You really need to read this http://rakaz.nl/item/new_themes_for_firefox_and_thunderbird

You can't ship with something this bad, really. The reason I don't use Opera is because it doesn't have a native interface.

Also, why is there no new-tab button on the interface by default? Get with the times Mozilla. IE7 & Opera have you licked. If people discover tabs in IE7 because there's a button for it right there, and there isn't such a button in Firefox, they just won't switch.

As a solid fan since 0.8, I really think Firefox 2 is losing the plot. :(

Using Windows, classic style, the tabs are horrible. The native feel is gone :(

The icon colours look a bit "wishywashy, but I like the new images, except for new tab which is a bit odd.

- Icons are pale, washed and need brighter, saturated colors in not hovered state.
- I dont like the green of the arrows. Stop buttons red is not actually red.
- Maybe it's better with a little less shiny , glossy look
- New padlock looks bad, especially small one
- Home is still bad, even after changing doors color
- Back Forward icons dropdown menus looks bad when hovered

Tabs, searchbar are better than 1.5

I really like 1.5 icons, 2.0 needs more work. But I believe it will be better.

With XP, classic theme :

Icons are pale, sad. The whole aspect is ugly.
This is a browser for a witch !

The result is the opposite of the goal : "improve usability".
Usability and simplicity are the keys for success.

I can no longer recommand Firefox (in this state).

Hello!

I don't know what's all the fuss about the updated Firefox2 interface. It's not a big change.

Overall, I like it. On Ubuntu Dapper it doesn't seem to break from the normal interface (at least not more than Firefox 1.5).

I like the glossy look.

But...

1. back/forward have a weird hover drop down arrow.
2. google search bar is too wide.

That's about all.

I like the new theme on XP, but it needs some work

tabbar forward/back/all tabs buttons need to be better integrated, the are flying over now, and i think that a foward / back button should appear only if there are tabs to move to, and they should not be opaque but solid color.

toolbar buttons should be more coloured, i read someone who says "change the hover style with the normal style", i also think so

Go button is too big for me, but i know it'll be removable so can be ok. dropdown in the url bar is not connected to them, i think it should be skinned.

a 1pc space between tabs could do a little more cleaner face.

bye!

. New icons look too pale. The final mockup has brighter warmer colors, so it looks like the colors where lost when saving them. They are so washed out that it is a bit difficult to see which ones are disabled or not.

. Icons simply look unclear and not crystal. A good example is the tabs icon in the options dialog. Or the advanced icon. When hovered they look more clear (which is the idea i know), but when unselected they just look bad. Also note that the content icon, the globe, is chopped off to the left. It's not completely round.

. Its not so clear anymore to see which tab is the active one. They all have the same height (selected tab had higher height in 1.5) and the selected tab doesn't look selected enough.

. It doesn't look native at all using Classic theme in Windows XP. The tabs look misplaced and it looks like there is a graphical error next to the location bar and the search bar: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=232412

. The tab overflow scroll arrows are too dimmed and not easily discovered (currently looking using classic). They almost look disabled. Hovering them doesn't give them much more color.

The new theme feels far away from done. It does look ok using Luna (apart from what was mentioned above), but it simply look pretty bad using classic. Hopefully these issues can be resolved before the final version.

It's gotten better but some issues i still have,

The tab bar colours do not look native(i assume fix is coming). This is must fix imo.

And it has some issues with high dpi/large font size.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348138
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350194

I also think the hover states of the icons would look better as default.

Using winxp classic.

On Windows XP, Classic and Luna (actually using a crystal msstyle, but it doesn't use the crystal icons).

In general I'm not adamantly opposed to non-native-looking stuff so long as it's attractive and usable and not glaringly out of place. The fact is, Classic is plain as could be with some patches of real ugliness, and Luna is dated and getting further out of fashion fast: there's no need to hitch our wagon too tightly to those declining themes.

I like the tab bar and the search box: both improvements with the following exceptions:
- Search box may be too wide for smaller screens (fine for me, but I don't lack screen space).
- The overflow scroll buttons in the tab bar are so desaturated that they look disabled even when they're not.
- Some of my tabs have 1px-wide gaps where the background shows through between the main part of the tab and the right curved portion.

I really like the new tab bar, especially the always-present dropdown listing the tabs (besides its main purpose, it gives me a space to drag links/bookmark icons/text addresses to to open a new tab even when the bar is full, a role the close button used to fulfill). The way the overflow buttons light up as you overflow is good, though there still seems to be a 1px vertical jog of the page as you hit overflow (much better than in 2b2, though). I like the new, not-very-native tabs on both classic and luna. Years ago I switched to Luna just because I couldn't stand how ugly the classic tabs were in Mozilla/Firefox. Tabs had not yet been widely considered an important interface element at the time Classic was designed, and it shows: notice how almost every other MDI in any kind of application uses a non-native doc-switching interface. I don't mind the desaturated/lower contrast look of disabled tabs, but I don't think I would mind reasonable changes either.

On to the bad. Namely, the icons. These are so indubitably a regression that I hope never to share a common living or working space with any of their few fans: not only would we not be able to agree on any kind of design or decoration, but I suspect we would not even share any design *values*. The only thing I can figure is that the designers were trying to be mac-like with the icons. I can't really see this working well on Mac (especially after seeing the link from parent), but it sure doesn't work on XP. The biggest problem is loss of saturation/contrast and loss of clarity. On Windows, *desaturated means disabled*. Even look at IE7 (if you must): They have big, shiny, non-standard buttons, but their default state is still boldly colored--they get *brighter*, not more saturated, on hover. Also, in 2b2 many of the small icons look badly resized, the large icons look cramped, the printer looks less obviously like a printer, history looks like calendar, new tab is ugly (though that is a hard one), and the new lock icon is all of uglier, harder to recognize, and misleading. Misleading because of the yellow-and-black stripes, which I have never seen on a real lock (in contrast, I have a lock on my shelf much like the old icon) and which in real life always mean "Danger!", exactly what the lock is not supposed to indicate. Also, In my XP theme, the right corners of all listbox buttons are rounded. This doesn't look great inside a standard rectangular box, as I think the location bar was before, but it looks extra stupid with the go button glued to the side of the box. I will get used to the go button if it stays, but I would like to see the location listbox button made like the search engine picker button to match.

Finally, buttons that look like buttons (at least on hover) are not a bad thing--really they're not. I don't want to go back to Win 3.1 and Win 95 days where applications had rows and rows of small, thickly-beveled buttons, but there has to be a happy medium somewhere between that kind of eyesore and 2b2's flat-except-when-it's-not half-hearted hover effects.

P.S. - This isn't on topic, but 2b2 seems faster and more responsive (I had gotten used to how middle-clicking felt in 1.5, and at one point with 2b2 I middle-clicked a link twice because the new tab opened so quickly and seamlessly that I thought my click hadn't registered). Also I really appreciate the spellchecker and improved add-ins management. And even more off-topic, please make ctrl+enter in the location and search open a new tab.

(Linux + Gnome + Metacity + Clearlooks)

Toolbar:

* The gloss on the 'previous/next page' arrows doesn't look good.
* The color of the arrows is too dark and doesn't fit the theme anymore.
* There is a very ugly small rectangular artefact in the middle of the arrow when the arrows are highlighted.
* The 'home' button is too naturalistic.
* The small icons are very unreadable.

Bookmarks bar:

* The live bookmark icon is too washed out compared to the red mozilla head icon.

Tab bar:

* The unfocused tabs are much too washed out.
* The 'close tab' button on the focused tab is shifted too much to the top.
* There is an ugly artifact when the 'opened tabs list' button is highlighted - the background behind it is highlighted as well.

Other:

* The user agent string doesn't fit in the about box.
* In several cases, contents doesn't fit in the preferences tabs.
* The buttons on the highlighted add-on in the add-ons window don't seem to be designed to be displayed on the kind of background they are.

In Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 I used a third-party theme (Qute with minor tweaks), but I liked the changes in 1.5 very much and returned to the default one. If 2.0 were to be identical with beta 2, I'll probably switch again, mostly because of unreadability of the unfocused tabs and of ugliness of the 'previous/next page' buttons.

Other UI comments:

* I'm not happy with inclusion of the 'close current tab' button on tabs. First, it makes it much too easy to accidentally close a tab when attempting to switch to one. Second, it's very confusing when it disappears and appears again, depending on the number of the opened tabs. Third, it makes it much harder to close a larger number of tabs (it would help a bit if the useless 'close other tabs' in the context menu were replaced with 'close right tabs' and 'close left tabs').
* The 'opened tabs list' button is an excellent addition.
* The 'closed tabs list' menu is an even more excellent addition. It would be, however, nice if there was a button for it somewhere, or if it would appear in the tab context menu.
* It would be nice to be able to get rid of the 'go' button.
* I'm glad that the useless mail-related orphans from Mozilla Classic in the tools menu were finally removed.
* I'm glad that the preferences window was nicely sorted out, and that there is no longer tabs-in-tabs monstrosity in the privacy tab (it still remains in the advanced tab, but hopefully it is less a problem).
* The 'bookmark-related extensions' entry in the bookmarks menu is, while harmless, a bit strange. Why have been bookmark-related extensions singled out from the other ones? Will similar entries be placed in other parts of the UI?
* Spellchecking is a nice feature. I can also see that you can add your words (like 'Mozilla') and download more dictionaries (why isn't English one available?). Having to manually switch languages is, however, a bit cumbersome - an option to use more than one language at the same time would be useful.

Wow! Never seen so many comments on your blog Asa! I run firefox on mac OSX and win XP. I haven't tried the new version on XP yet, but on the mac I think it's a step backwards:
- The icons seems smaller, less recognisable and more squished.
- Tabs that aren't selected are a bit too pale.
- The way the go button, and the search ones are 3d while the rest aren't just looks weird.

I'm loving the spellchecking, tab closes and firefox 2 in general, but the new theme on mac is plain bad.

Rusty

Running Ubuntu with GTK / default OS theme (Human).
No need to repeat what's been already said (especially about the home icon and the go button), I pretty much agree (see neil, who also runs GTK).
I just wanted to stress Back Forward dropdown menus don't just look bad, they are UNACCEPTABLE. When you mouse-over on them you've got the feeling that something with this theme is broken, that's it. The dropdown button is too large and horribly extends under the Back/Forward arrow.

I'm not really a power user (I have one extension =) ), but here's my take on the new theme (even though it's not finished yet I guess).

- The icons are all too pale, colorless and even blurry (the refresh icon, for instance, seems smeared).
- The native button-look should apply to the buttons, this was way more clear than the current "glow" (in which the icons look to dark too).
- The "history"-button looks like a calendar (Google Calendar comes to mind).
- The gloss on the "bookmarks"-button has been overdone, making it really unclear. Also, when my bookmarks are open, the icon becomes quite blue, instead of an open book, which I preferred.
- The "tab"-icon still doesn't look like a tab. :)
- "Small icons" look like crap. I generally don't use the word, but it seems the big icons were resized with paint.
- The icons in "small icons"-mode have too much space between.
- The icons in the options-window look, well, quite "blocky". Also, shouldn't the stop-sign be on the piece of paper on the privacy-icon?
- The feed-icon could also use some smoothing.
- I don't have a problem with the tab-strip, but I would prefer the previous look. My parents and all the people in my street I have to fix the computer for, use classic themes. It's also maybe a bit too white, it looks it's part of the page you're looking at.

But it's not finished, 'ey. :)

windows XP with the silver skin

I find the buttons too soft, I have to stop and look at them to find the right button, they have lost the strength.

maybe I will test it more and look for other things but that's the first impression that I got: urgh

I have never seen anyone suggest this yet, so here goes:

Why can't firefox just ship with 2 themes? Theme switching functionality has been around for years, all they need to do is have a popup on first run asking the user if they want to keep the new theme or go back to the original.

The close button in the yellow bar that appears when a popup is blocked, has the same background artifact as the tab list dropdown button.
Is this something I should report to Bugzilla? Sorry, I don't have much experience in reporting bugs...

I'm sure I'll like the new theme when it's finished (polite way to say I'm not liking it now).

