I love the new theme for Firefox. The back and forward arrows are beautiful. I’d put them up against any theme’s arrows. Same with the reload button.

Here are my thoughts on the rest of the buttons. Most of these thoughts have to do with scaling and amount of space taken up. The other issue here is sticking consistently to the theme of the beauty found in absolute simplicity.

Note: because I always use small icons to maximize my browsing space, I am only describing my experience with the small icons, although some of this commentary would certainly apply to the larger icons. I do understand that with smaller icons, you’re far more limited in what you can do, but I’m going to express my opinion anyway.

Give me more space! - Ben Goodger’s “Why Firefox” article says, “We place a great deal of importance on space for web pages in Firefox. That’s why our browser has more space devoted to web pages than Internet Explorer, Opera, or Mozilla.” I for one am a big fan of tons of browser space. For this reason, I always put my address bar and my navigation tools on the top line with my menus. I want my toolbars small, which is why I use the small icon set. But here’s the trouble: the small icon set actually forces the menu bar to use much more space than it should.

– Here’s what the menu bar, no icons next to it: –

– Here’s what the menu bar looks like with the small icons: –

Especially note the menu section. Whoa, Nelly! Look how much space there is from top to bottom, as well as how much distance there is between the icons. It might help to get a look at how IE deals with its small icon set when adjusted in this way.

– Here’s what Internet Explorer looks like with a similar setup: –

The same setup in IE takes up less space both horizontally and vertically.

So what is the problem? I don’t know. I played around with this a bit in Photoshop, but it didn’t seem like there was much reason to make the icons so far apart, or for the height to jump so dramatically.

– Here’s what I think the small icon layout should look like in Firefox: –

Notice that this moves the back and forward detail buttons closer in, as well as pushing the icons closer together. It also cuts dramatically the space required at top and bottom of the icons. In the end it seems to produce a more attractive look in my opinion. There are two main things at issue here:

Icons need to be closer together - A lot of space is getting chewed up horizontally by the distance between these icons.

Icons don’t need as much headroom and legroom - This leads to the text menu getting an enormous amount of space.

If Firefox is striving to place browser space as a top priority, it seems this would be a valuable thing to look into taking care of before 1.0. I know I would love to see this (minor) adjustment made. Note: In all fairness to the theme, it must be said that adding anything other than text items to the top menu adjusts the height dimensions of the top toolbar, including the address and search bars (something I’d also like to see changed).

Is the “new tab” button a toaster? - I am still quite unsure what that big white thing is at the bottom of the “new tab” icon. My first guess is a toaster, but I just don’t know. In all seriousness, I would recommend an even simpler new tab icon. Perhaps just a tab with a large green “+” in front of it, much like the “new window” button.

“New tab” and “new window” buttons need a bigger “+” when made small - The inset white “+” in the green circle is not very intelligible. If, instead, there was a green “+” instead of a little green circle it might look better and be clearer what the button was trying to do.

“Page history” icon: less page, more history! - Sticking to the simple theme, and keeping consistency, it might look much better to have a round clock style history button about the dimensions of the beautiful stop and reload button without the picture of the web page behind it.

Well, that’s it! Hope this is constructive. I really like the new Firefox theme and I would love to see it get a little bit better before 1.0.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 21st, 2004 at 1:33 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.