The Mozilla Mobile Team is working to make the Firefox browser look good on tablets, and Mozilla's Ian Barlow shared some of the design decisions the company has made with the new UI.

Firefox for tablets is an evolution of its phone based predecessor, with some added enhancements that take advantage of a tablet?s larger screen size.

Firefox looks right at home on Android 3.0, drawing its overall theme from Honeycomb's minimalist design language. Of course, this is still Firefox, so Mozilla has made sure to keep familiar visual elements in place, like its signature big back button and a distinctive tab shape.



The Awesomebar uses the same tabbed menu to allow quick access to bookmarks, history, and your synced desktop activity. Users of the current phone version of Firefox will notice that the tabs have been moved off to the left, which increases the number of results that can be displayed above the keyboard.



On Firefox for phones, Mozilla tucked away all of its UI elements to free up the screen for unrestricted browsing. On a tablet, the bigger screen allowed Mozilla's designers to bring some of those elements back onto the screen, like tabs, for example. In landscape mode, tabs exist in a persistent left bar, allowing for quicker browsing. You can switch through tabs with your left thumb, and scroll through web content with your right. In portrait mode, this tab bar gets rolled up into a menu item at the top of the screen, to free up browsing space below.