Firefox Australis: A Sneak Peak

A radical overhaul of the Firefox browser.

It seems Mozilla is working towards a major update of their Firefox browser. Although mozilla.org seems very quiet about it, from a quick tour of the blogosphere it seems Firefox Australis will possibly be making itself known around October 2013; although I've not found anything (or tried very hard) to verify this.

I have, however, been able to get my paws on an alpha UX release: here. It's been described as 'possbily buggy' and 'potentially unstable', but what the heck, let's give it a go...

I've pulled down  firefox-24.0a1.en-US.win32.zip conspicuously date stamped today. If you're running Windows there's also an install executable available; all are win32.

At first look it's a bit like, well, Chrome if we're being honest:

The rounded tabs don't dispel this in any way

The most obvious new addition is the new customisable tools menu:

Nice chunky icons and some commonly used tools I suppose, although the cut/paste/re-size options will be of no real interest to a lot of us, but I can image there are still a lot of users out there who aren't aware this functionality exists in whatever browser they're using.

The tool options can be customised - I'm guessing this interface is still a work in progress at the moment, but offers a simple drag-and-drop interface to add or remove tools of the grid:

Exiting this mode wasn't entirely obvious, but escape did the job.

The addons page looks a little slicker more fully featured:

Just for fun I installed stumble upon without issue:

To be honest, all of this is lip service. There is much Chrome-esq about Australis, there is much that is obviously a work in progress. This is still in development and as such it's too soon to be able to say much.

I've imported nothing into it, but it seems noticeably faster than the most recent Firefox release. Currently downloads and the developer console appear much as per the current release, but it will be interesting to see if Mozilla listen to some of the [negative] feedback relating to managing downloads, especially in regards to deleting downloads.

I'm especially interested to see if there are any new innovations with the developer console. As a big fan of Firebug it feels as if there is a certain amount of reinventing the wheel going on and it would be nice to see these features available as standard.

Currently I use Chrome for browsing, and Firefox for development, just on the strength of tools like Firebug and Firefox's own console. Just from an initial look I believe Mozilla may drag me back to Firefox as my sole browser of choice.

I'll keep playing and keep you updated.