Mozilla working on new design for Firefox

Mozilla is working on a refresh of the Firefox design, according to a post on the company’s Bugzilla platform. The new design bears the project name Proton and would be introduced with Firefox 89, which should be released in May this year.

The design refresh will be mentioned on the Bugzilla platform, reports Ghacks, among others. The Bugzilla page of the refresh shows that Mozilla is working on a new address bar and toolbar, among other things. The display of tabs and the various menus of the browser would also receive a new design.

Austrian developer Sören Hentzschel, who regularly writes about upcoming Mozilla developments, reports on his blog that he has seen some examples of the new design. In his article he writes that the new Proton design is still in an early development stage. Mozilla would have made several designs and it is not yet clear which one will be used for the final release.

Hentzschel does write that Firefox “will look more modern when the update comes out.” Mozilla would also make several other improvements to the web browser. The developer writes that, for example, a mock-up shows a compact display mode that places tabs on the side of a window.

The final design should be introduced in Firefox 89, the developer reports. That version of the web browser should appear in May. Hentzschel also mentions that the release period is still subject to change. No samples of the design are publicly available at the time of writing.

The Nightly and Developer versions of Firefox now have a flag that will enable the new Proton design, although this does not make any changes for the time being. Users can find the flag in the about:config page, under browser.proton.enabled. In time, the flag should have a function.