The Browser, Redesigned: Take Two (or 0.2)

 
winstripe 0.2 toolbar

[ This post is by Stephen Horlander, the designer behind the majority of the Firefox icons. – Kevin ]

After the release of “Winstripe” into the wild there was a large and varied response. Ranging from mindless petulant rants and demands, to well thought out critiques. Lets just say there were more of the former than the latter. Even before it’s inclusion in Firefox I was personally less than thrilled about how it turned out. The idea, as you may have read, was to take the icons from Pinstripe and make them fit into a Windows environment. The theory was sound as the icon concepts used in Pinstripe were, I feel, fairly strong. Due to time constraints and my own admittedly limited familiarity with more recent incarnations of Windows I think they failed on this count. They do however work well enough and are a good deal better than most of the icons used by many Windows applications, in my biased opinion anyway : )

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Closing in on Firefox 1.0: the Mac user experience

Now that the dust is settling from the 0.9 release, I thought I’d turn my attention to the Mac Firefox experience and what I think needs to happen to make 1.0 great. Firefox’s UI is “good enough” for day to day use, but there are some not so subtle rough edges that make Mac Firefox user experience less than stellar. Here’s a list with some thoughts. The ones on the top are very important in my opinion. The ones near the bottom will probably be random gibbering 🙂
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Firefox 0.9 is out!

Firefox 0.9 has been released. This new version includes a lot of great features and optimizations as well as a new default theme.

Mac users will allso notice that the default theme also gets a set of Aqua icons to replace the previous “button” icons. The new icons are more consistent with the Aqua icon guidelines and are easier to hit with the mouse. They also work with the Windows default theme to create a unified look across platforms.

I will create a Graphite version soon. Oh, and before you ask me to put the old icons back, please turn on “small icons” and live with the new ones for a week. Then we’ll talk 🙂

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