Sharing more about Project Nova

[rjacob]

Hello everyone!

Many of you have noticed some of the design updates appearing in certain Firefox configurations over the past few months. Internally, we’ve been calling this work Project Nova, and today we’re excited to share a deeper look at what we’ve been building and where we’re heading next.

The goal of this work is to create a more cohesive foundation for Firefox: making the browser feel cleaner, warmer, faster, and more adaptable.

Some of the areas we’re working on include:

• Simpler navigation and a redesigned Settings experience
• Easier access to features like tab groups, split view, and vertical tabs
• The return of Compact Mode
• Refreshed visual updates across tabs, icons, spacing, and browser surfaces
• More customization options, including new themes and wallpapers

The redesign work also focuses heavily on cohesiveness, accessibility, and making Firefox feel more consistent across desktop and mobile experiences.

This work is still evolving, and we want to continue building this in the open with all of you.

As always, let us know what you think below. We’re listening.

[elcste]

Please keep the find Find in Page bar at the bottom. Sadly bug 2023769 looks like it's getting moved.

[breakingspell]

Wow, this sucks! How do we as users get any say in what goes on with these redesigns?

Everything is internal (Slack, Figma), so we can't even see the mockups. 

[Arvid]

You don’t. Not everything will always be up for user to comment on before implementation. That would slow development down to a bog because I can already tell you that there are at least 5 opinions on this amongst the community without having even seen the implementation and mostly based on habit. Just give constructive feedback when it comes around. I’m sure Mozilla does a lot of testing anyways with how long some of the updates take to be rolled out to everyone. 

[4827482]

Overall love it!

My one gripe is the gap between the window close/minimize/maximize buttons and the screen edge on the top bar. 

Could they be invisibly extended to cover also the gap? Same for auto-expanding vertical tabs and the left edge. I think the hover trigger area should extend to the edge, even if the buttons themselves visually do not.

[aggggha]

Agree with this, the gap between window close/minimize/maximize and especially the scrollbar seems disrupting the flow.

Before, we just need to just drag the cursor to corner of the screen to click the scroll bar (or the close button), now i need to precisely locate the scrollbar because of the gap.

[selim]

This is called Fitts' law and yes, the Nova redesign is in dire need of respecting it.

[cephirosx]

On mobile it would be great if when the address bar is at the bottom this (see attachment) are also moved lower near the bottom or an option to do so

[BelFox]

You guys are doing a wonderful job. The Nova redesign feels modern, inviting and familiar 💜 at the same time!

On top of that, Compact Mode is making a return and you're considering more customization options (like tab and UI element roundness). Speed improvements are made as well. 

What's not to like? 🫶🧡

[bwinton]

As the person who removed compact mode, I'm even more excited than you that they're bringing it back!!! 🎉😂

[syntastic]

Please have an option to turn off all the rounding going on, specifically for tabs and url bar.  MacOS did this type of change in Tahoe and I've been hating it.  I don't mind flipping a flag though to turn it off and then people that enjoy that sort of thing can be happy.

[Tsetien]

Yes! This! Rounded corners, floating components, giant paddings, and all those eerie colours, all needed to be able to turn off. They are now so crazy as they even forcibly made tooltips rounded, how disgusting and revolting!!! EVERYDAY IS A FIGHT AGAINST ROUNDED CORNERS!

[TheJaredWilcurt]

On Win 11 I run some random hack someone wrote to turn off the ugly rounded corners because MicroSlop refuses to give an option to turn them off:

• https://github.com/valinet/Win11DisableRoundedCorners

That hack has to edit a Windows system file (uDWM.dll), and after Windows Updates, it replaces it, requiring me to re-run it at least once a month on reboot to fix that horrible OS.

On Linux I use Zorin, and once again, it has aggressively rounded corners and no option to turn that terrible design pattern off. So once again I am forced to hack my own OS by modifying system files (~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.cssand ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css). Adding in:

* { border-radius: 4px } decoration, window { border-radius: 0px }

This works but has some visual glitchiness occasionally, because it's just a hack I wrote.

PLEASE GIVE AN EASY OPTION TO TURN THIS OFF! PLEASE!

Stop forcing ugly aggressively rounded corners on everyone. If there is no easy option to turn it off, then you are forcing YOUR preference without giving a way for me to TELL YOU mine. There are literally only 2 browser engines. I shouldn't have to switch engines, or stay on older, insecure versions, just because the UI is terrible. BUT I WILL. I WILL GO TO WHATEVER LENGTHS TO GET AWAY FROM UGLY ROUNDED CORNERS!

JUST... PUT IN... A FREAKING CHECKBOX. Is that so hard??????

What an obnoxious looking redesign. Maybe Waterfox will save us from this, because I have zero faith in Mozilla's ability to listen to feedback or add in a single checkbox. I'm not even asking for a range slider to adjust the border radius to something decent, just a plain "opt out of all rounded corners" option.

