Take Project Nova for a spin in Nightly!

[AshleyT]

Hi there! I'm Ashley, Senior Staff Product Manager for Firefox. After months of updates on Project Nova, it's finally in Nightly, ready for you to see for yourself. We're modernizing Firefox from the ground up to ensure it remains a fast, secure, and highly customizable companion for today’s internet.

This is still early days, so you'll notice some rough edges — a few things may look unfinished or inconsistent for now. Keep your Nightly up to date to see the latest. 

As a reminder, the Project Nova updates include:

• Simpler navigation and a redesigned Settings experience, now live in release
• Refreshed tabs, icons, spacing, and browser surfaces
• More ways to make it yours, with rich new themes, wallpapers, and personalization options that let Firefox match your style.

We're grateful for all the thoughtful feedback we got on our earlier Connect post, on social media, and through user research. Based on what we heard, we've made some changes:

• We'll be experimenting with corner roundness settings for tabs to give you more options — coming soon in Firefox Labs.
• We brought back Compact Mode so there’s more space for web content and tabs
• We added more neutral standard theme options.

You can learn more in our blog post.

See it first in Nightly

Nightly is where this work takes shape in the open, and we wanted you to be among the first to see where it's headed. Since much of what’s changed so far focuses on the look of the interface, keep an eye out for how these layouts feel during your day-to-day browsing. We're aiming for a clean, intuitive experience —so please look out for anything that feels off, like icons, spacing, alignment, or how things hold up across themes, window sizes, different languages, screen readers, and keyboard navigation. If something catches your eye, we'd love to hear about it.

Download the latest version of Nightly to see what's new.

Something's not right? File a bug.

If you find visual or functional issues with the Nova style changes in Nightly, please follow these steps:

1. Click this link to file a Bugzilla issue. We're asking everyone to file bugs this way, so we can easily keep track of all issues reported.
2. In the bug, please add steps to reproduce the issue, and if possible screenshots or screencasts. Please don't add severity and priority to the bugs — our triaging teams will handle that.
3. You can see all Nova testing bugs filed here.

Have overall feedback? Let us know here in Connect.

Drop a comment here to let us know your thoughts and suggestions. Thanks for being part of this.

[NinjaTaco911]

Pls let dark theme be dark without the gradient.. 
And we need to be able to interact with the tabs and buttons without moving our cursor down like many in here are complaining about.
The borders around almost everything are really not needed and removes me from having an good ui experience

[PRG]

Got the new Nightly update, and very quickly noticed there is an inconvenient deadzone area above the tabs where you can't click on them, preventing me from quickly moving the mouse to the top edge of the screen and clicking the tabs like I had been doing before the update. It seems to have been caused by a black outline across the whole browser window.

So because of muscle memory, I fling the mouse to the top edge of my screen and attempt to click on the tab, nothing happens, and now I have to mouse the mouse down to aim at the tab below the dead space. It is not convenient.

Switching to compact mode removes the outline, but there is still a pixel-tall deadzone above the tabs.

Please fix. For both compact and standard. There should be no deadzone between the edge of the screen and the tabs.

Likewise goes for the side-edge where the top left tab would be, and I assume there would be a similar deadzone for column tabs.

[sysKin]

But why??

I help older people with their computers in a local community and their biggest fear is that something changes for no apparent reason. If this new theme eventually lands, I *will* get calls from multiple frightened seniors that they clicked something and it broke their computer and can I fix this please. No, they will not accept an explanation that some unknown UX developers were bored and changed things on their computer and I can't change them back.

Your "you've been updated" tab every few weeks is already giving them a scheduled heart attack (a.k.a. "my internet had no buttons but I closed my computer and opened it again and it works now").

I don't think you guys appreciate the magnitude of this problem. I'd appreciate some responsibility from Mozilla on this. Unless you have a REALLY good reason why this change is necessary and final and you will never have to do this again - just don't. At least minimise visual impact, this flip-flopping between rounded and sharp corners is becoming a meme in computing history.

[sklbz]

I am glad to see that roundness will be customizable by the user, but I would suggest keeping the old roundness as the default, not only for tabs, but for all other component that were modified to be rounder as well. Also I would like the strip for container tabs to cover the entire tab, as I find it more aesthetic and way easier to distinguish btw containers.

[BEEDELLROKEJULI]

Why does it not adhere to my GTK 3 CSS, any more? Additionally, why does the colouration of closed and open tabs not differ, any more?

[zohnannor]

gripes: 

- the padding which prevents me from clicking the tabs, the close button and the scrollbar
- the rounded corners which look terrible on tabs and the address bar (i don't mind them on buttons). what is that context menu?

[wutongtaiwan]

I have a small suggestion. When I search for bookmarks in the address bar, I hope there could be a delete button next to the bookmarks I find. Sometimes I need to search for a bookmark and delete it; otherwise, I have to open the website first and then delete it, which is really inconvenient. It would be great if this small suggestion could be implemented.

