Australis, a new Firefox user interface, has finally landed in Firefox Nightly.
The first thing you'll notice when using Australis is its curved tabs and the clear distinction between foreground and background tabs.
But that's not all. The bookmarks bar was separated from the location bar and merged with the bookmarks menu, the forward button only appears when there's somewhere to go forward to and the Firefox menu was moved on the right, at the end of the toolbar:
Also, the menu has a new touch optimized design as you can see in the screenshot below:
By clicking "Customize" in the menu, you can enter the new Firefox Australis customization mode which is used to customize the toolbar and menu panel but in the future it should also include theme and addon customization:
Unfortunately, some customizations were removed with the introduction of Australis: you can no longer hide the toolbar, the addon bar has been removed, there's no longer an option to use small icons and text+icons mode in Firefox and the option to create a custom toolbar was removed.
Australis, announced back in 2012, was initially supposed to land in Firefox 24 but was delayed quite a few times. However, since it landed in the latest Firefox Nightly, it will most probably be available with Firefox 28 which will launch March 4, 2014.
Install Firefox Nightly with Australis in Ubuntu
Australis has just landed in the Firefox daily PPA so if you use Ubuntu, you can easily install it using the commands below.
It's important to note that installing Firefox Nightly from the Firefox daily PPA doesn't overwrite your current Firefox installation, so you can have both Firefox stable (or beta) and nightly installed in the same time.
Add the PPA and install Firefox Nightly in Ubuntu using the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-trunkOnce installed, you should find a new shortcut in your menu / Dash called "Nightly Web Browser" (not Firefox!).
If you're using a different Linux distribution, Windows or Mac, grab Firefox Nightly from HERE.
