Hands-on with Firefox’s new “Australis” interface

Yesterday, the Mozilla Foundation released the first early beta of Firefox that includes its new Australis "user experience"—a retooling of the browser interface that dramatically pares down what is surfaced to users. The latest Nightly build of Firefox version 28 is the first complete implementation of the new interface's tabs and top menu behavior.

While it's not a radical departure from previous interfaces, Australis does have a number of useful changes. It dispenses with the blocky tabs of the current Firefox, replacing them with curved tabs that fade into the background when not selected. This makes it easier to tell which tab is active. Australis also does a lot to clear the toolbar of unnecessary clutter, making the browser much more friendly to touch devices.

Some of the streamlining elements of Australis had already shipped with earluer releases, such as the hidden the "forward" button. Unless you've hit the "back" button to navigate to a previous page in browser history, the "forward" button is hidden. It only appears when there's something to go forward to, so it doesn't take up real estate as a grayed-out button when it's not needed. The "streamlining" of the Downloads toolbar button, which doubles as a download progress bar when a download is active, also shipped out in advance of the full Australis interface.

A new change with this Nightly is the addition of a visual pop-up menu launched from the "Customize and Control" button on the far right side of the browser's toolbar. This feature isn't included in Firefox's current release (version 25), but it should be familiar to Google Chrome users. The menu provides quick access to basic features like cut, copy and paste, printing, and history in a form that looks like it's optimized for touch.

By clicking "Customize" in the menu, you can add additional functionality buttons to the drop-down menu or to the toolbar itself. This allows you to decide whether you want add-ons like Twitter and Google Plus integration or other features to always be visible. Otherwise, you can hide them away for access in two clicks instead of one.

Update: A bug in my particular install caused "Do Not Track" to be set on in the browser.  That's not, as I initially reported, a feature being pushed out with Firefox 28—use of "Do Not Track" is still left to the user to configure, a Mozilla spokesperson confirmed.

Listing image by Sean Gallagher