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.

[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.

[Reitei17]

Hi. As for the change in UI for android, I love it, i have no problems.

BUT the nova ui on firefox nightly PC is not good. At all. I like change and new modern ui but this is really bad.

The gradient colors are so bad, especially the light mode. It looks tacky and cheap. The gradient colors is so pale and light, like there is no life in it. The dark gradients are bad too but the light gradients are worse. And how do i describe it, the 1px (probably) outline color that surrounding the tab and address search bar is tacky. 

Please let the web ui designer to think over the design properly to make it modern and nice to look at. 

[AwesomeSheep48]

I don't really like how it seems like firefox is just making things round because why not, but I can live with it. What I would really like changed is how their is a black border around the entire window on macOS, as well as the browser view and toolbar. I think those should all be flush together.

The new settings menu is nice

[ibm7094]

As others have said this is a huge UX downgrade. Appearance-wise the rounded, padded look is unappealing, and the unnecessary spaces between everything just makes the whole browser look strange. Additionally, the extra pixels on the edges of the window both force the window to be smaller than the screen AND worst of all, makes moving the mouse to the top corner of the screen no longer put it on top of the X to close the window.

[Ecogreco]

I love the new design. Keep it up. Can't wait to see it on the developer's version and the live version. 

[mozuser2004]

The tab bar needs work.

Everything else is fine (more like whatever).

But the tab title seems completely disconnected from the current tab. The pill is too small/thin, maybe make it bigger, make it almost touch the toolbar below and the border above.

Also, the gradient look terrible. I know you can change color with themes, but I'd rather Firefox shipped with a simple default theme and anyone who wants crazy gradients such as this can use a custom theme.

Those are my 2 cents.

[mozuser2004]

And I just noticed the tab container marker is only a small dash on top of the page icon. No, just no. The dash on the entire length of the tab title was much better UI, it more clearly indicated what was going on.

[Darktomes]

i mean its good and kinda blocky if they just make it more rounded and add a little animations here and there it will be good

[IAmEmily]

I like it 🙂

[citti]

I think it's great but i don't like the fact that i can't select tabs if my mouse cursor is too high, my muscle memory formed with the old style, where i could move my mouse cursor to the top of the monitor and still be able to select tabs....

[SOSOS]

Guys, this is a total letdown and the user experience has gone straight down the drain.

Just three small things, but they wreck everything:

1. Corner rounding is maxed out and tab highlighting has been reduced by a couple of pixels — it feels like a straight-up downgrade in usability, not an improvement.

2. The gradient on the default dark theme is nasty — it genuinely looks like something's wrong with my eyes or my display. Wouldn't a flat, even fill have been the better call?

3. There's a 2px gap between the edge of the screen and the actual browser frame — that makes zero sense. It needs to go edge-to-edge. Right now the window doesn't even look like it's in fullscreen/maximized mode.

Please reconsider these three points — they're small individually, but together they make the whole browser feel unfinished and worse to use than before.

[F3TTST3R]

This just completely overrides my theme. It will say that my theme is enabled, but still visibly display as the default theme. 

 

[AfroThundr_]

Exactly the problem I'm having. The preview for the dark theme appears to have the flat non-gradient tab strip that I want from before, but enabling the dark theme or toggling to/from default keeps the gradient from the default theme. There appears to be no way to get rid of the gradient right now.

[NicFromNewy]

Firstly, I am mostly very enthusiastic on the work that you're doing, so please keep up the good work. I do like the extra padding and white space.

Also, I was delighted today when I used my iPad Mini as a second screen on my MacBook, when I dragged the Firefox window over to the iPad, the interface shrunk to give me more space, I think that is a great feature, thanks for adding it. 

I've been using Nova for a while, I had it enabled via "about:config" flag, its been fun watching it evolve, I would say that these are my biggest pieces of feedback for right now:

1) Showing the bookmark bar shouldn't affect the position of the vertically aligned tab pane.

When using vertical tabs, if you have the bookmarks bar set to "Only Show On New Tab", the bookmarks bar pushes the tab pane downwards, changing the position of your tabs, the shifting position of the tab pane creates a usability issue for me, and causes me to mis-click.

To me, the vertical tab pane is a much more important UI element than the bookmarks bar, especially when you only want to see it on the new tab page. 

This is by far my biggest pet-peeve (maybe also more a general UI thing than a Nova specific thing).

In the case that the user has "Only Show On New Tab" enabled for the bookmarks bar, consider building the bookmarks bar as a part of the new tab page itself? 

2) Current colour scheme on main toolbar doesn't work well when using dark mode (on Linux anyway).

Adding a dash of colour to the theme is very welcome, it looks good on the system light theme but the gradient on the main toolbar doesn't look good on the dark theme.