- As Mathieu Pellerin said in the 2d comment, the 2 bars are differently themed in Linux

- The Go button looks bad: 1) What's the idea behind no longer making it optional? it's hidden by default in IE and I'm sure that at least 90% of IE users don't use it. 2) Unlike the mock-up, its top and bottom right corners are badly rounded (pixelled). 3) its height is 2 px less than the addressbar and the dropdown widget.

- Most toolbar buttons faded in the wash, what's the idea behind it?

- The Home button is merely a faded 2-d house with a dumb orange door.

- The tab bar and its "hardcoded" background doesn't match the rest of the UI nor the OS theme.

- Tabs are terrible. 1) it's cool that they are easier to close, but the button itself is distracting (I'd prefer a grey or black cross on transparent background rather than a red square with a white cross in it) 2) That highlight effect when you hover over inactive tabs is annoying 3) tabs no longer look like tabs, they look like flat rectangular buttons.

- IMO its development has been very badly handled, just compare with the current Thunderbird's (successful) visual refresh:
Thunderbird: the guy develops a new theme "offline", checks it in when they feel it's done, asks for feedback and fixes the couple of minor bugs that users reported.
Bon Echo: File a bug, check in an unfinished patch, close the bug, file new bugs to polish, plus a dozen of new bugs to address the regressions.

OK, I read up to about half the page then decided to throw in my two cents (on Windows XP):
1. The small icons are terrible! It looks like they were just straight resizes from the larger icons. They are just not as smooth and clear as their larger counterparts.
2. The home icon is terrible. It looks plain, doesn't fit in with Windows XP icon guidelines, not to mention, it looks like it is on an indexed GIF image.
3. I thought Fx was more for native stylings. Then, the tab bar is custom styled. No doubt, it looks nicer, under XP (not so much under Vista), but I think people will have problems if they use other themes/classic.

On Vista, it looks even worse. In fact, I'm very disappointed by how badly Firefox operates and looks under it. It almost made me run to IE7, which I then found out was a bad move as now I can't have it as my default browser anymore!

http://wiki.mozilla.org/FX2_Visual_Update/Default_Theme_Update

"Three vendors (Meta, Radiant Core, and Raiz Labs were asked to submit proposals for a new theme. They were given the criteria that the new theme had to

* respect OS native look and feel "

Looks like the first and major requirement was completely forgotten since it looks alien in all Operating Systems (haven't tried in BeOS though ;) )...

Asa;

Everything is starting to look nicer and nicer with Mac Branch Build IMHO.
I Did have a problem with some View/Tools/Customize corruption earlier in the week, But the problem has since disappeared.

I really like the new tab strip, just wish you could have incorporated the extension, colorful tabs. I like this extension and feel a alot of other FF Users would appreciate it as well. Incorporate it as an option...but for now, the extension is not compatible with Firefox 2.0b2.

I'm using a iMac G4 2.0 Ghz w/ 20" Lcd Display.
ATI Radeon w/ 256MB VRAM.

Everything is crisp, Another wish is previously during the week, I had
a display option of different tab bar icons, they ranged from light to dark in color, I initially thought this was a work in progress, but they disappered.
It would have been nice for this to stay in the theme for users to select from the tab bar icons, each level of shading they liked.

I was really impressed, but then again, they disappeared and i don't know if it was extension related or theme development...

Keep Up The Great Work,

Ray Marotta; Web Admin; http://www.InTheMac.com

Just to add that from all the screenshots I've seen, the Mac version is indeed the most bearable.

Well mac theme should look more os-like i think. The new search bar is not the best. Should be all white and clear like on other apps. And of course icons are too small :)

I'd like to say that I think the new Firefox default theme is terrible. My reasons have already been mentioned by others, but the primary three are:

- It was just about perfect anyway, very "clean" and neutral, just as a default should be.

- The tab bar doesn't respect my Windows 2000 classic theme.

- The new icons are less defined and look "messy", i.e. too detailed.

I do not like the glossy icons/tabs. Okay otherwise.

I really like the graphics, the new tabs and everything, but there is one thing that is NOT good, which is the missing bevel on the icons of the main toolbar. this is a major clinch, because this is not just "not that native", but completely NOT NATIVE looking. I hate that. Everything else is great :)

I really like the new theme. I'd noticed the oh so very subtle change from a week or two ago. I run nightly builds and I'd noticed that the tab bar colours weren't lining up, like the borders weren't set properly and the icons were a bit too invisible until you hover your cursor over it. I noticed when the visibility changes were implemented and I love it.
Way in the beginning I didn't like the default themes and I'd always try to use Pinball, but after awhile I found a few disadvantages to using Pinball, or any other them for that matter. I've just found that as long as the theme is simple, fucntinal and visible, then it's good for me.
I love Bon Echo, (even camped there years ago) I was using Bon Echo pretty much since it came out and I was having some extension issues, so I had to stop using it, but I got sick of running the 1.5.0.x versions and I found a bad user.js and everything in Bon Echo runs very well, now.
I even used Minefield for a short period, but I much prefer Bon Echo.

I currently on Windows Vista with Aero Glass enabled, and thought I'd have just give Phoenix (0.1) and Firebird (0.6) a quick spin. It's easy to forget that what eventually became Firefox had a very non-OS respecting default theme right up until version 0.9 (by then renamed as Firefox).

The "glossiness" of the Fx2 theme isn't what bothers me, though the fact that like the pre-0.9 themes, it not respecting the the native OS feel is a major faux pas (and as mentioned was part of the spec in the theme refresh). Indeed, the new theme is pretty much the antithesis of what made the 1.x theme "great".

1.x's enabled buttons are nicely saturated with colour, with disabled items in grey-scale. More importantly, when the buttons (such as home) are hovered over, they have the button hover effect as per whatever Windows OS. If it's under Windows 2000 or XP (with Classic), it looks like a native button. If it's under XP's Luna, same again.... and now under Windows Vista (Aero Glass), we get a glossy hover effect which automagically adds a little spice to what is actually quite an old theme.

Furthermore, those buttons have the same hover effect as per what happens with the bookmarks toolbar area. Likewise with the tab bar for the 1.x theme... it looks like Win9x/2k under Win9x/2k, like WinXP (with Luna) when under WinXP (with Luna) and now like Windows Vista when under Windows Vista. Microsoft is rumoured to have yet another theme under wraps till at least RTM (Google for "Vector Glass"), which could very well change the way OS controls look once more. In this case, the 1.x theme shall fare better than the proposed 2.x one.

So what should a 2.x refreshed theme look like? By the fact it's a refresh, it shouldn't be that different... in much the same way the huge Firefox around the globe in "Help > About" was refreshed between 1.0.x and 1.5.x. As far as the browser icons go, they don't IMO need much "improving" (might be the stuckist in me talking ;)), though what the 2.x theme does need is for the menu bar "File, etc) and the menus (regular and context) to also respect the native OS look. For 1.x, it's currently the XP Luna style which jars in Classic, and though while not so bad in Vista, the menu items have a solid hover highlight as opposed to the very understated swishy glossy hover highlight within Explorer, et ali.

One final thing, though not relating to the theme directly, but is part of Firefox branding is that the largest icon sizes right now are 48px by 48px. Vista supports a huge 256px by 256px (4x larger than what OSX allows IIRC) and since it'll land during Fx2.0's lifetime it would be prudent to support such huge icons natively.

Home icon needs to be brighter as others have mentioned, but (on Windows XP here) I actually like the rest of the changes - good work!

Asa, you already have too much read, so i'll be brief.

The new them sucks, big time.

I sugest you to read this blog post, http://blog.jedbrown.net/?p=66

The new theme is a great step in the right direction. I can understand some people disliking the new icons (although I like them), but the new style\appearance of the tab bar is WONDERFUL. It sounds like there are improvements to be made and bugs outlined on many a personal blog. But it seems to me that things are moving forward and I look forward to the final version of this great refresh.

I also don't see any problem with bundling the previous theme (I know it would increase the download size slightly) to keep some of these people happier.

I'm not against new things, but I just don't see why did even visual refresh had to happen? 1.5 didn't look bad in any way... New buttons seems like regression and look plain bad to me - no borders, except on back and forward button. And that borders look really bad... Tab bar, on the other hand, doesn't look bad at all, but should respect native OS feeling. Improvements on tab behavior are, on the other hand, great. Enhancements to RSS icon seem OK to me. To conclude, I liked previous theme better... allot. Used FF on Windows and Linux, by the way, and was hoping for native buttons, check boxes, radio buttons etc. on Linux...

Yikes! I hate the new theme. In fact, there are several features I can't stand in FF 2.0 and, since installing the beta, I found myself continuing to use 1.5. I honestly can't believe this, I've never had so many issues with Firefox before.

Separate the Go and Search buttons from the location bar and search box, respectively. That way, I can get rid of them without taking the whole location and search bars, as I have always done in previous versions. I don't need or want them wasting space when I'll never use them.

The new toolbar icons for back, forward, stop, reload and home buttons look disgusting, I prefer the ones from 1.5. The hover effect on the back and forward buttons just doesn't look right. If you're going to have them look like 3D buttons when hovered, do it like it was done in 1.5 where the button encompassed the entire arrow, not as it is now with the green arrow overlapping the edge of it.

The "Quick Find" bar used when I enable the option to "Search for text when I start typing" is useless. At the very least, I need the match case and highlight all options back, though it doesn't make sense for it be any different from the regular Find bar. I shouldn't have to press Ctrl+F just to get those options, they should be immediately available for when I need them.

I preferred the design of the search engine menu button in FF 1.5, which was just the logo on a white backround. The new button just looks wrong. I don't like the longer search box and the shorter location bar, and there's no way to resize them (I think that could be done with an extension in previous versions, though). I think they should be changed back to their previous sizes in 1.5.

If there's only one tab open (and I have the option enabled to always show the tab bar) and I close the tab by middle clicking on it, I preferred the way that worked in 1.5 where it just navigated to about:blank. If I changed my mind, I could just hit back. Now, in 2.0b2, I have to go to the menu History>Recently Closed Tabs>[Site Name...] which is just too inconvenient. However, in general, I like the ability to reopen a closed tab and I think the menu can stay as is, but restore the old behaviour from 1.5.

Allow me to turn off the close buttons on the tabs. I prefer to close by middle clicking and I don't need or want them wasting space. One problem with them is that when switching to a tab is that there's a chance I might hit the close button accidentally. Setting browser.tabs.disableBackgroundClose to true is an acceptable interim solution, but I just don't want them there at all. In Windows, the new look of the tabs is not so good. I preferred the old design that matched the Windows XP look and feel for tabs much better.

Where is the option gone that allowed me to force links that attempt to open in new windows, to open in the same tab or a new tab? I like it set to the same tab and I shouldn't have to go to about:config to do that.

I hate the new theme, I really do. The reasons I have for this were mentioned before, but I'll give a quick motivation anyway.

I'm on Windows XP using Classic.

- The new icons are blurry, bland and way too light. When using the Classic theme the icons just seem to blend with the background colour. This mainly applies to the Home and New tab buttons. Besides that the "old" icons are just much clearer and better designed.
- Compliance to interface guidelines is basically absent. Why does the adress bar have rounded borders? I'm not using OSX. Is it really necessary to move the search engine button out of the field itself using non standard widgets? It's probably done to make it more clear to new users that it's a button, but I feel there are other ways to educate new users (For instance make a small message appear at the top of the screen on first use of the search field or something).
- I don't use the search field go button, why can't I remove something I won't use?
- The tabs bar is another example of ignoring interface guidelines. It looks like I'm using the Luna theme. But I'm not using Luna... It really annoys me when applications do this. To me a consistent look on my desktop is very important.
-The spacing between icons and the edges of the toolbar is way too small, making it look really cramped.

There's probably more that I cannot think of right now, but there's really nothing about this visual refresh that I feel is an improvement. I don't even understand why it was necessary anyway. I've never heard complaints or questions from other people who I introduced to Firefox about the way the interface works. The old look was clean and clear, the new look is a total mess imo.
No, I'm not one of those people who are afraid of change, on the contrary, but this refresh is just a step backwards and a contradiction to reasons given for interface changes in the past.

Another thing. The toolbar buttons are...buttons. So make them look and act like buttons.