[Tsetien]

If Waterfox fails you you might consider give Floorp a try also. (Though it is annoyingly based on the current branch instead of ESR.) And actually, even ‘Nova’ isn’t that hard to beat, with Aris-t2’s CustomCSSforFx and some personal fixes it can still be reverted back to a look that similar to Firefox 4 to 28. Also, I reckon you must have already heard of ‘Unround Everything’, but just in case you have not, search for it.

Currently I only cannot get tooltips for add-on icons squared (weird, eh? Even tooltips for tabs and bookmarks were fine, just those for add-on icons!), everything else was perfectly right-angled!

[grundt]

The UI changes are now accessible on Nightly and Developer releases - set "browser.nova.enabled" to true in about:config

I have to say, I'm not a fan ...

• the roundier corners just put borders closer to text and make the text harder to read
• the more highly contrasting color palette just seems glaring and hard on the eyes

I could only stand it for about 10 minutes before I had to switch it back ... maybe after my stomach settles I'll spend more time with it and see if I can find anything nice to say 

proton
nova

[Oso_Polar]

+100 Color choice is very poor and rounding is excessive.

[suikaz]

it's awful, but it may actually be less broken than proton

[cristianer]

I like it, but please bring back the icons in the menu. Plain text is kinda ugly. 

[kit_absurd_res]

This! The icons made it quicker to find the expected menu item. Countless others asked for the same thing ever since they removed them.

[gcozzi]

1. Regarding the desktop version of Nova, the 'islands' that separate the UI sections introduce a pixel gap that many users might find unnecessary; it would be great to have an option to disable this effect. Additionally, I noticed that on both KDE Plasma and GNOME Shell, this gap is completely translucent, blending the browser's content with whatever is behind the window, which proves quite distracting.
2. On the other hand, I believe it is essential to conduct usability testing for the mobile version specifically tailored for one-handed use (prioritizing the right hand). Placing key buttons at the top or the bottom-left corner makes them difficult to reach comfortably.
3. Finally, color selection for tab groups or the browser theme shouldn't be restricted to a predefined (and very opinionated) subset; having a full RGB color picker available would be a major improvement. Also, the functional or conceptual purpose behind the teardrop shape on the tab group labels is not entirely clear to me.

[kit_absurd_res]

I like how you brought up "opinionated" as that's a part of the company's motto. I'd go further and call the entire update opinionated, provided customisation features don't land in time or at all.

[Arvid]

Almost every UI is going to be opinionated in some way. Letting the user customise everything takes quite some time to develop and worst case makes future updates a nightmare for the dev team. At some point you’re just gonna have to live with software looking a certain way and if you don’t like it Firefox already provides more options than many other browsers in terms of fully customisable CSS. 

[grundt]

Just allowing Theme developers access to all the UI customizations affected by the browser.nova.enabled toggle, would make me happy.

I'm quite impressed at how responsive that toggle is (immediate change, no browser restart required).

If Themes had access to all the same UI elements as the toggle, it would allow anyone (with enough motivation to create a theme) to mix and match from the Nova/Proton pallettes to their heart's content without any need to build UI customization into Settings, and presumably without hampering future UI updates (as the changes would already be constrained to fit within what's toggleable).

[YouMadeItWorse]

Oh huh, I think the system ate my first reply. This redesign is ugly and pointless just like your android redesign. It's obvious the UX team needs to keep reinventing the wheel to justify its existence at Mozilla and the sooner you uncreative hacks are sacked the better.

[Arvid]

This comment provided 0 useful feedback. 

[smallpatatas]

Glad to hear the focus is on things like speed and accessibility.

Two pieces of feedback:

1. I'd like to strongly urge you to make AI features 'opt-in' rather than 'opt-out'. I currently use a fork of Firefox to avoid having to constantly turn off these kinds of things. I suspect much of your userbase doesn't want them either, and I also reckon that as the AI backlash grows, a browser without AI in it at all will become a sought-after thing.

2. I find the redesigned menu on Android to be much slower and more confusing to use; I suspect it's all the rounded corners and other visual distractions, along with some features being in horizontal rows while others are in a vertical list. I find I have to scroll a lot more now, and need to visually scan for much longer. I thought this might get better as I got used to the new design, but it hasn't.

Thanks very much for being open to hearing feedback!

[alwayssunny]

Honestly the biggest feature you can add is the zen mode thing. so i like the vertical tabs, the fact that you can collapse them, but there is no feature to make them disappear entirely. so im talking like just a pure web page and the tabs only come back when you hover over where they should be. in the age of clutter and excessiveness, being minimal and performant is going to be the winner. i tried zen, it was minimal but not performant. if you add that feature i will never go back to zen. and maybe im a mac nerd, but i like the rounded design. 

[Crusader_Nejaa]

When can we have the option to use the old UI for the tab viewer and the 3 dot menu in the android app?

[Oso_Polar]

Looks alien on Windows 11 - all controls and tabs are way too rounded, in the style of ancient Mac OS. Pinned tabs are circles!  Purple controls don't match selected system theme colors (and in general IMHO is a very poor choice for default color for controls). Menu looks very odd - has strange background color and "frames", doesn't even look like a menu.