A few ideas:
- Make the colour theme detect system colours to blend in better
- Allow the user to disable the colour gradient
- Allow the user to customise the colours on the gradient
- Make the colour theme monochrome when in dark mode
- If branding is an issue, why not have a few "pre approved" gradients so that one that more closely matches the system colour scheme can be chosen.

3) Too many borders (or lines) in compact mode.

In the white space between the sections (page content, toolbar, sidebar, etc) currently there is a distinct border around the section, and a lighter background colour for the white space. 

I think the darker borders creates too many lines in the design, I think that it would be nicer if you didn't have borders but instead just used the border colour for the white space between all of the different sections. 

4) Border radius on UI

I personally like it, so I hope that keep them, but I do understand why some may find it jarring, so customisation may be a good thing for those people who don't like them. But I hope that you retain the option to keep the border radius.

-----

Anyway, I want to re-iterate that I like your work, I am glad Firefox is getting some love, and I think that this work will help keep Firefox relevant in people's minds.

Thanks!

[anonymous7]

First of all, great job on the new design. I love it. The new colors, glow, icons, everything.

I have some suggestions (I use vertical tabs):
 - I dont like grey backgrounds. Can you switch them to full blacks. (like the left vertical tabs bar and adressbar)

 - The border radii are not consistent like the relation between menu radius and menu item radius. Can you use the same value globally.

 - The icons for containers get clipped due to circular shape in the menu for container selection (like airplane and briefcase).

 - I dont like the new position and size of pill indicating the container type. It was very prominent earlier, now it merges with the site favicon.

[gtsiam]

I generally like the new look, especially with vertical tabs. However, a major issue I have with it is the scroll bar - When I am maximized/full-screen, I want to send my mouse to the right most edge of the screen and scroll.

Having to micromanage the pointer so that I click the thin sliver that is the scroll bar is a huge, gigantic even, downgrade - I've stopped using gitlab over this, please don't let firefox be next...

[Gioxx]

I'm going to share a post from another user on X, one I completely agree with:

---

Personally, I’m not a big fan of heavily rounded edges across tabs and UI elements.
For my workflow and visual preference, I much prefer a cleaner, sharper, and more traditional layout.

Even though I’ve enabled dark mode in Nova, the way it handles gradient brush strokes, tab outlines, and those “pills” for tab groups is noticeably different from before, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. I can really understand the desire to refresh the look and add color, but sometimes this choice is imposed even on users who would prefer a more professional and clean appearance.

I’ve seen many styles change over time, many trends “come back into fashion”; the rounded, soft look is a relic of the past that some people clearly miss, and I can also understand that the completely boxy (very “German”) style might not be to everyone’s taste, but there’s always a middle ground between the two options, and the previous look was already an excellent (truly excellent) compromise, and in some cases, it was even more compact.

We’re talking about a browser—one of those pieces of software that stays open practically 100% of the time (or almost) during work hours, not a toy; let this kind of theme be a matter of choice. For now, I’ve disabled Nova via about:config, hoping that this will remain an option in the future (perhaps directly from the preferences panel or via the themes and extensions tab).

[1metatron08]

The biggest complaint I have right now, as far as a day-to-day use thing, would be the border around the entire window that makes it to where you can't scroll with your mouse cursor at the edge of the screen. It's incredibly annoying and makes me have to adjust the way I normally use the app for seemingly no benefit

[Loulougroslouis]

i don't think the redesign is the issue, i just keep missing my clicks with the border 😞

[guest271314]

Hmm. Where did my comment go? You folks really want feedback, or what? It's absurd to ask for feedback then remove feedback you don't like. Or am I missing something? I know I posted here already.

The double address bar thing is redundant. The UI winds up rendering the same URL twice - taking up space in the UI for no reason. And you have white almost impossible to see font on top of a pinkish background for the tabs. 

Just use one (1) address bar. 

[denyshon]

That's awful and absolutely unneeded.

Some constructive points:

• Tab previews have unnecessary space at the bottom (but not at the top)
• Buttons in the address bar are now hard to click
• Borders around "sections" (like sidebar or toolbar) are totally useless and just distracting

[bakk]

I am not one of those people that complain whenever a design changes that wants it to be super compact and look like it's from 2005, but I don't think this is an upgrade over what we had before. The previous design already looked great and was modern. I think the rounding has gone too far now and I don't like how clickable areas have gotten smaller. I don't think 100% rounding like this is modern these days anyway. The previous border radius was great.

[Denir]

Ashley LISTEN TO ME before you loose more users because of this!!!!

1) Compact mode is too large, you absolutely need to reduce it more. Compact mode means get the UI out of my way as much as possible. Design should follow that. Might as well build a "frameless mode" from Helium.

2) You designed so many themes for Nova and not once you thought of a pitch black theme? How??? You can't ship that without a pitch black theme. You just can't.

[batata]

I want to use compact mode but the radius mismatch is a turn off for me. : (

 

[guest271314]

The only way I can really see the font on or next to the new tab bar is changing the theme to dark mode, which I ordinarily don't use.