I find it hard to believe that anyone will read down as far as my comments, but here goes. My particular gripes are:

1. Non-native tab bar. This is bug 348975.
2. Native location-bar and search-bar, but _styled_ go and search buttons, despite the fact that they are attached.
3. The difference between small icons and large icons is almost zero (in terms of clickable area). Please restore the button sizes as per Fitt's Law.

1 and 2 are the most obviously ugly problems in my opinion. 3 is a usability problem, but probably won't affect me. Other than that, I'm not really that worried about it. The shiny/faded affect isn't offensive to my eyes. I've seen worse themes.

Oh yeah, I'm on Windows.

I don't understand why anyone at Mozilla is spending time on this kind of unsubstantial fluff and ignoring serious dataloss and useability bugs. For example, users by the score are losing "localstore.rdf" with every update, and many lose their bookmarks when their five backups are overwritten before they notice the problem.

I do like the more polished look, but they’re really not as bright as 1.5.
I use the Firefox default theme, so perhaps the feedback will help before the final release of 2.0.
I’d also like to mention that the Tabs are much easier to read with the contrasting black on white, nice job on that.

Forgot to mention, I'm using XPSP2

Personally, I like it for the most part, and I'm on WinXP. However, please allow us to get rid of the go arrow, since I will never use it.

Close buttons on a tab is a good idea.

But on OS X they are too similar to the stop button.

And they are on the wrong side!!

All apps on OS X have the close button on the left. That's how it's been for years, on all apps.

Firefox breaks this convention with little regard for its users. Frankly I'm disapointed, but hope that this can be re-worked before the final release.

I'm one of the "dislike it" people, using Windows.

- The icons (appear) to me to be smaller, even on "Large" icons.
- The security padlock looks weird on a verified secure site
- The colours seem very pale

The tabs are too bright.
I don't care much about anything else, because I am using the Littlefox theme.
Debian, GNOME.

It also asked me if I want to make it the default browser, and I did, and it did, and it said it is the default browser. Not in GNOME. Where? Beta 1 didn't do that, 1.5 doesn't seem to do anything with that feature.

ASA, congratulations for Firefox 2! :)

There some aspects that Mozilla need review:
-The new home button is ugly.
-The others buttons need to have more details and need to be more alive.
-At Win 9x need a full theme(like opera) not only the tabs.
-At Win 9x there's a strange border in some buttons(go, search).

http://www.googlediscovery.com/firefox2atwin9x.jpg

hello sir .. i think the theme is not bad .. maybe some tweaks might be done to make it Vista-ish will be good but keeping it compact as well.. thank you for your effort .. best regards and continue your good job

I am running Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 on Windows XP Pro, SP2. I use the windows classic theme. I personally like the icons. I saw someone mentioned a hate for the menu system on Windows Classic -- I love it. I love how they look flat. I hate how most everything in windows has that 3d effect. I mean its good on some things, but the menus look good this way. I totally, totally hate the tabs themselves. I like the idea of graying unfocused tabs out, but the unfocused tabs.... the focused tabs... are just waaay tooo bright. The focused tab for me on classic is nearly completely white. A different color is good, but not white. I have to deal with bright things enough.

On the other hand, I agree that the toolbar buttons need their borders shown. I dislike the new back and forward drop down areas -- how just the area around the drop down arrow is bordered on hover.

One of my main complaints though, is in Firefox 1.0 - 1.5, I got used to the close tab button being on the absolute right. Is there any way to make the tab "drop down" optional along with the close tab button. Maybe there's a way to get them to work in harmony. I also really don't like the border on the search engine button. I preferred the search engine being in the search box -- that's where i looked for it. Now I get it confused with a normal toolbar button or ignore it entirely.

I confess, I don't understand the utility of a blog post like this.

Our Beta 2 theme was fraught with polish bugs. These make it difficult to give a fair analysis of the theme.

Even current nightlies already have significant improvements over the state we shipped Beta 2 in.

So... what's the point of asking for detailed feedback, when it's about a version of the theme that's already outdated?

Oh. And I HATE the hand cursor when you hover over an active tab.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060821 Firefox/2.0b2 ID:2006082101

I dislike the theme: it looks as though someone left Firefox out in the rain!

Bad things first:
The colours seem washed out, the icon edges don't seem crisp, the 'Go' button looks like it's stuck in the hover state. The top arrow on the reload button is lighter, which I'm sure is deliberate, but I don't know why so to me it just looks wrong. If the extra blue around the outside edges of those arrows is supposed to make them look '3D' or something, again it fails: the icon just seems smudged. All the colour has gone from the 'Home' icon, except for the door which is a strange bright orange... again, it looks like the other colours got washed away.

Good things:
Having said that, I do rather like the new tabs (though I personally set the pref to make the position of the close button consistent at the right, I accept that the new default makes sense). The close button itself is pretty. I'm ambivalent about the hover state of the tool-bar buttons: having just the icon highlight does look modern, although it also creates problems when just text labels are used or the icons don't have contrasting hover states.

I really like the hover border around the RSS icon in the location bar. That's so much more obviously clickable than before.

- I like the new hover effect of the back/forward buttons!
- Too few contrast on hover at all other buttons and the tabs.
- The new home button is inappropriate and ugly. Grey-white and orange? Iih.
- The new buttons don't look good when they are small.
- The border of the go/search button and the drop down button on the left side of the search bar don't fit with the other design.

It was not a good decision to delay the new theme to the beta status. Now it's a painful affair fixing all the ugly and incorrect things.

I hate the new theme, while using it on Windows XP. Specially I don't like the new glossy icons... Tabs are OK... but really don't like the icons. Please change it, or provide a "classic" theme for Beta 2 AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

Asa: thanks for this opportunity to napalm you.

Here is my itemized list of likes/dislikes regarding the new theme:

My setup: Windows XP, SP2 + Classic Theme
Fx build: Gecko/20060902 BonEcho/2.0b2 - Build ID: 2006090203

A) First the Like:
1. Tab bar "shading" scheme (i.e. distinction between foreground/background tabs)

B) Dislikes
1. The toolbar icon set is quite faint and dull (especially the new tab, new window, bookmark, downloads, history and printer icons) when using "Small Icons" . Maybe it's the overuse of green and blue?
2. The lock icon displayed on secure pages. I believe the old yellow/gold lock icon contrasts better than this new gray lock on a gray background, though I guess it would then clash with the yellow URL bar.
3. The icon set in the Options dialog - the Tabs icon looks to me like a washing machine. :-)
4. Please detach the "Go" button and make it customizable (I noticed this is actively being investigated on Bugzilla; don't remember the bug number)

C) Finally, what needs improvement in addition to the dislikes:
1. The left/right overflow arrows are way too faint. I suspect those with poor vision will have a difficult time noticing them.

Thanks and take care.

Personally, I really don't like it that much. It just feels very poorly done - the spacing is all wrong, and my main gripe is that it's simply way too faded out. I use the "Classic" theme on my work PC, as I wouldn't dream of using the stupid children's interface, and it looks very wrong with it. Maybe it looks right with "Luna," but I wouldn't know. The alleged 'contrast' on the tab bar is nearly invisible to me, and I've middle-clicked a few stray tabs not having a clue which tab I was actually on. (Thankfully, Undo Close Tab exists, but I still don't know which keystroke calls it up, as it's not clearly documented, and the menu for specific tabs is still buried too deep in History.)

I understand it's a usability thing for new, less technical users, but I *liked* having the single tab close button at the end of the tab bar. Unlike the Safari nonsense, it, along with middle-clicking tabs, adheres to Fitt's Law a lot better than individual close buttons, as there's either a predictable click target, or a very large seeking area to middle-click. Of course, middle-clicking to close still exists (except on Linux [sigh]), but this encourages people to seek a tiny close button. Once 2.0 is fully released, I'll surely get some tab management extension to tweak this stuff to my heart's content, but for now, I'd like to see what typical users see.

One of the few good additions to the theme is the shifting of the search buttons - I'll grant that they do tend to make more sense, and it should be more obvious to users that things can be changed. Also, a 'go' button for the search makes it easier when you're pasting with the mouse (of course, Opera's "paste and go" is really fantastic for that kind of thing)...which I have little need for, as I'm largely keyboard-centric, but it's still appreciated.

The "Go" button...eh...it's too 'tightly anchored,' but I happen to like having a Go button for the same reason as above for 'Search.' If I'm using the keyboard, I use the keyboard, if I'm using the mouse, I use the mouse. Switching my hand from one device to another is a waste of time. Still, I'm perfectly happy with the boring Go button I have right now (composing this on 1.5 on a Mac).

Normally, I wouldn't have a home button, except on this laptop, where I do dev work (and have a handy local page with links to my current work and docs) - I do agree that the new home button seems excessively detailed when compared to the very plain back, forward & refresh buttons (the last of which is oversized, BTW).

Are there good intentions here? Yes. Is the implementation good? I'm not really sure about that - I'm not a typical end user and my vision isn't perfect, so I really do value things I can easily see [and not washed out, pixel perfect toys]. I"m also a creature of habit, and would probably jump at the opportunity to have Arvid's Qute theme as the default instead. ;)

P.S. Why is there still no 'New tab' button by default? It's one of the first things I add to fresh Firefox profiles? (I place it besides the search box, so that it's right above the tab close box...which makes sense to me (again, see usability points w.r.t. switching b/t input devices)) I can't imagine a typical user having any idea that new tabs can be summoned by any other means than to 'right-click and pick "Open Link in New Tab."' Yes, that is an observation of mine of real users...most have no idea about middle-clicking.

The new icons are ugly and take too much space, when they are small.
The contrast of the icons is too low; some icons are diffioult to recognize, they all look so washed-out.

WinXP

PS: the theme for thunderbird looks awesome: http://quadrone.org/projects/mozilla/

I dislike the new theme too, for the most part, for many of the reasons stated here, which I won't rehash.

Just one thing: using faded out buttons when not highlighted isn't simply ugly and hard to use, but also doesn't make sense conceptually. It de-emphasizes them, so they're basically saying: don't click me.

Just my € 0.02,

– Michael

I basically like the new theme :)

But it (especially the tab bar) doesn't look that good with (non-standard) the Windows Theme I'm using, Black Mesa. Here's a screenshot with FF 2b2, IE7rc1, Opera 9.01 (using the native skin), and the Windows config panel:
http://people.opera.com/rijk/tmp/browserchrome.png

I like the new theme, more modern, more clear and up to date, I don't seem to have any problems with it. I like the silver looking tab bar which looks great.

I also like the search button with built-in search bar and the "play" button to navigate to the page typed in the address bar.

Not specifically related to the new theme, but I would just like to second Jonh Silvestri's comment on the open new tab button.
Mozilla lists tabbed browsing as one of it's main features, why isn't it made very clear to the user how they can create a new tab?

Thanks for the opportunity to unburden myself.

I generally run Firefox on XP or Server 2003, with no theming or effects, expecially not Luna.

So I'm in the native camp, or maybe not, not sure what that means.

I think the new theme is a disappointing departure from a previously winning combination. Beautiful branding and application icons made by John Hicks, together with Winstripe http://kmgerich.com/2006/08/05/firefox-1x-classic-themes-available/

I have always seen Winstripe as a design classic, and in the aftermath of the recent enthusiastic promotion of Firefox through Spreadfirefox and all its efforts video included, it has become totally synonomous with the brand and image of Firefox in my mind.

The change to something this different does seem a bit at odds with the efforts that have been made to get Firefox this far.

I dislike:

The tabs, break UI convention, flat and blurry, they seem to occupy a 'ditch' below the toolbar, and just look out of place with the rest off the chrome.

I've never been a fan of the close buttons, but I do think the previous beta had nicer looking buttons, the new buttons look small and ruddy, and seem slightly
'off position'.

The icons are horrid, very unclear and badly spaced as many have said. Their small version is almost impossible to make out.

UI oddness, adding the buttons to the URL and Search forms seems very strange to me from a usability point of view, perhaps more on the side of configurability than ease of use. To press return to enter data is a UI convention from the dark ages of computer use, no need for the button, of for the love of Nielsen let us take it off ourselves - Without further UI breakage.

I think of the toolbar as a blank pallette for us to configure, and it should obey the basic tenets of windows application design. K.I.S.S.

I don't think we should have to hack the userchrome by hand to sort out restrictive vanilla theme issues. thats just plain wrong.

gotta stop now I'm boring myself.

bring back Winstripe!