[JulianCore2]

I dont think the whole new "Pill-like" thing is THAT bad. 

It would be really good if there was just a simple option where you can choose between rounded, slightly rounded and square instead of forcing a single option upon every user 

[Nye]

pill-like is very bad, have you seen what they did to tab group icons?? 

[zohnannor]

disable

browser.nova.enabled

in 

about:config

or add this:

:root {
    --border-radius-xsmall: 1px !important;
    --border-radius-small: 2px !important;
    --border-radius-medium: 3px !important;
    --border-radius-xlarge: 6px !important;
}

.browserContainer,
#navigator-toolbox {
    border: none !important;
}

to

userChrome.css

[zohnannor]

:root {
    --border-radius-xsmall: 1px !important;
    --border-radius-small: 2px !important;
    --border-radius-medium: 3px !important;
    --border-radius-xlarge: 6px !important;
}

.browserContainer {
    border: none !important;
}

#navigator-toolbox {
    border: none !important;
    overflow: visible !important;
}

better version

[Minus]

Went to sleep with fire fox woke up to chrome clone one hell of a night-ly. STOP ROUNDING EVERY CORNER it destroys firefoxes unique identity, you did that two or three years ago and changed it back why do it again the type of people that like rounded corners are not using firefox they are light weights and will stick to chrome, you need to stick to your demographic you cant compete in that market, your stupid if you think more people are going to download a chrome clone using chrome and then keep using it. the target audience you want to aim for is professionals and hardware enthusiasts, if you want more users add a task manger type interface for hardware monitoring and/or cookie/add-on control but stick to a windows style format so people are familiar with it and feel comfortable, this will also draw in randoms who like to look at numbers and feel good thinking there part of the PC master race, changes like this should also draw in more mobile users if added to the app we live in an age where people want to see what’s going on in the background and think they can control it. why add a border to the whole window it makes it look like your just porting an APP from mobile to PC like a B* i mean cheep skate. that’s all your getting from me for free, i love fire fox just like everyone dose you don’t need to change just keep getting better at what you do

[YourLocalGoober]

not true 

[guest271314]

The horror... Why? 
/guest271314/

[guest271314]

That double top address bar thingy, with white font on some pink background is ridiculous. Much slower, too. Probably to handle all of the useless graphics. 

[wellington1993]

Hi, I mostly liked the new design, but I confess that level of round in the things scarred me. 
In my opinion, some things could be a little rounded. 
Could be possible a little transparency or opacity tricks on the painted areas? 

My best Regards,
Wellington Torrejais da Silva

[VerGreeneyes]

Still mulling over the aesthetic, but one ergonomic annoyance: Even with a maximized window, it's easy to sweep the cursor to the top of the screen and click above the reactive area of a tab title. That's pretty annoying: I now have to carefully position the cursor inside the reactive area to click between tabs.

I've noticed the same with the scrollbar, but that may be preexisting. I'd like the rightmost edge of the scrollbar to react too, at least with a maximized window.

[YourLocalGoober]

yeah i didnt notice that but good catch

[mcnew]

Why is the active page title in a rounded tab that just floats in mid-air in the tab strip and has such a heavy accent?
Why is the tab grouping in such a weirdly shaped element?
Why is the entire UI built on floating, detached elements that really break up the interface and waste space?
Why does compact mode in Nova take up just as much space as normal mode in the current design?
Why do you need everything to be rounded?
Why does every element have to get bigger? Just look at what you've already done to the navigation bar on Android; compare its height in FF vs Chromium browsers.
Why does the new settings page require more clicks, while everything has gotten even larger in size?

[wdw1007]

As shown in the image, the width of the top bar changes when the window is snapped to the edge of the desktop.

I personally think an option should be provided to make it uniformly narrow or wide, or to allow it to change accordingly.

The spacing between elements in the menu bar is too small.

And I hope the color change in the top bar is optional, like the previous default theme where only deep black was available.

The changes are good, but hopefully future versions will allow users to choose between the old and new UI versions. 😀

[nilsmartel]

Hope this is the place for feedback of the new design 🙂
Often times the cursor just rests at the edge of the screen.

Now, when doing that, things like scrolling are not working anymore, because firefox interprets that as not scrolling the webpack.

Slight iritation I imagine quit a couple of people are going to encounter

[Mkn]

Hi, are there any plans to bring back the icons in the menu?
And to give the tabs a background?
Also, are there any plans to update the new tab so that visual bookmarks are larger or so that users can adjust their size?
Also, have you considered adding the ability to switch between different interface designs, like Photon, Proton, and Nova? This feature is available in browsers like Floorp and Waterfox, which are based on Firefox.
Thank you for improving Firefox!

[kornel]

The compact mode isn't compact enough (I've been using the previous unsupported one, losing it is a dealbreaker for me).

