Like most of the planet, today I downloaded Firefox 4 to check it out. I’ve been a happy Chrome user for a while now (and before that, Firefox).
Upon first glance, I’ve got a handful of UI complaints. Things that could obviously and easily be improved, I think.
- The “Title Button”. Why orange? Why so prominent? Why so high-contrast?
- Clicking The “Title Button”. Ohh my. This is a UI abomination. OK, maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s really bad. The groupings are unclear. Why two columns? What is the difference between items in the left column and the right column? “New Tab” has an arrow indicating that mousing-over it will reveal more stuff…or, is it pointing to the right column? Edit is italicized for fun! The Cut icon (scissors) has to be the worst Cut icon I’ve ever seen. Almost doesn’t look like scissors! The Print icon…
- The Tabs. I see now that Chrome has spoiled me with a really nice tab design. These Firefox 4 tabs are so blocky. The vertical lines separating the tabs are too bold. The fact that both sides of each tab intersect with the horizontal line beneath them is too harsh. Chrome, by contrast, has a neat curved tab design, where only one side of the tab (except for the leftmost tab) intersects with the line.
Chrome Tabs: Nice
Firefox 4 Tabs: Ugly
Microsoft Word’s tab design, for instance, shows an interesting way to improve upon Firefox 4: by hiding the border of the not-in-focus tabs. I guess this might not work well in Firefox, given the design of the Bookmarks bar. - The Buttons and General “3d-ness”. The Home Button. The Bookmarks Button. The Firebug button (if you use this addon). They’re light up-top, dark towards bottom. Have a slight shadow. Rounded corners. They look nice, but these details just aren’t necessary. Too many lines. Accentuates the whitespace (the area in between buttons) too much. Again, see Chrome for contrast (apparently even theChrome logo is going flat)
Aza, where were you!?
When you hover over a menu item with children (like options) you have to wait the system timeout for “menu-deployment” before you are showed it’s contents. The normal way to force the system to show the menu at one is to click, but here that takes you to the options dialog.
This even though the menu item is showed twice, once as the parent item and once as the first child.
I downloaded Firefox 4.0 and it is a nightmare!
Also: Javascript-created boxes (confirm(), alert()) are created like high-z-index DIVs, so they cannot be moved off the page. They can’t even be repositioned on the page canvas; they stubbornly insist on obscuring the middle of the page! Ugh. If I can’t find a fix soon, I’ll have to downgrade to 3.6 or switch to Chrome.
I am big fan of Google Chrome, but one thing I do like about the new Firefox is the “switch to tab” feature. It eliminates unnecessary duplicate tabs. Sweet!