I think that the quality of the icons (refresh, home, new tab, etc) are not up to par, especially when they are small. I'm also not a big fan of the foward and back button treatment. I do like the new tabs though.

I'm on Win XP with Luna Silver.

Most of the icons look fine... as long as you're hovering over them. The non-hovered state looks very washed out. The hovered state is vibrant. I'd make the hover state into the non-hover state and do something different for hover. I think I'd prefer some kind of bevel on hover, something like the back/forward arrows get.

Except, the bevel on the back/forward arrows is the absolute worst part of the entire theme! Why does the bevel extend along the "shaft" of the arrows but not the "flares"?? It honestly just looks like someone screwed up (which is exactly what I thought when I downloaded the first nightly with the new theme). If you don't want bevels on the buttons, don't put bevels around the arrows. If you want bevels, put them around the whole icon.

The new tab button (which should be on the toolbar by default) should tone down the blue mock favicon. The little red mock X is fine, but the blue favicon seems weird. Maybe it should just be an abstract shape instead of a square like the red X.

Tabs themselves look fine.

The tab bar seems a bit dark and the color isn't quite right.

The "all tabs" dropdown button looks like it's sitting too low and it doesn't really have an appearance that conveys any meaning.

The tab overflow arrows are extremely washed out, even on the hovered state. The hovered state could be the disabled state and two brighter icons could be made for the active and hovered states.

I wish there was some kind of animation when tabs are closed, especially when tabs are overflowing. Say you have 30 tabs open with identical title text: there is no visual indication when you close a tab.

I personally don't want to use any theme that does not use native widgets (or widgets that use native drawing, anyway). That was a chief complaint of mine about the default theme of the old Mozilla Suite. And that's not the only problem with the new theme. Take a look at the screenshots below, and I think you'll see what I mean. There's just no comparison, IMO. In the new theme, the icons are a mess and the tab strip stands out like a sore thumb.

http://dave.gasaway.org/misc/ff15.png
http://dave.gasaway.org/misc/ff20.png

Count me in with the group that is not happy with the new look. Everything has already been said by previous posters, but I'll go ahead and explain the things I don't like anyway. (I have used both the Linux GTK and Windows versions of the beta.)

- The icons look washed out, faded, and dull. The "hover" version looks much better and should be used as the default look. The non-hover version is the one that people will be staring at 99% of the time that they are using Firefox and is the one that will leave an impression on potential users who see Firefox for the first time. So why would you want to use washed out, less attractive versions for the sake of a cheap and easy hover effect? If you are attached to the idea of getting rid of the button borders when hovering, at least spend some time coming up with a creative hover effect that doesn't make the default icons look bad.
- The home icon is awful. An ugly, square 2d house that looks like something I could have drawn. If the person redesigning the icons is a professional designer they should be able to come up with something better than this. Delete it and start over.
- The other tool bar icons don't look awful, but the changes that have been made are not an improvement IMO. They seem to add unnecessary detail that makes the design less clean and attractive when compared to the previous versions. Ditto with the color changes. Too many of the icons seem to use a white, blue, and green pallette that makes them harder to distinguish from each other. The darker pallette also gives Firefox a colder, harsher feel, which I think will make it less appealing to new/prospective users.
- The small versions of the tool bar icons are fuzzy and unclear. This is probably a direct result of the more detailed and faded look of the regular size icons. It also looks like the designer just scaled the icons and didn't make any effort to clean them up by hand.
- The button borders on the forward/back buttons when hovering just look wierd and the drop down button is too tiny when using small icons. Stick with the standard size button borders like everyone else. In fact, just stick with button borders on all the icons. I'm not against change, but it has to make sense. The "no borders" hover effect breaks down when you take into account the need for drop down menus on tool bars.
- The options dialog icons look fine except for the privacy icon. Is that supposed to be a lock? Why does the lock in the security icon look good but one in the privacy icon looks like junk? This one definetly needs work.
- I was really expecting the Firefox and Thunderbird themes to converge on a common look. Why aren't the two teams working together on this? (I'll spare you the comments about how much better the Thunderbird refresh looks so far. But I have to say that I sure wouldn't mind if Firefox adopted a similar theme.)

Again, I'm not against change, but I really hope you guys just ditch the refresh and stick with the current theme until Firefox 3.0. The visual look and feel of Firefox is important. It will either attract new users or turn them off. So please, take time to come up with a new look that is an improvement and not just a change for change's sake.

But what do you think, Asa?

- Michael

Who cares? It's skinnable, right? So include the classic theme and others in there, make it easy and obvious for the 80% of non-technical users to switch or otherwise choose a look and feel, and you're done.

Here is a great breakdown: http://blog.jedbrown.net/?p=66 a few of the noted issues have been fixed...

"So... what's the point of asking for detailed feedback, when it's about a version of the theme that's already outdated?"

When will the theme be finished and ready for feedback? At that point will there still be enough time to make significant changes before Firefox 2 ships? I sincerely doubt it. Which is why I'm glad we at least had one chance to voice our opinions in a forum where we know that it will be heard by someone official at Mozilla.

If we later decide that the new theme is the best thing since sliced bread, there will be plenty of time to say so later. And I think the chance that the Mozilla community's opinions will change in a positive way will be much greater if the designers hear our feedback now about the current direction of the theme so that they have the opportunity to incorporate the feedback in their work.

I've previewed the new Thunderbird theme(Kempleton)from Arvid Axelsson and like it immensely! I dislike the new theme for Firefox. I think the icons in small mode lack vivid outlines and the copy/paste icons are hard to distinguish between. Currently, I'm using the Winstripe FF Classic 0.9 theme from http://kmgerich.com/ to return FX to the original classic appearance. I would like to see FX complimented by the Kempleton theme used in the new Thunderbird!

Negative:
- I agree with everything Jed Brown said about the theme.
- I also think that it is a bad move to make so big changes that are made. All extensions out there have icons with the look and feel of 1.5. All extension icons will look missplaced.

Positive:
- I could always continue to use the 1.5 theme remake on 2.0.

Thumbs-down, I'm afraid. I'm actually okay with the Home button, but I'm not a big fan of gloss (personal taste; I don't like Crystal either). Compared to Pinstripe's rounded corners and softer glass effect, the new icons look sharp and pointy, like you'd prick yourself if you tried picking one up.

Going by the screenshots on Aronnax's site, the Mac versions look even worse than the Windows versions. Very flat. This is too bad, since I always thought Pinstripe looked much nicer than Winstripe.

As far as lightness, the original mockup icons looked too dark when I viewed them on a CRT (they're not so bad on a bright LCD). But the attempted correction doesn't look quite right either, since the colors were originally chosen for a different lightness.

The current state of the tab strip in current builds blows away the rest of the theme IMO. It clearly looks as if two different people designed this theme, one designed the tab strip and the other the icons and neither had a "vision" as to what they were going to achieve together. Both the toolbar and options icons are washed out and look bad, especially when small icons are enabled. Tools-> Options honestly looks seriously disjointed. I understand simplifying the UI but it seems as if "we've" gone to far in the Tools-> Options area. All we needed to do was add the required UI for new functionality and clean up the existing functionality, just a "bit". Not demolish it totally, as has been done. Tools-> Options-> Tabs and Feeds look especially "bad". They look like an afterthought in the design and layout. Their design is inconsistent with the other areas in the Options panels.

Let's not even talk about Native Theme Rendering. We were told that https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243078 would be a goal of FF2.0. And actually you wrote a bit about that on this blog during the heated debate about the infamous "Wallpaper" bug, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303806 . Even Mike Connor states "From a product standpoint, this change is needed to better serve 35-40% of our users, whereas a much smaller group (1% is the estimate) actually download and install themes. I would much rather ask that the theme authors do a bit of extra work in the next few weeks before the release than ask all of our non-Luna windows users to live with a non-standard menu look and feel until Firefox 2.", https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243078#c218

As we all know there will be no Native Theme Rendering for FF2.0. The theme for FF2.0 goes directly against what is stated here http://wiki.mozilla.org/FX2_Visual_Update/Default_Theme_Update in regards to "respect OS native look and feel".

I don't see how you (Asa) or anyone on the FF2.0 visual team can state that what is currently the FF2.0 theme represents a coherent vision for FF2.0. Just look around, there are so many inconsistencies in the theme and let me add there are literally hundreds of negative comments about the icons in both the google thread on this discussion as well as on mozillazine and of course in the respective bugs but i doubt anything will be done about them.

Anyway... It's time for me to head out...

~B

The new default them for Fx suffers from poor definition in small mode and washed out colors. Using Vista as a guideline IMO is a bad idea unless you have the developers of Vista's theme helping out on it.

You should have just hired Arvid Axelsson to make the theme. Egos aside his theme work is hands down the best. Look at the new Tb theme it is excellent.

I agree with the one poster to keep the 1.5 theme until Fx 3.0 so you can iron out the graphical issues with this new theme.

Posted by: Steve on September 2, 2006 10:53 AM
PS: the theme for thunderbird looks awesome: http://quadrone.org/projects/mozilla/

Yeah, that theme is awesome. Bring back that guy for making the theme! He has the right idea.

I never liked the Fx 1.0 - 1.5 theme much. I thought the Qute theme was much better. Clearly, whoever was in charge of Firefox in those days simply lacked the patience to deal with Arvid, which is sad. A big project should not be made to suffer because of people's egos and impatience.

That said, the 1.0 - 1.5 theme was not all that bad. OK, a bit dull, but not bad. At least it could stretch to accommodate larger text.

The 2.0 theme is a niche theme. It is not suitable for a browser that must be used by many people. That means that it should accommodate textsize changes without looking dorky (while the newest iteration of the tabs does accommodate larger textsizes, the endcaps on the text boxes are still fixed in size). The browser elements also need to be visible; the inactive non-disabled buttons in the 2.0 theme are far too faint for many users. It's a nice, well-done theme that should be available on Mozilla Update, but should not be any app's default theme.

Speaking as a themer, I see that the various changes done to what I perceive as the browser's structure - the various xul boxes that hold the visual elements - make it hard for other themers to work with Firefox. Morphing the whole browser to fit a niche theme seems unfair.

IMO Firefox would do well to return to Qute, to match T-bird's look. Failing that, just go back to the 1.0 - 1.5 theme. It really isn't terrible.

But that's up to you. In every business environment where anyone will use Firefox, I point them to SphereGnome or FormalGnome, depending on their tastes, and occasionally to Qute. The Firefox default themes are just not good enough.

I haven't used Firefox 2 yet, but I downloaded and use the port of the theme on 1.5.

My comments are that it stands out too much. The FF 1.5 theme wasn't noticable. The FF 2 theme is. It doesn't blend in.

Otherwise, it's ok.

Running Windows XP with regular Luna theme.
I think I could get used to the new stuff... Although, I think the new icons might fit in a little more with Vista than they do with XP, they don't really bother me.

My biggest complaint is how the Back and Forward buttons look when you hover over them. I much prefer the way it is in FF 1.5... The *whole* button is outlined, not just the little bitty arrow (and then some half-button outline under the big green arrow). Makes it look more like a button. I dunno, I think this is just ugly.

Other complaints:

It is too difficult to read the text on background tabs. It looks like lots of other people think this, too.

Is it just me, or is the text of the items on the bookmarks toolbar lighter than it was before? If so, why is this?

Buttons appear to be rather cramped in the toolbar there (not enough vertical space), compared to how they were in FF 1.5.

Thanks for listening to all this! I'm sure that some of the resistance to the new theme is just our natural inclination to resist change, but being able to share our concerns is a good thing. I'm using Mac OS 10.3.

1) Let me get rid of the "Go" button. (I guess I can't argue with the reasons for including it by default, but I think they only apply to novices.)

2) "Small icons" mode (which I used under 1.5) seems worse than useless: it now saves almost no vertical space (2px?) while the little icons float in whitespace. Meanwhile, the hover effect behind the back/forward buttons that is only somewhat odd with large icons completely overwhelms the small ones. At this point, I feel like small icons aren't a useful option (perhaps the new default set has simply made them obsolete).

3) The aforementioned hover effect is weird. I guess you're trying to highlight the drop-down menus on back/forward, but it's not clear to me that it's necessary. And it's certainly not consistent across the interface: the similar drop-down arrow at the right side of the location bar doesn't seem to have any hover effect at all.

