Date un’occhiata alle seguenti immagini:


Non si tratta di due browser diversi ma dello stesso: Firefox 3. Come annunciato recentemente da Alex Faaborg (interface designer di Firefox), la prossima major release del noto browser di casa Mozilla, si integrerà graficamente nel sistema operativo ospitante:

With this release of Firefox we are trying to achieve an even closer level of visual integration than we have had in previous releases.

In pratica, verranno creati temi diversi a seconda del SO: ad oggi, si parla di due versioni per Windows (una per Xp, l’altra per Vista), una versione per OsX Leopard, e una per Linux. Per quest’ultima, data l’infinita varietà di look & feel di cui ogni distribuzione è dotata, il lavoro è tuttora in fase preliminare, come specificato da Mike Conor (ingegnere capo di Firefox):

…designing a universal icon set specifically for all of the distros using GTK2 is a pretty hard challenge (I’d say nearly impossible), and I don’t think there’s any way we’ll really get it right, and there’s some painful discussions about who to target if we really try to target a specific reference distro.

Le ragioni di questa decisione?
E’ sempre Alex a spiegarle:

One reason we want to focus to this level of detail on visual integration with various platforms is because the Web browser is an incredibly central piece of the user’s operating system, and we don’t want the user’s initial reaction to be that they have modified their computer to add some type of strange, foreign application.
[...] As you move between performing tasks on the Web and interacting with the rest of your system, we don’t want the experience to be jarring. We view visual design as a part of interactive design, in that we want Firefox to blend into the rest of your system. Not in the sense that users no longer remember that their computer didn’t initially come with Firefox, but in the sense that the visual integration aids in achieving flow.

Un’ottima iniziativa che contribuirà senz’altro ad aumentare la diffusione del browser made in Mozilla. Attendiamo con ansia.