Mozilla is reportedly working on "Nova," a dramatic redesign of the Firefox interface.

After making an initial shift towards AI, Mozilla is reportedly working on a major overhaul of its Firefox browser.

Dubbed “Nova“, this new internal design was discovered thanks to design files accidentally published on a public Figma account of the company, before being quickly deleted.

A new interface for Firefox?

It was the specialist blogger Sören Hentzschel who shared the first screenshots in an article, and while Mozilla has not yet officially confirmed the existence of the project, the visuals give a fairly clear idea of the direction being taken.

This development comes at a delicate time for Firefox, as the browser is seeing its market share gradually decline, while Google Chrome largely dominates and new players are also trying to to establish itself…

Vertical tabs and a much more rounded interface

The revealed mockups show a marked aesthetic change, where the current interface, rather angular and minimalist, would give way to a much more fluid design with rounded corners, pastel gradients and floating blocks.

The address bar and the bar tabs, meanwhile, seem to merge into a single element, detached from the rest of the window. For their part, web pages appear in a rounded frame, visually separated from the browser interface.

Finally, the screenshots also suggest a visually distinct private browsing mode, with a darker purple background and a dedicated interface.

Despite these changes, Firefox should retain its great flexibility, and users could still choose between vertical or horizontal tabs and customize the interface.

An inspiration from Arc, Zen, and Vivaldi…

This future design strongly resembles certain trends already present in other modern browsers. Among them, the vertical tabs and floating blocks are reminiscent of Arc and Zen.

Some observers even see this as a paradox, since Mozilla seems to be adopting ideas already tested by projects derived from its own browser.

In the world of free software, these exchanges of ideas are frequent, but for Mozilla, they also highlight the difficulty of innovating quickly while maintaining compatibility with millions of different configurations…

An attempt to revive Firefox?

This redesign could be part of a broader strategy to revitalize the browser.

Indeed, in the desktop browser market, Firefox remains far behind Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. With Nova, Mozilla seems to be seeking a delicate balance: modernizing the user experience while preserving Firefox's core identity. It now remains to be seen whether this new interface will be enough to attract new users… without alienating existing ones.