4) The back/forward buttons in particular feel too dim most of the time: they just don't feel active or alive to me. I like the general idea of different saturation levels for different button states, but the most common state needs to be easy to use.

5) The interface switches from 2D-looking to 3D-looking very suddenly between the "recent locations" drop-down menu (a flat black triangle) and the Go button (a shaded triangle sitting on a raised rounded button). Similarly, the flat search bar surrounded by rounded, 3D buttons feels a bit weird to me, though it may grow on me.

6) Background tabs are dim and can be a bit hard to read (and favicons on those background tabs are so dim as to be almost useless). A corollary is that I've sometimes had trouble distinguishing the active tab from a hovered tab (whose text, etc. look almost as dark as the active one).

Don't get the wrong idea that I'm entirely down on the new look! It's generally fine. I don't know what all counts as "theme" and what's just new UI, but I do like a lot of things like the tab-by-tab close buttons and other tab improvements (and I think the decisions that have been made about when to get rid of close buttons on background tabs are good ones). It's just easier to put one's finger on things that don't feel quite right.

Ok, my 2c:

I'm not sure whether I like it or not. Personally, the old theme was ok for me. I don't like programs that look differently after each update, though for Firefox I got used to it quickly. Less frequent users will probably be more confused about such things.

The refresh looks quite nicely on XP Luna, but doesn't really match on XP classic. Sure, simple users mostly use Luna, but many of the experienced users still use classic, and they'll probably wont like the new theme.

My first thought after the theme update was: "why is the home button disabled?". Most buttons are looking a bit disabled all the time. The icons simply don't match very well with the classic toolbar background. The tab bar gradient doesn't match classic theme style. The go and search buttons are looking good on Luna, but on classic, they don't match their input fields, and - well - they're the only rounded buttons at all.

I hope that all this is still work in progress, and things already did improve since the first checkin. With some more attention to non-Luna, the theme may get nice after all. And work on theme should have started a lot earlier, now its a bit late in development process.

Cheers,

Udo

The theme looks like decent draft, but far from finished version, so I can't give final conclusion as I don't know how much it is possible to change it till the final version.

First of all, icon design is nice, a bit more modern than original Firefox, so it could be called even an improvement. Possibly some of them could be less gray to fit better in classic theme. As I find icon design the very basic of the theme, I think that theme has good potential because of this.

I think I preferred Firefox toolbar to most other application because it had small number of big icons. Unfortunately, now there are more icons and they are smaller which is a bad thing. Now Firefox looks too much Operish. I don't quite understand why you need to shave pixels of the toolbar when you could do that painlessly on status bar, or even on tabbar. Impossibility to remove go and search buttons are really awful, many people do that. I must say that I don't know even one man that even once clicked on home page button, and I always wonder how long it will stay on by default, but then this is not something that has changed from 1.5, so it is part of another story (the same goes to story why Firefox is the only one keeping separate stop and reload buttons). All in all, with bigger search bar and all of these, address bar becomes useless as you can't read site's title in the drop-down on 1024x768 in many cases.

As many noted, not just that icons are smaller, but even spacing is smaller and uneven which leaves bad feeling. Back button looks unfinished. Possibly the color should be altered. Hover effect on both back and forward buttons looks horrible because of the way it treats arrows. I think that Firefox should take IE7 approach with unified history and just one arrow.

Tabbar takes some intelligent changes, but it needs some more work. Gradient doesn't bring some gains on Luna and makes things ugly on classic theme. Also, tabs in background are too much faded out, just correct factor a bit and it will be fine. I don't quite understand the usefulness of the white line on the bottom of the tabbar.

Finally, having RSS button in address bar, drop down and Go button one close to other makes things really confusing. Possibly Go button could be placed inside address bar?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1b2) Gecko/20060821 Firefox/2.0b2 ID:2006082101

The new theme seems kinda bland to me. Of course part of that is because I use to run Colorful Tabs but found that caused problems with the close button(s) on the tab(s). Overall it is okay, I don't really like it nor do I really dislike it.

I'm on Mac OS X. The new theme to me looks very washed out, undefined, and busy. Simpler themes like the previous are much cleaner and more appealing. I really hope that the new theme is sent to the trash quickly.

I'm on OS X and I don't like parts of the new theme.

The Icons are really nice, but the back and forward buttons don't match Apple's HIG nor the other buttons with this 3D dropdown thingie. It's ugly on Windows as well. The flat gray look of the bookmarks bar is not really nice and the graphics for the hovering of bookmark-bar-bookmarks have subtle color differences (the graphic of the round edge on the left of the highlight is slightly brighter as the background and the round edge on the right). The searchbar looks somehow cut by the surrounding buttons, there are no shadings where the locationbar has shadings.

By making the shape of the surrounding buttons of the location and search bars a bit darker they cound resemble OS X's round search bars better.

I like the new tab bar in general, but the close buttons should be on the left, just like OS X's window close buttons and the tabs in Camino and Safari.

I'd much rather go for OS consistency than a revolutionary theme. The FF 1.5 style used XP tabs and default drop-down menus, while still having a unique (but consistent) icon set. Personally, I'd say keep the FF 1.5 style, or at least scale back the changes in the FF 2.0 theme.

If anything, the icons themselves are too sharp, glossy, dark and uninviting; not to mention, the spacing around them is different than the old theme, making everything look much more squished together. The tab bar is a little better, and I can understand its improvements, but on XP they don't seem like a native OS component.

If the theme is improved drastically before FF 2.0 is released, I very well might switch, but otherwise I think I may stick with the old theme.

Jason ("but the new style\appearance of the tab bar is WONDERFUL"), do you really like how this looks?

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/4536/ff2ez5.png

I'm not sure either about the searchbar engine button now looking like a native button. IMO it used to look better when it has transparent background and was into the input box.

Another great example of many UI inconsistencies in FF2.0...

http://img263.imageshack.us/my.php?image=firefox2optionsmenuinconsistencydd3.png

~B

9-03-06. XP.
I like the new tab bar layout (now with the orange bar on the top and bottom of the current tab and the favicons clearly visble), but it does seem like the developers don't have a clue and are throwing everything against the wall and hoping something will stick.
My specific concerns:
1. Same problems with the washed out icons and funky hover-state as everyone else.
2. The "new tab" button looks like a toaster or a pocket protector. Nothing like a new tab. As a matter of fact I constantly confuse it with the new printer icon.
3. For some reason, I now have to concentrate specifically on an icon to discern what it even is. As the icons keep getting smaller and smaller, MORE detail is not the answer.
4. A close button on an INactive tab is a big mistake that takes up valuable text room and is quite frequently clicked by accident when switching(!): If you have 10+ tabs open, you may only have the favicon and close button visible on the background tabs and have to be VERY careful not to close the tab by mistake.

Peter Kasting,

While I could see from your POV that this post seems useless if you've already fixed many of the issues, take a few minutes to read the opening sentence of many of these comments...
"Thanks for the chance to unburden myself", "Thanks for listening", "Thanks for inviting our feedback"...
Obviously your users have quite a bit to say about the theme, and isn't it better they're offered a place like this to say it? Isn't it great that you guys not only CAN, but DO invite feedback? And hey, if you've already fixed half the stuff listed, then pat yourselves on the back and say "Hey, we got it right! We fixed what people didn't like."

Almost all the comments I read were offered in the spirit of wanting to help the project and see Firefox blow everything else out there away. So please take them in that spirit. It looks to me like this has been an extremely effective way to let all of us feel that we're part of the project, even if we're not core contributors. And that can only be good for the community!

So yes, as a developer and programmer with a focus on efficiency and avoiding redundancy, it may seem wasteful to you to solicit these comments and for so many people to spend their time typing out similar things. But remember there's more to the 'fox than the code (though it certainly wouldn't exist without it).

I like what has been done with the URL and Search bars, especially the go buttons. Very unified and attractive. Beyond that, I'm not sure how I feel.

Though I will express a desire to make the close button on tabs simpler, like the IE7 X button.

I've just tried it on Mac OS, and it is worse than on Windows. It's bad, like K-Meleon bad. Everything about this theme is wrong. Literally, there's nothing positive I can say about it at all. Every last bit of usability has been removed. For the love of God, ditch the theme completley and start again.

I can't even tell what the icons are. They are small, dull, blurry and too soft.

I've briefly commented on an early iteration of the new theme and believe the icons to be professional looking and polished, with the possible exception being the retro-Home image. Some additional points:

1. After further use, I also believe that the monchrome, low opacity look for the navigation icons, while more meaningful from a UI perspective, tend to give the browser a lackluster-look when it's first brought up.

2. I prefer the informational and warning icons (16x16) to be always present on their respective elements (statusbar, urlbar, &c.) Since the icons are so small, I never notice them surfacing anyway, so hiding them until such time as they are relevent isn't much of an attention-getter for me. Whereas, having them always present (with low opacity in disabled state) affords a consistent interface and even acts to pique my interest as to what they are for such that I hover over them to get the popup balloon in order to find out.

3. I've already discussed my concern over introducing the huge amount of changes during the beta cycle so I will simply list it here as a place holder. Anyone interested in reading the whole sordid affair can find it on m.d.a.firefox in the "Why so many UI changes in a Beta cycle?" thread.

4. Lastly, as one who has been porting themes since 094, I've seen several changes in the underlying chrome since then. Most of the changes were meant to reduce the number of cpu cycles required to render the elements which was endearingly referred to as "bloat" in many a newsgroup discussion. Looking at the number of binding overlays required for this theme seems to suggest a step back from the minimalization concept? Personally, I believe that the default theme should continue to adher to the KISS principle and leave the bloat to 3rd party theme designers.

Peter Kasting:

It's interesting that you say that people can't judge the look and feel of Firefox 2 based on this beta, because I'm looking at the current trunk build right now (on Windows XP), and aside from the spacing issue between the toolbar buttons being resolved, and a little border around the disabled tab buttons, I'm at a loss to really see any significant changes that address *many* of the issues that *many* people are referring to in this posting talkback.

The buttons themselves are still dark (they barely look "active", even when they are).

The button borders for the forward and backward buttons don't account for the entire "hit" area of the button, making it confusing UI. Actually, the same can be said for the rest of the buttons. If the hit area is a square, why not delineate it? The real question should be, "Who benefits from this arbitrary change? If no one benefits, why do it?"

The "unfocused" tabs still look "disabled", probably due to the fact that they are the same hue as the background of the tab bar. In fact, in the latest builds, with the addition of the lazerline border, they almost look like they're meant to be see-through.

The back-and-forth buttons for cycling through large #s of tabs are dim and unclear.

The "go" button and the "search" button are still attached to their respective bars, and there is no means of removing them. Again, the questions "Why? Who benefits from this change?"

So, despite a few cosmetic changes, it seems that the latest trunk builds have not dealt with a number of the issues that the users in this forum have found troubling.

Now running the 3/4 build, it turns out I rather like the tabs, they actually look nicer that the native tabs of my OS theme (linux kde plastik) imo. I still have to use userChrome to get same tabbar background as toolbars - that background image is never here nor there imo (except, perhaps, in luna silver).
On WinXP luna olive I think I still prefer the previous "native" tabs (kinda beige, orange top when hovered) however.

Hi. One comment: i think the options menu is very inconsistent. Here is a quick comparison of the different options windows, please have a look at my comments over the different windows in that picture:[img=http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/9913/firefox2optionsmenuinconsistencydd3.th.png]

sorry, correct link: http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/9913/firefox2optionsmenuinconsistencydd3.png

the argument people just don't like change is weak. most people liked the new tb theme the second they saw it.

this reminds when adblock .6 got released by an unknown author everybody was questioning it, and calling it fake, did you see when it first came out at amo? crazy, now practicily everyone is using adblock+ .6 (now adblock+ 7).. exluding myself though.

The argument was not all, but that many people just dont like change, many of which also dont conciously realise they reacting negatively for mostly the reason of not being comfortable with change. Firefox is a hugely more used product than Thunderbird, and there were people who kicked up a stink about the TB theme, just as there are for the new Fx theme. There's more kicking up a stink about the new Fx theme because more people use it than TB, and the original TB was noway near as good as Fx 1's rather more plain theme that had little you could fault it on. People just get used to the appearance of buttons, and by extremely more extents with browsers because the main 5 navigation buttons are so prominent, and looked at, used so much more.