[s_hentzschel]

This is not the final Nova design. What you screenshot shows is the result of some already applied changes, while other changes are still missing. A few months ago, mockups circulated in the media showing what the final result was supposed to look like. So no worries, the look of the menu will change.

[s_hentzschel]

I really like the new design. Even the current version, which is available in the Nightly build, looks so much better than any previous Firefox design.

I have one question: During the last major redesign, many icons were replaced, but the developer tools icons were left as is. Today, they look out of place because they have much thicker lines. Now Nova is set to get many new icons again. Will the developer tools be included this time?

[m7]

Edit: Looking at the blog post again, I see that the compact mode design there is different than what I see on Nightly if I hide the system title bar and the sidebar, so I guess the Nightly version doesn't yet have the extra space removed. Apologies for jumping the gun here.

While I'm glad to hear that compact mode will be supported again with the Nova design, when I tried Nightly today and enabled Nova plus compact mode, I am very disappointed in the fact that Nova's compact mode takes up more space than Proton's touch mode, so the trend of everything taking up more and more space continues. The reason I even started enabling compact mode to begin with is because Proton made everything bigger, so I used compact mode to take back the extra space, and now Nova's compact mode is somehow even worse, since it effectively gives me Proton touch levels of wasted space at best, while even Proton's normal mode made me unhappy already to begin with. And no, I do not have a touchscreen, so I see no value in all this extra spacing for me, especially in what's supposed to be the compact mode.

Attached is a picture of Proton touch mode (in Firefox 151.0) on the left, and Nova compact mode (in Firefox Nightly 2026-05-21) on the right. These days I use vertical tabs and compact mode to free up some vertical height, some of which I then use to enable the system titlebar so I can have buttons there to keep windows above all others, pin windows to all virtual desktops and hide windows from screencasts, plus have a dedicated area for easily moving the window with the mouse.

So, since you're asking for feedback, mine is that compact mode should be as compact as Proton's current compact mode is at least. At a quick glance it seems like all the extra borders/gaps around everything is the main cause of the wasted space, so removing all that in compact mode would be a good start.

[s_hentzschel]

The final design is likely still a few months away. The Nightly version does not represent the finished Nova design, but merely shows the current status of the implementation. As far as I know, no adjustments have been made specifically for compact mode yet. That’s still to come.

[Maverick74]

Would be great if we could get a "one-toolbar" compact mode! We could take some inspiration from Min browser ( https://minbrowser.org/ ) or from comments at:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/allow-resizing-of-the-ui/idi-p/81/

Particularly, I would like something similar to this to be achievable:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/make-address-bar-placeable-to-the-tab-header/idc-p/21004/highli...

Or, at the very least, an auto hide setting for the URL toolbar would work!!!

For laptops with smaller screens it would be great!!! (Even if I had to set it at about:config)

(oh, I forgot to say something: I do love the new design!!! 😀)

[anon-ff-user]

Thanks for the update on Nova, looking forward to the performance improvements.

My two main issues with this are the excessive rounding and spacing. Firefox seems to be jumping on the current design trend of separating UI elements into "islands" with spacing in between them. I understand that Firefox is doing so to avoid appearing dated, but ultimately I feel this design trend is entirely form over function.

These UI islands take up more space that the current design and make the UI even more congested and "busy", with no benefit received. You can try taking any screen with this islands design, and remove the spacing in between them and see that the resulting UI is less cluttered and simpler.

I will probably be unable to convince you to change course entirely, but I would greatly appreciate the ability to toggle these two elements from the new design:

• Reduce the corner radius for UI elements to current levels
• Removing the spacing between the islands completely. Maybe this can be incorporated into the renewed compact mode.

Firefox has served me well for the past decade and a couple small changes can help me continue using it for another one.

[Arvid]

I totally agree. In order to make these islands look good you need padding inside them as well as on the outside. If elements don’t have room to breathe they normally appear cluttered (as much as some like to disagree). Either the islands you now need double the room than without to give the UI white space. 
I think they were born because of split tabs so webpages are clearly separated, but I think either a strong border or only using the islands when tabs are split and for the webpages only would be sufficient.  

[K900]

Another thing I've noticed: specifically when using the system theme on Windows, the window background has the title bar still painted on: 

This goes away if I switch to the "dark" theme though.

[Scotchester]

Adding another vote for a toggle to switch from the fully rounded buttons/tabs back to the current state of things. I get that full rounding feels friendly/approachable or even "modern" in some sense, and that you're trying to attract new people into the Firefox family, but it's not my preferred aesthetic, and I would appreciate the ability to choose (even if it's just a hidden about:config flag).

I'll throw out a pipe dream request, too. It would be awesome to have the option to make tabs look like, y'know, tabs again? 🙂 That is, attached to the main area below them (or to the right of them if you're using vertical tabs) instead of being free-floating buttons.

[fed-up]

I second the attached tabs! It's bugged me for a long time that the "tabs" now are just buttons that look detached from the main content.

[myspace]

thanks for update. excited to see more and glad to hear compact mode is coming back!