Okay Geek Farm
New Mozilla Firefox 9 interface leaves us shaking our heads
Brandon Davenport
As you probably know, there are many browsers available like Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Chrome. They all have something in common — they are designed for the everyman, the non-tech savvy consumer — they are simple, fast and lightweight with big buttons and simple layouts, but we are geeks and we need control. Mozilla Firefox was built for us with the power we need with all sorts of buttons and boxes strewn all over the screen and Addons galore. Firefox was big, bad, ugly and we loved it — but it looks like that’s about to change.
The new interface looks great, but it just drags Firefox deeper into the copycat rat-hole it’s been slipping into for the past while. I’m not going to dive into the technical aspects of the new UI (as it’s probably going to be revised dozens of times before release) I am just going to express my distain for the path Mozilla has set for Firefox.
Catching up faster than anyone else
We can talk all day about how Firefox jumped from version 3.5 to 7 in a matter of months, or the fact that the tab layout has been ripped from Chrome and the buttons from IE9. That the menu is gone and replaced with a few scattered buttons and the entire program has been anchored with ball and chains by dozens of your Addons, slowing it to a grinding halt. What happened to Firefox?
What happened was Firefox got boring, and a new market was breaking open with browser makers taking serious action. Apple beefed up Safari, Google launched Chrome, Microsoft released a less crappy IE and Opera continued raising the bar for their dozens of users, all the while Mozilla was watching their share eaten up by these new marvels of online surfing.
Gradually, we’re watching Firefox go from being the powerhouse we knew to another dumb-downed browser, just like everything else — and even though all the new browsers are wonderful, and my parents love them (heck, I use Chrome a heck of a lot too), Firefox has slowly started slip from being the one browser we can rely on as geeks, to another clone.
Trading originality for new opportunities
The majority of browsers are really great at a few things — they’re fast, simple, small and they’re not intimidating to most users. It makes sense that Mozilla would want to have Firefox conform with these qualities and grab the coat-tails of the new hotness in the browser world. IE is improving vastly and Chrome is gaining market share like a bat out of hell, so of course Firefox should copy the others right? No.
View — All Firefox 9 UI Mockups
Like I said, most browsers are great at a few things, but what made Firefox unique was that it was good at everything — debugging code, ad-blocking, tweaking, customizing and anything else you could imagine. It was the first browser that was useful to geeks and allowed us to create some pretty awesome stuff, and it was fast as hell at one point too. This was the browser we used for everything, and later on we could even take it with us on a USB stick! — But now Mozilla is trying to conform with the pack, and it’s loosing sight of what Firefox once was and it’s really almost sad.
I don’t have much else to say besides it’s sad to see such a powerful tool blended into a cocktail of all the other browsers already available. It feels as though Mozilla has abandond what they created in order to persue the never ending struggle to out-copy everyone else. We’re going to miss the days of geeks creating browsers for geeks… what have they done to you Fox…