The fact is the new Fx theme is nothing totally new or radical like some negative comments suggest. It is an subtle upgrade upon the original plain Fx theme, merely tweaking to bring it upto date with the times. Its a difficult balance to try and do that, but the guys have done an all round ok job. Its not hugely different to the original plain theme so its comfortable. Minor critical points such as it being too soft and faint, the Go and Search buttons being bundled with there relevent text box, and a few buttons being over complex like home, history, plus a few other points, fine, really. But to say the new theme is simply not a good upgrade at all, or that its infinitely worse than the original theme, is simply wrong, and typical of a rebellious new jerk reaction to change to a daily used common thing. It derives from its original form, is not massively different.

So comments along the lines of it being awful are plainly way out exaggerations, very opinionated, and not considering the facts. There's so many visual improvements it simply far outways and minor points that need work. The Go button connected to the url bar, a search button and it connected to the search bar. A proper search engine selector button in a logical place, History rather than Go, and the back/forwards dropdowns actually having a line seperator when the hover, so unlike Fx 1 theme, you can see whether your clicking back or its dropdown correctly

I'm often critical about how Fx can make improvements, but in so many ways including the theme, Mozilla have done an absolute magnificent job, and I for one am applauding that. There's going to be far more negative disapproving comments around because only those disapproving are bothered enough to comment, the majority are seamlessly happy with Firefox 2, its theme, and every other aspect of it. There's always going to be a bit of a stink kicked up by what seems a large portion of users with this kind of thing, but the storm settles, brave decisions have to be made, and things need looking at in the grand sceheme of things. This theme is as simple at the original theme, and most novice users will be as happy, if not more happy with it, so, its good. Great job Mozilla!

I'm on Windows XP SP2.

I don't particularly care for the new theme and think it's design-wise a step back from the old one. But the real deal-breaker for me is the back button:

It's no longer a mile wide.

This is a real usability issue, as it makes it that much slower to hit back. In the old theme I can move the mouse all the way out to the left side and then move it up to the button to click it. Try the same thing in the new theme and you will find that the button does not extend to the end of the screen, meaning that you have to move the mouse slightly to right to hit it.

Microsoft also got this one wrong with the Start button in Windows 95 (was it?) (click target not extending to the very bottom left of the screen) but they fixed it later on. Please do not make the same mistake with Firefox!

I really like the new tab style.
I don't like the new buttons.

Keeping it short & simple. :-)

I'm on a Mac, using 10.4. I've been hopeful for a new theme because I've always found the 1.0/1.5 theme to be out of place on the Mac, and the Camino folks have done a good job of producing a similar theme that plays nicely with other Mac apps.

The good:

I've come to like the refreshed theme. It doesn't look too Mac-y, but it's better. Some Mac users have complained that the "large" toolbar icons are too small, but I think they're a perfect size. Also, I like the softer color palette. The tab bar is nicer, and the menu fonts are the proper size.

The less good:

The icons do need to be sharper, though -- they look too washed out. The rollover buttons in the toolbar are out of place in the OS; no other app looks like that. Others have noted that the tab close buttons need to be on the left side, per Safari, Camino, and the rest. That doesn't bother me as much as the rollover red color, which looks very un-Mac. It should be easily to replicate the Camino-style close buttons.

As I play with this theme more I like it more.

I just noticed that the ff2 theme for 1.5 works far better than that for ff2, and it also corrects some problems with the default 1.5 theme. I am by no means a theme-freak (until trying the ff2 theme for ff1.5 I have always used the default one) but I do consider themes to be a major usability factor nad may even *not* use ff2 if it is released without correcting some of the issues I listed (mostly gtk integration) in my last post.

Hey Asa,

Just tried the new theme in XP, and I really like it.

As I said above though, it looks really bad on a mac, but I think nice on the PC. Perhaps just making the disabled icons a bit brighter would make it even better :)

Rusty

Mt thoughts as written on the Mozillazine forum thread (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2469583#2469583)

The icons are nice but I agree they should be more vivid. I find myself straining to see some of the buttons when I'm tired because they almost seem to blend into the pinstripes. Other than that I like the smooth look of them.

The buttons that are attached to the url bar and search bar look a bit wrong, the outline is too muted compared with the outline of the url and search bars. Consequently, they do not look like they are part of it, they just looked like they were tacked onto the end. Maybe they need some sort of shadow or something.

The tabs aren't really OS X-like, I think they should have sharper edges- like Aronnax's beautiful themes. Also, there isn't enough contrast between the tab colour and the background colour of the tab bar- the tabs need to stand out more I think. This isn't helped by the fact that background tabs are so dull that they too blend into the background.

The tab close buttons need to be on the left. I know this has been debated with regards to having the tabs look balanced but it's just wrong to have close buttons on the right in a mac app that has the window close button on the left. Where's the consistency? The tab close button is the icon I like the least. It is horrible- too small and hard to see. The red hover state goes completely against the style used by every other mac app available. I know the developers wanted consistency between platforms but I think for the end user consistency between apps on their platform is more important. Isn't this more important?

The mac icons are too small but I think this is known already. My overall impression is that the icons are too milky and washed out.

IMHO this theme destroys everything that was good about the Fx1.5 theme. I felt like Fx was just starting to feel like a polished mac app that felt like other native mac apps. I don't want a program that feels like it has a GUI of its own, if I wanted that I would be using SeaMonkey.

If this theme ships with Firefox 2 then I just hope Aronnax can make a replacement theme for Mac ASAP!

This new theme might look good on windows but certainly not on linux.
It looks absolutely horrible on Linux, no offence to anyone of course.

I can't understand why decisions were made specifically to remove native styling, and hover bevels, from the buttons.

There is no good aesthetic reason to do this, and lots of usability reasons _not_ to do this.

The toolbar buttons also look bad. They could do with some more colour and a 'sharper' look.

By contrast, I am a huge fan of the new Thunderbird 2 theme - it looks and feels great.

"So comments along the lines of it being awful are plainly way out exaggerations, very opinionated, and not considering the facts."

@Kris Silver

I have worked in design and usability, especially interface design for well over 10 years. I completely agree with most of the complaints about the new visual approach. From experience I can say when users are unhappy, they express themselves honestly, sometimes colorfully yes, but honestly. To write those expressions off as knee jerk or exaggeration is foolhardy and arrogant.

User feedback, especially for free is gold dust. listen and learn.

The icons on the navigation toolbar look very bland and washed-out, that may be the 'Vista Look' but since when have M$ been the ones to follow?

GOOD:
- I like the back/forward/reload/stop buttons.
- I like the rounded tab borders
_ I like the search box restyle

NOTLIKE:
- On linux the back & forward buttons, when mousehover, are surrounded with a square box that cause a space between the arrow & dropdown button.
- I like the color difference from selected and unselected tabs but the unselected are too similar with the background.
- I don't like the tab close button
- On linux (maybe my kde settings?) the

BAD:
- The home button is horrible. Is too different from other buttons, poor colors, much gray confuse with the background. The same for the httpS lock symbol, I very don't like it.

This is my opinions, generally I like more the old theme...
Thanks asa for take consideration of the user opinions

vola

Asa, will MOFO et al. make public the total cost (in USD) of the visual refresh?
I'm sure that if the old theme was the new one and vice versa most people would like the changes, in no particular order the
- go button optional and movable all around
- simpler searchbar
- cleaner and well-integrated tabbar
- removal of the "cool" hover effects on tabs and buttons
I've just run XP Luna with both Bon Echo and Minefield, alternatively. Dude... was it worth spending hundreds of hours (and counting) for this?
To be fair, there are still many open bugs, and what we're crucifying (figuratively speaking) is not the final 2.0 theme. Let's hope the mainstream feedback will be taken into account somehow.

Just a few points (I got used to the rest, including the close buttons)

- buttons shoule look/behave like buttons; give us back the bevels

- the new pad lock is a joke; I could only tell what it means because of where it showed up, not because of what it looks like; grey/yellow stripes mean danger, btw, not secure

- the reload icon and home icons are just bad; the former looks fuzzy, the latter just... odd

This theme looks extremely bad in KDE (but I like the new tab strip). The icons are so poor that makes Firefox looks like a Windows 95 software.

Where are the developers right now? I was looking in mozilla.dev.apps.firefox to try find some reply from them, but nothing, just silence...

They simple need to recognize their mistake, apologize to all off us and remove this theme from version 2.0, like they did with places.

And please, show more respect for Linux, especially KDE users.

Sorry for my english.

@ ethan; fair response. There is no shadow of a doubt user feedback should be listened to and taken seriously, when did I say anything to the contrary mate. I've always been a very very strong advocate for Mozilla taking seriously user input on a wide array of area's, and still do. It isnt a blank canvass though, and you have to get things into perspective.

If Mozilla changed something everytime more than a couple of hundred people complained and asked for it to be changed back, because they dont like the new change, then Mozilla would never get anywhere with developing a product. Thats just plain simple and realistic.

The fundamental thing I think you mis interpret in my point, is that "scores of negative comments" is not always a sign of a definite overall user majority of millions not liking something. It's a suggestion that might possibly be true yes, but still to say it likely is true is a wild estimation. The other large factor to consider in there being a big reaction to the change, is the very fact its a change. Its a big change, to a big thing, to something people have looked at day in day out for months, people are used to it. It's like when the UK BBC weather forecast completely changed its graphics and look of the country after some 10 years, recieved such a huge out cry. People had gotten used to looking at the same thing for many years, change it, no matter what, many people will be displeased purely because its change, and they percieve the original as better regardless. You cannot deny that is valid, and to a large extent.

The point is that of the millions of users out there, for the most part only the slightly more advanced, aware, perceptive users are using the Fx 2 theme at this time. Those that are happy, are silently happy, so the volumes of positive comments out there are lower especially on something like this. Those that are not happy generally are far more vocal, and thats why we see far higher volumes of negative comments than positive. It may be slightly true for other issues, but for something like the main interface, its hugely true.

When change occurs, you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be those un comfortable with it, and not happy, very used to how it was before. You can bet your bottom $100 that if it its something big and noticeable that many have become accustomed to like the main interface theyve looked at day in day out for months, a big stink will kick up. Well thats product building, and sometimes tricky brave decisions need to be made, and the response of several hundred at most, is not the verdict of millions.

I'm a very very critical person, but I shall not subscribe to any serious dislikings of the new Fx theme that Mozilla staff have worked so hard on, because its not massively different, improvements are moderate-major, problems are minor, and its in the working.

I'm sorry, but several people have worked very hard on this, and its simply wild to say when its so similar to the previous theme, that its hugely wrong, its moderately different showing its change thats the real factor. A lot of works been done, I'm not denying theres more work and improvements there sure, but still, its an improvement and whatever you do, some people arent going to like it.

Its not fair to react so negatively to all the hard work based on all of these factors, theres many improvements, and a handful of improvements. Theres improvements many of which outlined here, but its good, keep improving and going Mozilla.

I dont like the theme at all. It just doesnt seem to fit with WinXP Luna. The shinyness is just plain ugly. However, I do like the new search bar - it looks pretty good.

Generally though, the new "designed" icons are ugly and unesthetical and it look waaay worse than even Phoenix 0.1

Needs work desperately!

much ado about nothing... give a look of 1.5.06 and past 2.0 b2 under, for i dont see the cosmetics to have done anything noteworthy....one of the first things i fixed is getting TMP to load to remove the X buttons but from the active tab and cute menus userstyles amendsment to get more emphasis on the active tab....also the open new tab button from AOIS is a bad omission from the standard interface/theme.....aside the themedocots will make it brilliant, so forget spending more...it wins it anyway hands down against IE7 all versions...AND the speed of this 2.00B2 is astounding.

@Kris Silver:
Just because the basic shapes of the icons are the same does not mean that it's basically the same as the old theme.
On my XP box using the classic look the two are very different.
I do appreciate the work that is put into Fx very much but if something is bad in my opinion I will say what I think of it. Criticism is the best form of feedback you can get. I know that from my own experience. I think it's silly to turn down your criticism just because people work hard on it, and it does not help the developers either.
I respect your opinion, but in all honesty you are trying to bring your opinion as a fact (or at least it comes across that way).

