Dear Mozilla: It's okay for Firefox to have it's own identity
I just saw a screenshots of the upcoming Firefox UI update, and I just had to roll my eyes a bit.
I remember back in the IE6/7 days, Firefox was strikingly different than IE. When you saw someone browsing the web on Firefox, it was immediately and very obvious they were using something *different*.
But things began to shift once Chrome really gained popularity. Mozilla stopped innovating on the UI/UX side of things, and just started copying whatever Google did. Google switches to whole-number versioning? Mozilla starts doing the same. Google switched to trapezoidal tabs? Firefox switches to trapezoidal tabs shortly after. Google squares off their tabs? Mozilla squares off Firefox's tabs a few versions later. Google starts flattening their interface? Firefox gets ironed flat a few months down the line. Google starts stripping the UI down to the bare minimum? Mozilla begins slimming Firefox's interface down immediately after.
Microsoft gave up, and decided Edge could just be "Chrome ..but different." Chrome and its friends can have their rounded address bars and circles and bare-minimum iconography. Firefox can be its own thing, that sticks out from the crowd.
I will admit the splashes of color and round floating tabs of Nova are pretty unique, but I'm just disappointed how the address bar and navigation button areas just always seem to be copying whatever Chrome is doing. Not to mention, the only modern OS that seems employ "circles" throughout its design language is MacOS. The circles seem to clash with Windows and most Linux desktop environments.
Firefox didn't originally get popular by being an IE6 clone. It got popular by being different. It was okay that it looked different, worked different and behaved different.