Another new version of Firefox was announced on April 29.

Version 29 is touted by Mozilla as ‘elegant’ and ‘the most customizable’ Firefox ever, but there’s been a lot of noise on the web from people who are unhappy with the user interface changes.

It’s not really clear why many major browser developers are trying to make their browser look exactly like Google’s Chrome, but that does seem to be what’s happening. A few months ago, Opera chucked their browser engine in favour of WebKit, with the result being that Opera is now almost indistinguishable from Chrome. Mozilla hasn’t gone that far: their browser engine hasn’t changed, but in terms of appearance, Firefox now looks a lot more like Chrome. Perhaps they think that if Firefox looks like Chrome, users won’t realize they’re not actually using Chrome.

Has anyone done any actual usability studies on these UI elements that are now so popular among developers, like rounded corners on everything? Do rounded corners make people more productive? I doubt it. Another example is Firefox 29’s tab bar, which (besides having those awesome rounded corners we should apparently care so much about) now makes unselected tabs fade out so that they are hardly visible. How is this a good thing? Mozilla seems to think that being able to read what’s on those unselected tabs is a major distraction. Nope.

As for Firefox 29 being more customizable, I beg to differ. I was previously able to open and close the bookmark toolbar with a single click of a toolbar icon. That icon is nowhere to be seen in Firefox 29. Instead, I now have to click the ‘Show your bookmarks’ icon, then click ‘View bookmarks sidebar’. This is progress?

The release notes page for Firefox 29 lists several new features and changes, none of which are particularly useful or interesting.

The best thing about Firefox 29, in my opinion, is that web site favicons – those little icons that appear next to the page title in the tab bar and desktop shortcuts – now seem to work reliably. Previous Firefox versions had a lot of trouble with some favicons.

Several security issues were fixed in version 29, so even if you think you’ll hate the new UI, you should probably upgrade anyway.

On a related note, despite my having diligently reported my problems with the Firefox release notes pages (bug #973335) and version announcement pages (bug #973330), Mozilla has done nothing to improve them, as you can see from the pages for Firefox 29.

Ars Technica has their own review of the changes in Firefox 29.