I like almost everything, except for the Go button and that you removed the ctrl+k dialogue box.

Who I am: I'm a professional web developer. I use firefox as my dev environment all day at work on XP, and as my personal browser at home on OS X.

What I like about the new theme:
- no more dodgy shadows beneath the icons
- icons are more polished, "glass" look, this looks more solid and professional
- background tabs contrast well with foreground tabs and are much more recognizable as tabs on the mac
- on windows overall it's a definite improvement over the old theme

What I don't like about the new theme:
- Icons are not saturated and/or glossy enough. Like others have said, the word is "dull".
- Mac theme looks very non-macish, and I would definitely replace it with a custom theme if it ended up in the final version (whereas I did not replace the default theme in 1.5). Put plainly: I don't like it, and it's worse than the old theme.
- I never used the go button and always disabled it, so taking away that option from me is not so nice. (I could live with this though.)

I suppose it all depends on what the aim is here. If the aim is to wow the user like IE7's new interface will do, this theme would be a poor choice. If the aim is to apply a bit more polish to the UI, without moving too far away from the old theme, this new theme could work, but only if:
- all platforms see more saturation to make it less dull
- the mac sees a dramatic redesign to make it more mac-like (I'm not a graphic designer, so can't get into specifics, but just about every UI element in that theme feels wrong to me. The theme is heading in the wrong direction when it comes to macishness.)

I like the new theme, especially the whole glossy look to it. It is much better than the 1.5.x default theme. I wasn't too kine on the "Home" icon but it grew on me. I also like the fact how the buttons and tabs change color one the mouse moves over them, I know Opera has been doing that, but I am glad that Firefox has it also.

I would like for the search box and the search engine icon to be of the same size, right now as it stands the icon is a bit smaller so the it doesn't mold in. I would also like the "Go" button and the magnifying glass icon to be attached to the corresponding box so that it with mold with the theme better.

All in all I like the new theme. Thanks.

I'm on OS X, and, as others have said, I think this theme is heading in the wrong direction on the Mac. Some notes:

* Mac toolbar icons shouldn't increase saturation when hovered over--that's a Windows XP thing. And as others have said, I think the "normal" state is a bit too washed out. The hover states look like they might make good actual "normal" icons (perhaps a bit less saturated), and, on OS X, you don't need a hover state, so you're good to go.

* The funny hover effect on the back/forward buttons make them look like a poorly ported Linux app to me, as do the funky effects with the Go button and buttons on the sides of the search box.

On a somewhat related note, I *do* like the new menus on OS X (e.g., context menus, etc.)--they look much more Mac-like, and I had to carefully look at the shadow to realize that they still weren't true OS X menus, but it's good enough for me. :) I also like the icons in the Bookmarks menu (yes, Mac apps CAN have icons in menus--heck, Safari even does it).

Now, for Windows XP, I don't think the theme looks as out of place, especially not when using Luna. Using Classic, however, the Go button doesn't quite line up with the address bar, though the Search bar looks OK. However, in general, while I appreciate the work on the new toolbar button appearances (like Back/Forward), I would suggest switching back to "normal" buttons--they just feel weird, and I don't see any reason not to make them look like real toolbar buttons. The icon design I can live with, though a bit more saturation (perhaps somewhere between the hover state and the current non-hover state) would be nice.

The tab bar looks OK to me on XP and live-with-able on OS X, though for some reason I still think "poorly ported Linux app" with the rounded tab-close buttons, but it could just be me.

I'm using Windows XP SP2.

I guess I'm one of the few who actually think the theme refresh is a good thing. Don't get me wrong, the old Winstripe theme was great around 0.9.X and it was good during 1.0.X to build brand loyalty. But when Firefox 1.5 was released, I thought there was going to be a new theme for a new version and was disappointed when I got the same theme again. During the first six months that I used it, the theme wore on me so much that I switched first to Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) and then to Qute. I even updated my father's version of Firefox 1.5 to Noia 2.0 (eXtreme). I firmly believe that theme is something that should be updated or at least tweaked with every major release.

As for the new theme, I think that it is a step in right direction. I like the new crystal/glass look is coming along beautiful.

I have read here that there are some commenters with an unhealthy need for OS integration. I personally feel that such integration is rarely worth it. Unless it looks as tacky and out of place as Open Office 1, an application specific theme is better that blending in with the OS. Especially when the OS's theme is getting close the five year mark. Besides, programs from 3rd parties are suppose to have their own look and feel.

As for problems, I will give props to others on this comment thread who say that the Home button is out of place. First off, the red door and chimney are out of place in a blue/green theme and second, the more 3D view never looked out of place in the Winstripe, Noia 2.0 (eXtreme), or Qute.

Also, as far as problems go, the theme is too washed out. I like bright, colorful themes and the new theme is a tad too gray for my taste. Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) and Qute are very colorful and very well constructed. If the new Winstripe theme could be made to look colorful along these lines, it would be a great improvement.

If there isn't going to be a light up border when I hover over an icon, then the hover version of the icon had better be VERY different and/or VERY lit up from the standard icon.

Further more, I have a hard time telling which icons are active and which aren't.

The new Winstripe theme is a definite step in the right direction. It just needs more work over the next month to make it brighter, more colorful, and better constructed.

I like:
New tab bar, go button, search bar.

I don't like:
New toolbar icons which are too blurry.
Back and forward buttons should have larger clickable area.

I DO NOT like:

* The Home Button: bad colors, flat, too detailed and visually not pleasing

* The Go Button on the address bar: I do not need it!

* The lack of any padding below and above the icons when Small Icons are NOT chosen and the anything but glossy feel when Small Icons are Chosen. Too small and Win95 looking, actually redundant in this state.

* The mousover effect on the Back and Forth buttons: too detailed and just clumsy

* Most of the Oprions Icons: especially Privacy and Security, the former one is
uninteligible, the latter - bad looking. The previous padlock jas just nicer, so was the sprocketwheel for Advanced

* The clumsiness of the Search Bar, the precious one was extremely elegant, why change it?

To sum it up to me it is LESS glossy and more cluttered and clumsy than the previous one.

I like:

The tabs

and anything else that Beta 2 has to offer

As a regular to this blog and FF user since Phoenix 03:

I don't care for the new FF theme!

But I do care for a consistent look of ALL mozilla applications!

The Calendar-team for instance spend a lot of effort in creating Icons matchin the Winstripe FF theme.

TB still runs Qute... (While the is "Thunderstripe", which matches Winstripe very well).

I strongly recomment a consistent Icon-Set over all applications. Anything else is not professional.

Kind rerards,
Christoph

I like the new theme, it's smart. Why not keep the old one though and then offer the new one as another choice in the themes section. Then everyone's happy :)

I checked out the latest nightly on Windows 2000, I'll try it on XP later.
IMHO
- Tabs are even better
- Searchbar is ok, Search box is ok
- Colors are a bit better than beta
- Icons are a little better than beta but still too washed out. Home icon should be redesigned, Reload icon needs more border contrast
- Small icons are very bad compared to 1.5's small icons

I remember when the winstripe first introduced, it was way worse than current theme and people went crazy, The designers listened to reactions and perfected it in short time, I believe 2.0 theme will improve as well. Thanks to Asa for this opportunity.

I find the new home icon quite ugly: it's too white, it has a skinny red door and a grey roof... the old one had a warmer feeling: a nice gradient, a brownish-yellowish (not skinny) door and a similarly coloured roof.

On the other hand, the close button on each tab is really handy, and many tab improvements are surely going to be a big hit.

I know I'm one of about a billion, but three things bugged me specifically:

1) The padding around the toolbar icons is gone! Any artist will tell you that art is not just the elements on the page, it's also the space between the elements. (PS: I believe this is fixed in the recent nightlies, but I've had enough bad experiences to know not to download one right after a freeze is lifted)

2) Native bevel hover effects around toolbar icons: enough said!

3) NATIVE tabs! If we're just trying to fit in with Vista, then the tabs should look like Vista tabs on Vista, and classic tabs in Windows Classic. Period.

i like it.
win xp

I am sure someone will have an extension for this, but the only thing I would like is an option to turn off the red X's on the tabs.

I'm sorry to say it, but I hate the new so-called "visual refresh".

To me most of the buttons look clumsy and have an "un-clean" look. This is particularly true with the arrow buttons and the refresh button. The hovering effect over the back and forward buttons (which present a frame-like outline) makes the button behaviour look FUBAR. I also think that the border/outline thing on the refresh icon (i.e. the dark blue/aqua outline of the arrow) looks mostly like a mock-up.

I also don't like the attempt to make the Go button look "integrated" into the address bar. It doesn't work here, since there is a 2px space between the border of the AB and the Go button.

The quality of the winstripe (FF 1.x) theme to me is that it looks fresh and clean, with nice bright colours (without being too bright).

The most succesful part of the new FF2.0 theme is the Home button, which looks pretty okay (although it could still look better if it was more clean). Also the Go button is pretty okay, if it wasn't for the unsuccessful attempt to integrate it into the Address Bar. I also like the icon of the Search button, although the integration with borders and stuff look broken.

The tabs and the close button look pretty cool, and it's nice to be able to see without doubt, which tab is active.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you need elaboration on my comments.

I posted my opinion a few lines up, I just want to add something.

I just understood what the Privacy icon in the Options was trying to represent, and I understood it only because I've seen a similar DND sign in a different theme.

This icon looks like a strange gray padlock next to another ugly padlock that is the Security icon.

WinXP by the way. Thanks for listening and good luck!

Asa -

Can you explain why the Go-button isn't customisable anymore? It seems simple enough to theme it one way if its placed as an adjacent sibling to the URL bar, and differently if its not. Instead it was added inside the URL-bar widget. Why? Is it just to keep DND from confusing new users?

This is a great example of an organisation disappearing up their own backside. You're no longer comparing the theme to other apps, only to FF1.5; and it shows.

In no way could this be called a native theme on XP. Mac feedback is bad, and Linux feedback is worse.

Chances of MoFo changing their mind from what I've seen: 0.36%. Prove me wrong, please.

Oh and wheres our tooltips?

"Chances of MoFo changing their mind from what I've seen: 0.36%. Prove me wrong, please."

Dunno but I'd say the likelihood of us eventually getting screwed has increased :)
I was under the impression that nearly every comment in this page (and elsewhere) mentioned the wrong-looking washed-out buttons. Here's what you can now read in the "Toolbar icons have too little contrast" bug:

"We're looking at making changes to the icons if there's time, but the theme is
definitely in a shippable state at the moment, so this won't block release."

I wonder if the real problem here is that it's been checked in very late in the cycle, at a time when everyone is panicking to meet deadlines. Under those conditions people accept compromises that they wouldn't if they still had many months to go and a lot more spare time.

If I could suggest one constructive thing from all this... that the theme basis for Firefox 3 be decided on very soon after Fx 2 ships, and then a draft landed on the trunk as soon as practical for the creator, so it has a LONG time of practicality testing, comments and refinement before Fx 3 even branches let alone lands.

I use both Mac and Win XP nightlies, updated on a daily basis. I really want to like the new theme. I hate being critical of someone's hard and honest work, and frankly the scathing nature of some of the criticism here is appalling. But still I don't feel that it's suitable as a default theme. And even at this late stage, I'd switch it back if I could, with all the repercussions that come with that. I do find that there's something pretty about it... it's very seasonal... like seeing everything through snow. However, I believe that's also its major flaw... the default theme of a major application should be usable by anyone, but I fear this theme isn't very practical for anyone with less than 20/20, clear vision, and a less-than-crisp monitor.

I was really thrilled when the new icons landed on Thunderbird, and I had no idea they were Arvid's! I hope this is a good portent of Arvid's working relationship with Mozilla, and the shape of things to come. It's a shame his icons haven't been adapted for the default Mac version, which to me still looks like a very awkward Mac Classic app. But I hope it's a good omen, anyway.

I use windows XP now. I like new appearance of my lovely Fx. But there are few things that would be nice. Now I use small icons, because some of them I want to be small, but I'd like the ability to choose icons size on every tool bar separately, so I can have back forward reload stop and home keys of normal size while additional keys like history, bookmarks, chatzilla and so on of small size. I'd also like if there would be a skin for Windows Vista from mozilla, because other downloadable skins may be buggy.