After disabling that bookmarks bar, I can actually use the browser again.

What I see as an issue is the way the vertical scroll bar appears and disappears, and is too narrow width-wise. Every time I try to scroll using the scroll bar I do not get the scroll bar focused on the first time. Widen that thing, and stop making it disappear so I have to play around on the edge of the screen for that narrow thing to reappear. 

[radi0silence32]

I don't like the rounded edges of everything, I prefer how it was before. 

[Misuzu]

Please always keep one fundamental principle in mind: the purpose of a browser is to display and help users interact with web content. As long as usability is maintained, the maximum amount of space should be reserved for the webpage itself, not filled with meaningless borders, padding, or decorative elements.

Since you listened to community feedback and brought back Compact Mode, Nova Firefox should not introduce these unnecessary visual spaces again. A compact and efficient interface is one of Firefox's strengths, and it should be preserved.

The default theme should also maintain a consistent visual identity. Using gradients and different colored blocks in the default interface only creates distractions and draws attention away from the content. These kinds of visual customization should be provided through personalized themes, not forced into the default experience.

In Dark Mode, some elements in Settings and other areas should avoid pure white lines and use softer gray tones instead, reducing unnecessary contrast. This was the approach Firefox has traditionally followed, and it provides a more comfortable viewing experience.

I also believe the current rounded rectangle design is already an elegant solution. Excessive use of circular shapes reduces space efficiency and does not necessarily improve usability. Text, icons, and UI elements are not circular by nature, so there is no need to follow Apple's design language too closely.

I hope more focus can be placed on what truly matters for a browser: security, performance, speed, and reliability.

I have always believed that a browser should give the largest possible space to web content and minimize unnecessary distractions. The interface should support browsing, not compete with it.

[AfroThundr_]

I wish more of the devs actually read and internalized these principles, as we'd have less of these false starts and UI/UX regressions from the beginning. Simply asking yourself "does this change adhere to good design principles?" and "what benefit is this change supposed to bring to the user?" would go a long way. Instead we have a complete visual overhaul that was not needed where half of the changes are a direct downgrade in usability.

[Darklink7748]

Hi,

I have some feedback on the new UI. It looks like the extra spacing added above tabs is making it so you cannot close the tab you are hovering above with a middle click. If the spacing is going to persist for aesthetic reasons I would ask that you still allow the tab be closed when in the blank UI space above it. I would reflexively do this due to the tabs always going to the top of the window and this change makes it so I have to be more purposeful on hitting those boxes. Thank you.

[strongthany]

I don't mind the look of the rounded boxes, but I do have issue with the readability of them. Putting visual component of the tabs in such a way obscures the clarity of where users should click. This gets especially noticeable when having a window that is overloaded with tabs. I don't want to shoot down a refresh of design philosophy, but I think some visual clarity could be improved. 

[breakingspell]

It's been a very interesting few days following this thread. 

Firefox for Android should have been allowed this degree of community review and feedback on their recent redesign. 

[celmir]

MUCH to do, but I love this path that's been started!

[killsalot]

literally the only thing driving me insane is the border, utterly ruining up the look of firefox is one thing, I installed themes to make the colors normal. But even set to compact the border is bigger than it ever was. it doesn't make any sense, is nova running over top of nightly or something? why does the app look like its inside a VM or something.

[Apocalyptrix]

I really dislike the rounded edges on the selected tab - don't know why.  It seems harder to reach for the close tab button for some reason.  

[WildcatRay]

Of what I have seen so far, I like what I have seen.

I believe I made this suggestion in another thread here. Outline all tabs. A simple line on the outside of inactive tabs would suffice.

Another browser I use did something similar eliminating lines around inactive tabs as well as the toolbar and bookmark bar. I did find a theme that added back lines around the inactive tabs.

Add the tweak of outlining inactive tabs and this theme will be very good if not excellent.

[Lanwara]

Overall not bad.

The rounded corners is... alright, but yeah I'm definitely looking forward to be able to customize the border radius. I think EVERYTHING being 100% is a little too much. The new gradient is also fine.

"Compact" mode is a bit of a joke at the moment with Nova. I use vertical tabs and they have noticeably taken up much more space with all the extra spacing that has been introduced. The whole reason I use vertical tabs + compact mode so I can see as many tabs as I can!

Please remember that Compact mode means COMPACT, and that means removing all those extraneous 2-3 pixel gaps between everything.

[Nye]

the redesign looks horrendously ugly, how do I revert it??

[Lanwara]

1. Go to about:config
2. Dismiss the warning
3. Search for "nova"
4. Set "browser.nova.enabled" to false
5. Restart your browser

[Nye]

ty, actually got rid of it without restarting too.

but it's a temporary fix. I cannot bear to look at tab group icons, it's the worst thing I have seen in browser design.