After Australis, Firefox is going to get another UI overhaul. Mozilla is working on a new UI for Firefox browser, called Photon, likely to ship with Firefox 57. Nightly user, if you’re excited about seeing upcoming UI changes to Firefox and want to test them, let me tell you Photon UI changes aren’t landing on a separate branch, Firefox team is landing them behind preferences, you can enable the preference in Firefox 55 Nightly and follow the developments.
Enable Firefox’s new Photon UI
- Visit about:config
- Find the preference browser.photon.structure.enabled and change its value to ‘true’.
- Restart Nightly.
The advantage with this is everyday you see little or no UI changes or Photon updates landing on Nightly.
Update: We’ve decided to add Photon updates below as Mozilla lands the changes in Nightly:
Mozilla wants to surprise release population with Firefox 57 release, where UI looks completely different and new when compared to present Australis. FYI, Firefox team has no concerns of advanced users discovering the hidden Photon preferences before the 57 release.
Living with Photon UI
You’ll miss the Firefox menu and options, but still they can be accessed on Windows as you can press Alt for menu bar to appear. Enable the menu bar and then you can able to open Add-ons manager (Tools > Add0ns (Ctrl+Shift+A), newly organized Firefox preferences page (Tools > options) and help menu (Help > About Nightly) for installing Nightly updates. Or, you can disable the new Photon UI and come back to the Australis UI by toggling above said preference value.
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