Saturday, February 19, 2011

Firefox 5 UI mock-ups from Mozilla: pinned sites, slicker search bar, and more

Over the last few days, Mozilla's lovely Are We Pretty Yet? has been steadily accumulating Firefox 5 interface mock-ups. If you haven't visited AWPY before, its primary purpose is for listing and fixing bugs in the Firefox 4 UI -- but it seems it will now also be used to showcase potential interfaces for Firefox 5.

The mock-ups include concepts for 'desktop apps', which are Firefox's answer to IE9's pinned sites, and hopefully they'll re-use the same meta tags so that website developers won't have to accommodate both browsers. Presumably a similar interface will be used for Open Web Apps when they finally emerge, too.

There are some suggested changes to the search bar, mostly to make it more streamlined -- and no sign of it being merged with the location bar, like Chrome or IE9.

Firefox Sync looks like it will be more prominently advertised, both on the about:home default start page, and in Remember Password and Edit Bookmark dialogs.

Finally, it looks like enabling/disabling and updating add-ons could be significantly streamlined in Firefox 5. It seems a little odd to break out into a separate window after moving to a tabbed add-on manager in Firefox 4, though.

It's unlikely that any of these are more than design concepts at the moment, so don't get too scared or excited. We shouldn't have long to wait before real builds of Firefox 5 begin to emerge, anyway -- probably by the end of March.

There are a couple of full-size screenshots of the mock-ups after the break.

Tags: apps, browsers, ff5, firefox, firefox 5, Firefox5, mozilla, ui, user experience, user interface, UserExperience, UserInterface, ux, web

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