Australis is a project name for the upcoming Mozilla Firefox’s desktop design refresh. With Australis Firefox user interface is completely streamlined for performance, it is designed to be faster and cleaner. It also unifies the look of the browser across desktop, phones and tablets.
Australis has finally landed on Firefox nightly builds meaning that its closure to a release. Mozilla says it is not yet ready and needs some polish before it is pushed to the public, but it is ready for community feedback, so it is included in the Firefox 28 nightly. It will go with Firefox 29 nightly builds in December and depending on the community feedback it might make it to the stable build in mid-April.
According to Mozilla this is the most beautiful iteration of Firefox, includes simpler customization options for end users.
- It’s the most beautiful and detail-obsessed iteration of Firefox’s visual design yet: modern, clean, and comfortable.
- More fundamentally, it’s a streamlining and simplification of the default interface, to declutter and better focus on how people use a browser today.\
- Finally, it includes a new simple way to customize the browser and make it your own.
The notable differences in the interface include the new tabs which are more curvy in design, the non-active tabs are de-emphasized. The not so often used menu items are dumped in far right corner under a menu item. You can change this behavior by going to customize from the menu and drag and drop items you need and items you don’t need. The new design makes it easy to customize the browser according to your needs.
