Mozilla has been working on Firefox for more than two decades, non-stop. Having said that, it is now of the few browsers that develop its own web engine and does not make use of Chromium.
Recently, the company released a new version of Firefox that offers a brand new User Interface. The Firefox 89 comes with the Proton UI, which according to Mozilla, is ‘cleaner, more inviting, and easier to use.’
Coming to the UI itself, Proton uses the vertical space for tabs and eliminates the tab divider in favor of more background color. The main menu now comes with a bunch of whitespaces and is deprived of many icons. Firefox has also reorganized the main menu.
If we take a look at the latest release notes, the developers said,
Floating tabs neatly contain information and surface cues when you need them, like visual indicators for audio controls. The rounded design of the active tab supports focus and signals the ability to easily move the tab as needed.
The new version changes a lot of things. On the macOS, the browser offers updated panels, modals and info bars. It also supports more context menus and finally the much awaited dark mode. The developers also said that they have come up with a non native web form control that will improve the performance of the pages.
Watch for layout bugs in web pages that make assumptions about the dimensions or styling of form controls.
– says Mozilla
A nifty addition is the new Total Cookie Protection if you use the private browsing mode. The blog post by Mozilla explains more.
That means: when you open a private browsing window, each website you visit is given a separate cookie jar that keeps cookies confined to that site. Cookies can no longer be used to follow you from site to site and gather your browsing history
The Enhanced Cookie Protection feature was introduced back in February with the release of Firefox 86. The catch was that it only worked when users had the Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled in strict mode.
In case you absolutely hate the Proton UI, well you can disable a part of it. Just head over to the browser preferences, just reverse the browser.proton.enabled preference and you will be good to go.
