Firefox 4.0 tabs on top. Why?
June 30, 2010 Leave a Comment
Firefox 4.0 will bring a major overhaul of the user interface. Mozilla is planning to include the Ribbon/Fluent look by removing the menu and adding a button on top just like the Windows Ribbon, Office 2010, Opera, etc. but also to change the placement of the tabs by putting them on top.
Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer at Mozilla, explained in a video (included on the bottom of this post) why the tabs are on top in Firefox 4.0. He also stated that this is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of the toolbars they have.
In the Firefox 4 nightly builds, and in Firefox 4 Beta 1, we are changing the default tab position so that tabs are on top. This is a preference that users can change by right clicking on any of their toolbars. Moving the default tab position is obviously a significant and to some extent controversial change to the Firefox UI, which is why we made the video above to help explain our rationale. [...] The change to placing tabs on top isn’t about one browser versus another browser, it’s about the evolution of the Web as a platform, Faaborg stated on his blog