I wrote about it last week as well.
http://blog.jedbrown.net/?p=66

In all honestly, while I hate the new icons, I can live with that, however there are way to many regressions in my opinion. Having said that, I have yet to grab a new nightly and see if any fixes have been made or not since b2.

The new white tabs are burning my retina. I like to sit in the dark when I use a computer - I use windows classic theme with very dark colors in general. It really bums me out how so much new software does not cater for dark-theme people.
I struggle reading PDFs and websites that have white backgrounds as well.

I agree with the sentiments above on many other points as well - the older icons were simpler and more defined. The go buttons clutter up the interface. I do like that unified "addons" menu though.

I favor the new theme. I would not consider it ideal, but comparatively, the old theme is rather plain and doesn't grab the eye of the average non-technical user who does place a great deal of opinion on appearance than we would like. The new theme has in its favor a shinier look, a nice integration of functional buttons with the related gadgets (address bar with "go", search bar with selector and "go"), and an attractive effect on hover (particularly the forward/back). On the negative side, the "home" button doesn't fit. It is just butt-ugly. Further, what's up with the glaring white tabs on top of a silvery backdrop? Some contrast is nice, but.... OUCH.

I've been playing with Firefox 2 for about a week now, and I've been loving it. I had been using Camino on OS X, but always hoped that Firefox would get a little faster and look a little nicer and integrate a little better. If it did those things, I would use it. Although the new theme takes a little getting used to and isn't super Mac-ish, I've come to really like it. I like the smaller "large" icons and the search bar. The icons need to be sharper and less washed-out, though. And it's faster, on par with Camino. All of the other little things are good too, like proper font sizes in the contextual menus, rss reader integration, etc.

Note that most new prefs icons (see hourly build or next nightly) are more washed out in winstripe than in pinstripe.
pinstripe: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=233548
winstripe: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=233549

Quote - "I'm sorry, but several people have worked very hard on this, and its simply wild to say when its so similar to the previous theme, that its hugely wrong, its moderately different showing its change thats the real factor. A lot of works been done, I'm not denying theres more work and improvements there sure, but still, its an improvement and whatever you do, some people arent going to like it."... End quote.

Worked very hard have they? Tough, take it back and do it again, just as I would have to do, if it was one of mine. No one cares how much effort goes into something, the only thing that matters is the result.

I've had a look at the default theme and it could still be rescued without too much effort. The main overall problem is that there is a lack of boldness in the theme and someone got really carried away using opacity and transparency effects. Milky effects just don't work.

Don't kid me, Asa, you know this theme don't look right. Your problem is knowing what to do about it, right?

Although I've seen better icons, this theme can be reworked easily enough, with the existing icons, to look right. Apart from the tabs - start again. You cannot have off white tabs next to a native toolbar background, anything darker than mid-tone is going to really clash - which it does. Even this tab side can be straightened out easily enough.

See, this is the problem. It's no good just saying 'that theming by committee doesn't work', you have to believe it and understand why or...........

Decision time, Asa and the lads, and the clock is ticking.

Frank :)

hmm Asa why have you censored my post? It was not malicious, just 2 screenshots of Pinstripe vs Winstripe showing how prefs icons in Winstripe look more washed out.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=448167&postdays=0&postorder=asc&postsperpage=15&start=0
'enjoy' :-)

does it really take that long to sub same size icons/sets for the current? Wherever there are 3-state icons, recreate 3 for that img file.
I'd start with ff1.5.0 icons if those aren't locked out in some kind of licensing. Then apply consistent status-based effects (most of) the icons. E.g., greyed/dead, hovered available, nonhovered available. whatever exceptions remain, have to be dealt with.
if ff2 looks a lot like ff1.5, that's fine. ff2 has nice features: spellcheck, etc. People won't avoid upgrading because it looks "too simillar" to ff1.5
IMO :-)

maybe this can be fixed in 2.0.1???

'burnt retinas'.
crank down the CRT. then everything will be similarly dim. :-)

"Those that are happy, are silently happy, so the volumes of positive comments out there are lower especially on something like this."
not necessarily. i've commented only when someone else has begun a thread. if i cared only slightly less, then you wouldn't see any comments from me. It's difiult to get accurate survey type data, but my sense is that neg reaction is proportionally high.

FWIW, i'm using the small icons on 800x600 crt. they seem to be a little (~15%?) smaller than large icons on 1024x786.

Qu themes... googled that... http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=380143
wow. i haven't bothered w/themes since i learned how to visually differentiate profiles via userchrome. but QuBranch looks nice in that static screenshot.
how much bytage does an alt theme add to the installer? maybe put a javascript chooser on the mozstart page for ff2 themes? put a theme installer link inside large imgs. one screenshot for each theme. (unless it would be nice to include a screenshot from the rear view of each theme :-) yeah, conceptualize that )

this theme is a bit over the top, im my humble opinion.. I thought firefox's philosiphy was simplicity and security, for the advanced users it can be a god send with the amount of extensions and customizability firefox has to offer.

this theme is a bit over the top, im my humble opinion.. I thought firefox's philosiphy was simplicity and security, for the advanced users it can be a god send with the amount of extensions and customizability firefox has to offer.

oops double post.. firefox went haywire on me.

I am running Firefox 2 beta 2 on Ubuntu with an olive-greenish coloured version of the standard clearlooks gtk+ theme. The new Firefox 2 Beta 2 icons look really ugly, very washed out, and too much detail on some icons like the home and new tab buttons. The home icon is boring and grey, the other icons are just too washed out in my opinion, maybe it looks ok in Windows XP, but not in Linux by far. I simply preferred the old icons. Also, the tab bar is light grey on my machine, it doesn't shade with my olive-green clearlooks gtk+ theme and really stands out like that, it should be a shade of green on my machine, not grey.

I like everything except the colors of the back, forward, reload and stop buttons.

- dull colours on icons, contrast far too low on them, making them practically impossible to distinguish at small size
- "list all tabs" is completely redundant when there's only a few tabs open; if you must, have it appear at the same time as the left/right tab scroller thingies, as it only starts making sense once you have more tabs than you can display
- the "list all tabs" dropdown button looks completely and utterly different from the "bookmarks toolbar folder" guillemet button immediately above it; as they both have the same visual effect of making a context menu type thing appear, it looks extremely weird that they have such a marked difference (even their width is slightly off)

and on a more general note: if the aim was to make it look like opera on my win xp machine, then it's a success...it has the same non native quality that can also be found in horrid things like itunes (particularly the latest version)

Tab bar needs way, way, way more contrast. Even bringing back the orange stripe would be a godsend. Fx 2 on nightly build Sept 15 here. browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3 (1.x style), so not even a purposeless and spacekilling [X] delineates the sea of gray that is Fx 2 tab bar. Painful.

Look at the tab bar on raiz labs for ideas on better visibility. Scroll down to the group of three images. http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/

Tab bar needs contrast bigtime. Please help.

On Windows Vista with the default visual style, the new Firefox theme in RC1 and RC2 looks quite good. The only major issue I have with it is the rounded ("3d") look of the main menu bar. It fades from a gray-blue to white bottom-to-top and looks quite ugly. This effect looks far better on the tab container bar where it is a far more subtle fade from gray to white.

Compare this to Internet Explorer 7, which has a blue background for the top toolbar which matches the window border. It only uses the rounded effect for the tab bar.

The same problem effect is now used in Thunderbird 2 for the collapsible message header pane and doesn't look good there either.

The icons are much improved from beta 2. The home icon still looks a bit ugly and dark yet washed out. I think all the icons look better when running on Vista (aero) than they do on XP (standard).

For Mac and Linux, the "Visual Refresh" is really a disaster. Please seriously consider backing up changes to these platforms.

These nice gfx effects are fine on windows, since Windows has little GUI consistency. On the other hand, both OS X and Gnome have HIGs and their users take HIG compliance seriously. I highly doubt Firefox would be able to get away this kind of blatant violation of the HIG.

Unfortunately, Firefox 2 development is totally frozen at this point so I highly doubt there will be any last minutes changes. Most OS X users would be switching to Camino (at least it's still Gecko-based) as a result of this and most linux distros would be customizing their own themes for Firefox or switch to Epiphany.

I'm running Firefox both on GNOME and on Windows XP with the Classic theme. I must say I was extremely dissapointed with the changes made to the default theme when I first saw RC2.

My first and foremost complaint is that I deem a complete theme revamp unnecessary. Minor and occasional refreshments in the GUI department are always welcomed, but I'd much rather want the dev team's resources spent elsewhere.

Concerning the theme itself, I dislike it for several reasons. As most have already noticed, the icons look drab and discoloured, even depressing. They are also too close together and make the whole thing look very 'skinny'. The choice of colours and the gloss made the whole UI look very plastic and unnatural. They also integrate poorly with the Firefox logo, something which the old icons excelled at because of the similarities in style, colour and saturation.

The old icons had a vibrant feel to them. I remember they were one of the first things to catch my eye when I first installed Firefox. They're nicely coloured, catchy, but still very *simple* and *usable*. They somehow manage to remain professional but 'playful'. To try and express the difference, I'd say the old theme left me thinking 'clean' and 'accessible', and after seeing the new theme I was thinking more along the lines of 'cluttered', 'plastic' and 'Windows Media Player 10' (and that's not a compliment).

An issue further is that many extensions have excellent looking icons, such as IEtab, or Tab Mix Plus, which now look absolutely alien in the new environment.

The new tab bar is actually quite nice, IMHO. Yet it feels a bit out of place in GNOME, and especially in Windows Classic. The old theme integrates nicely, on the other hand.

So, to sumarise, change is *good*, yet, if you really want a refreshment of the UI:

1. Scrape the new theme.
2. Start with the old one.
3. Try staying closer to it this time.
4. Rince
5. Repeat

Until then, it'll be Winestripe for me.

I found the 2.0 theme for Mac OS X very bloated.

Here are my specific dislikes and reasons why:

The "go" button adds clutter and is unnecessary. When someone is typing in a URL it is easier to press than to move your hand to a mouse and click the "go" button.

The desaturation of colors in the back, forward, stop, refresh, and home buttons give the application a grey, stormy look.

The overall greyness of the theme.
---

On a side note, has anyone considered consolidating the "refresh" and "stop" buttons into one, like in Apple's Safari? It seems much more practical since one would only need to use the "stop" button while the page was loading, and only need to use the "refresh" button after the page is done loading. Is this a patent issue?

I use Firefox 2.0 on Windows XP, and I hate the new theme. I hate it because of how it looks, but also for the direction it's taking the whole UI.

I like things simple. I hate eye candy that gets in the way. If I wanted shiny-looking toolbar buttons, I'd use a theme. There are many available. There has always been many available. People who want eye candy have ALWAYS been able to use such a theme, while those who don't have always been able to stick with the default.

But NOW, I've got a skinned-looking cutesy UI, and I've got to go screwing around trying to find a way to make it look unadorned. I've got to do homework and jump through hoops just to make it easier on my eyes.

The main thing I hate are the new tabs. I used to use a simple userChrome.css edit to make the unfocused tabs much darker in color than the focused tab. This helped my eyes quite remarkably. But now, with Firefox 2.0, all the tabs blend very much more closely with each other. My userChrome.css edit not only doesn't work as intended anymore, it makes the tabs look even worse.

Isn't this bassackwards? There is absolutely NO theme that everyone will like. So, doesn't it make good SENSE to keep the default UI looking like the OS environement itself, and let the people who want glossy graphics get it from one of the many choices that are available?

Why are glossy graphics being rammed down my throat?

Hi,
I'm really disappointed in Firefox 2. The themes really stink. Over all this new Firefox is a loser. I no longer recommend Firefox to anyone. I went back to Firefox 1.5.0.8 using Silver Skin 2.6.6, the best skin ever. If Firefox 2 does't improve, I'll never go to it. I just hope security is kept up on 1.5.0.8
I have many friends that I put on to Firefox, their all disappointed with Firefox 2. Some have removed it from their computer, didn't go back to 1.5 series.
Sincerely,
Richard Roder

There's all my complaints, but there are a lot of good things too. I think the nature of the business is that the good parts of the design aren't going to get noticed much - that means the design is working. So I guess everything I didn't complain about is good. ;)