FX2 Visual Update/Default Theme Update

Please add your comments and thoughts in this mozilla.dev.themes discussion instead of on the Discussion page.

Background, Process

A small team was brought together to explore and guide the development of an update to the default theme for Firefox 2. The team consisted of:

• Chris Beard (VP Products)
• Ben Goodger
• Mike Beltzner
• Mike Connor
• Kevin Gerich
• Jon Hicks
• Stephen Horlander
• Joe Hughes
• Brian Rakowski
• Mike Schroepfer
• Linus Upson

Three vendors (Meta, Radiant Core, and Raiz Labs were asked to submit proposals for a new theme. They were given the criteria that the new theme had to

• respect OS native look and feel
• appear modern and contemporary with current web and client apps
• appear consistent across platforms
• have minimum to zero code impact requirements (ie: all CSS and icon work)

The returned proposals led the team to focus in on four specific areas of priority for Firefox 2:

1. Search Bar: new icon required for the "search" action, design required to visually associate an "action button" with a textbox, design for showing search suggestions, design for making it clear that user can select the search engine.
2. Icon Polish: use shapes and metaphors from the existing *Stripe themes, but unify (and soften?) the colour palette and update the edges, detail, styling and gloss to match better on Vista, with modern XP apps, and OS X.
3. Tab Strip: improve distinction of selected tabs, differentiate appearance of background tabs from tab strip, optimize close tab button for use on all tabs.
4. Buttons in Textboxes: make buttons that appear in textboxes distinctive and provide affordances to indicate that they are "clickable" elements.

Of the vendors, the team selected Radiant Core to continue working towards an implementation of the new theme.

Design Mockups

coming in the next few minutes