A Modest Construct

Firefox v2 has reached Release Candidate 1 stage (get it here, by the way), and there’s unfortunately not much to sing about: it still uses the same branch of the GECKO rendering engine as its predecessor, Firefox 1.5. There are some UI improvements, such as the ability to add and remove search engines (a feature I’ve been wanting since 1.0), some slightly reconfigured tabs (each tab now has its own close button, like Opera), and some better in-browser handling of XML. The biggest change trumpeting is built-in spellchecking for text entry fields (right now, it’s telling me that ’spellchecking’ isn’t a word), as well as support for Javascript 1.7, session restore support, and phishing protection.

But what really caught my attention was talking about significantly design changes. In March, I posted an ASCII mockup of proposed interface changes that were uncomfortably exciting. Based on what I’ve seen, very few of those changes ever made it into Firefox 2’s chrome.

The big news was that an outside design firm was working on a visual refresh to spruce up the default theme for Firefox 2 in order to compete with Opera and IE7’s new looks. I really dug what I saw during Firefox’s betas. It wasn’t a dramatic change, but the polish was nice. Instead of big squares around each button, they each had a distinct shape.

But as of the Release Candidate, the theme has changed, and now the toolbar buttons are back to being big square selection areas again, and much larger. The buttons themselves haven’t changed a whole lot, but the way the user interfaces with them has.

Plus, the tabs have gained an ugly ’silver’ gradient that makes them more difficult to read.

Yeah, sure, it all looks nice, but Firefox has to continue to innovate. They aren’t riding the wave of their 1.0 iconoclasm anymore—IE7, despite being a bad browser, is undergoing major changes, especially cosmetically, and the folks at Opera are developing like the wind. Firefox is falling behind, and the decision to be so tepid in the 2.0 release isn’t going to help them any. Come on, guys: innovate!