Toluu

Alex Faaborg

User Experience Design at Mozilla

New OS X Icons, Made by SofaDecember 17 2008

Mozilla recently collaborated with the Netherlands-based design firm Sofa to refresh some of our OS X application and file system level icons for both Firefox and the wider Mozilla platform. The result of their work is really fantastic:

Disk Image (Firefox), large version

Crash Reporter (Mozilla Platform), large version

Software Update (Mozilla Platform), large version

Polishing Firefox, Week n (Special Edition)October 29 2008

It turns out that publishing lists of polish bugs in small groups over time isn’t actually the most efficient way to draw attention to them, so here are some longer lists of polish bugs for your perusing pleasure.

If for some reason today is not October 29th 2008, you can use these handy bugzilla searches to view an updated list (and welcome to the future!):

Hard Polish Bugs (visual and interactive)
Easy Polish Bugs (visual and interactive)

If any of the bugs do not have enough information specified to move forward, just ping in my the bug comments and I’ll post clarifications so you can keep making progress towards Firefox being as pixel perfect as possible.

If you would like to add a bug onto these lists, please make sure it is filed, add the keyword “polish”, cc me to the bug, attach a screenshot of the issue, and use the appropriate whiteboard terms:

[polish-easy] - updating an icon, css changes, etc.
[polish-hard] - something that is not trival to fix (like rewriting the focus code)

[polish-visual] - s

Privacy UIOctober 27 2008

As many of you probably know, I’ve been a big proponent of adding a private browsing mode to Firefox ever since I joined Mozilla (technically I was even advocating for the feature while in the process of interviewing here). So after two years, you can’t imagine how pleased I am to finally be doing some design work as we prepare to ship the feature. We all owe a tremendous thanks to Ehsan for his awesome work and consistent determination to get the feature implemented.

Over the last two years I’ve also humorously found myself in a few of the actual stereotypical examples that we normally use to explain the broad and diverse range of use cases for private browsing:

-I had to load up Safari to research engagement rings
-I literally had a birthday present ruined for me thanks to seeing someone else’s browsing history

Thankfully I haven’t had to research a super embarrassing medical condition yet, but at this rate that’s probably up next.

Private browsing mode is actually just one of a number of privacy improvements that we are hoping to get into Shiretoko. Some of the other changes include:

-A “Clear Recent History” dialog, which is kind of like private browsing mode, but it works in reverse (all good interfaces support undo!)

-A refreshed Privacy preference pane that allows you to control what types of information appear in the loc

Firefox Themes: The Contention Between Visual Hierarchy and Toolbar CustomizationOctober 24 2008

When we were receiving feedback during the development of the Windows themes for Firefox 3, one question tended to come up a lot:

Why are there three distinct visual styles of controls in the main toolbar?

This is a really good question, and something that I don’t think I adequately explained during the design process. Here are the current main toolbar icons:

And as you may have noticed if you customized your toolbar configuration, there are some intentional height differences in the set when using large icons:

So you might be wondering (or regularly emailing me):

How did we end up with those?

It’s kind of a long story. Going back to some of

Polishing Firefox, Week 3September 29 2008

Here are this week’s set of polish bugs in Firefox. This week is all about alignment. I’ll start with two:

1) Location bar icons (star, rss) not vertically centered in linux (bug 455524)
2) Re-size control between location bar and search bar is misaligned on OS X (bug 457773)

Post your alignment bugs in the comments and I’ll add them into the post throughout the week. Also, if you are interested in working on polish bugs, email me at and I’ll be sure to cc you on each week’s bugs.