Back in October we knew that Mozilla was going to spend a lot of work making Firefox 3 fit into the different platforms available. Alex Faaborg, a User Experience Specialist over at Mozilla, just wrote about some early renditions of what the cross-platform icons will look like. He said that on “OS X I want you to feel like you’ve upgraded to latest large predatory cat, on Ubuntu the latest Adjective Animal alliteration, and on Windows you’ve just installed Service Pack Awesome.”
In all there will be 120 different icons for each XP, Vista, OS X, and Linux. In his article he provides a large table of what they have already been completed, but there is still a lot of work that still needs to be done. Here’s a brief overview that I put together of some more popular icons people will be looking for:
Alex also mentioned that they just decided to change the style of the XP icons from Luna to Royale, which isn’t reflected in the icons pictured above. The end result for XP should have a bit more of a glossy appearance:
If you’re concerned with the shape of the forward and back buttons, there is a good reason for the semi-radical design change. As Alex previously explained Mozilla wants to create a distinguishable appearance that, when looking over someone’s shoulder, you’ll be able to quickly recognize that they are using Firefox. That’s a smart idea if you ask me, because many other browsers have a very distinguishable appearance.
The next milestone for the icons isn’t scheduled until February 15th, which means we have over two-months before we see more of what’s to come.
Enjoyed the post? Subscribe to our feed to get a daily dose of CyberNet!
Tags: Firefox, Pre-Release, Software, Browser, Firefox 3, Mozilla
Related Posts:
- Mozilla’s Progress on Platform-Specific Themes
- Firefox 3 Themes for XP & Vista
- Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
- Keeping Track Of Firefox Extensions That Leak Memory
- Aptana: A Free Cross-Platform Web Application Designer
Linux seems very dissapointing. i cant even see the forward and back button.
Hmm, not sure if the XP set will look alright when you use the classic theme. I thought they would make a separate classic theme anyway, but since it’s not mentioned..
They’re heading into the right direction though, imo. Looking forward to seeing these in the application! (seems the beta’s will be running until March at least? That means a release in summer or so.. further away than I thought
)
As I always thought, XP icons are hard to beat, although to some they may seem cartoonish.
Vista forward and back buttons have wrong lightning, which should come from left above (the other Vista buttons are better in this aspect).
Microsoft provides quite a bit information about this with the Vista Icon Guidelines: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-.....11280.aspx
They’ve decided to go the more classic route with Linux, and reuse icons that most Linux users are familiar with.
The release is taking a bit longer than I expected as well, but I would rather see a quality browser make its way out the door than rush it.
They do have a cartoonish feel to them, but I think that’s intentional to better flow with the all of the other icons used in Windows XP. The Windows Vista ones are more “real to life” and look a little more professional in my opinion.
That’s a really good point! I thought something didn’t look quite right with them, and I think that’s what it is.
“Stock icons will not display if libgnomeui is not present” - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=402742
The above bug is for reading only and not commenting in, unless one has useful patches for example.
The Gnomestripe theme uses the native icons (and tab styling) of the gtk themes if available. Can look rather nice actually as i Firefox 2.0 the gtk pretty much mainly only colored the background and tabs stayed the same with gtk color. Firefox 3.0 will alos be using gtk theme to style the forms as before it looked like you were using Firefox on Win9x.
Oh I fully agree, it’s just that I’m really looking forward to it because of all the enhancements (specifically the switch to using SQLite). I’ve tried using the beta, but it has too many bugs still (or unfinished in places) and not all my important extensions are working well with it yet.
I only use a handful of extensions, and so I’m able to use Firefox 3 nightlies without any troubles. The new built-in bookmarking system is pretty nice, and I have been enjoying the use of the star in the Address Bar. It’s much easier to bookmark sites that way.