I feel like the design robbed me of precious screen real estate. I have a bajillion tabs open and every pixel counts. There's an extra border around page content area that divides page from the toolbar. It also wastes precious vertical space and creates a super irritating asymmetric rounded corner with the sidebar.

I'm also disappointed by loss of clear tab coloring for multi-account containers. The line on the top of the tab was very clear visual grouping. A line on top of favicon looks like a rendering glitch in the favicon, and makes the weight of favicons feel off-center, which is extra jarring when everything rounded like it's 2010 again.

on macOS the whole UI is rounded almost but not quite like Liquid Glass, which makes it feel like a uncanny valley knock-off. Previous squareish UI was self-consistent and stood on its own. This one looks like you've tried to copy Apple, but couldn't get it right.

[ShadowTwinkle]

Not big fan of the Nova Style changes. The corner lines really bother me

[YourLocalGoober]

yeah.... but we are on nightly so its gonna be rough (look all good features werent always good when in nightly)

[untriedutility]

Hi, I just enabled the new Nova UI experience for Firefox Nightly. Honestly, as a first start, I really like the new design. It feels sleek. It just feels new and refreshed, so I really like that. I like the ability to be able to change the icon of the Firefox browser. It feels like we have a little bit more customizability now. One thing I would note is that I really like the border radiuses that are applied across, like, not just the normal browser view, but also the settings page and stuff. I do think the radius, the border radius, is a little inconsistent at times. And also not always compatible with, for example, extensions and stuff. So that might be something to think about, or at least be able to tweak ourselves.

[Nye]

I think you just like novelty because nothing about this is fresh, it has been copied off other browsers and filing off firefox' identity as much as they can. 

[Ares283]

This is a straight up downgrade, please revert this update or make the new UI optional... 

[JustForThis]

The new “design” is awful. I think it’s really terrible, especially the borders in full screen. That completely destroys the purpose of “full screen” when you can still see these weird borders. Switching to “compact mode” doesn’t make it any better either, because everything becomes even smaller as well. I don’t understand how anyone could think this kind of worse improvement is good. But that’s just my opinion. Please roll back this “design” or at least make it optional. If this “design” stays like that, I’ll switch browsers. Thank you.

[YourLocalGoober]

Look i understand you, but its a early preview and nobody seems to understand that. And to add to that this is less than a quarter to release.

[TryBest]

Arc "mode" would be the best approach. When it comes to user experience, Arc leaves every other browser in the dust.

One of the biggest issues with any version of Firefox is the lack of modernization regarding the "basics."
On large screens, all the Settings menus are left-aligned. Native centering would be much better.

[yukine8]

CLI and GUI are both user interfaces, yet the concept of backward compatibility is completely thrown out the window when it comes to GUIs. This feels exactly like the Windows 8 disaster. Have you forgotten how regular users couldn't even figure out how to shut down their machines?

Let’s be real, you are not Apple or Google. You can't even get your clickable areas to match the visual UI, and apparently, calculating a proper border-radius is too mathematically complex for you.

If you actually want to deliver an excellent user experience, the shortest path would be to downsize the UI team and take away their ability to make arbitrary design changes.

But I know how this works. You will ignore community feedback as usual, Nova will be implemented anyway, the about:config flag will quietly disappear, and we will be forced to fix your mess via userChrome.css. It's so predictable.

Bring back the square corners, or at least give users the choice.

What an absolute joke.

I created this account solely to voice my frustration over this disaster.

[YourLocalGoober]

GUYS THIS IS A EARLY PREVIEW NOT THE FULL THING BEING RELEASED OF COURSE THERE ARE ISSUES. 

[Nye]

absolutely every change is unnecessary and ugly tho 

[YourLocalGoober]

And i love it, but plz fix the toolbar and sidebar, they look odd with the new design. Also pls add a option to get the old normal theme back, or at the very least put in as a official firefox theme. The criticism is undeserved and its too early to critisize the whole thing. If we can go back to the old thing i bet 99% of complainers would stop complaining.

[hfhchan-plb]

This is a huge step back in terms of design - the colors are too bright and distracting, and the extra borders, rounding and padding adds visual clutter. Please roll back the change.

[YourLocalGoober]

well if you dont like it, you can turn off the redesign by flipping all settings that say nova to off (in about:config). And also i think they should make it optional. Also its early so it will improve as time comes.

[dedmen]

Turning it off is a good idea. It means you won't see new iterations, and cannot provide further feedback to try to steer it away from a wrong direction, until its considered "done" and enabled by default and no option to turn it off because "this is the new way now".

Surely that's what we all want.

[YourLocalGoober]

Hmmmm yeah your right.

[YourLocalGoober]

Please fix the border in the sidebar and below the toolbar but above the page. And also dark mode just turns the browser from cool nova redesign to buggy frankenstien mess. as a dark mode user i really hope that can change.