Hi everyone, my name is Ashley Thomas, and I’m a Product Manager at Firefox. We are in the early stages of redesigning Firefox Settings to help our users discover ways to shape their browsing experience. It is important to us at Mozilla that Firefox users have agency in accessing the web, whether choosing a default search engine, enabling browser dark mode or tuning the privacy options. To achieve this, we plan to create:
- A modern, user-friendly design with intuitive navigation and search that will help you find and discover options that suit your needs.
- Clear descriptions (and visuals as needed) of setting/configuration options that enable you to make informed choices.
- An experience that highlights the value behind each feature and invokes a sense of confidence in using Firefox.
True to Mozilla’s roots, we are designing this in the open. Today, I’d like to share our latest concept for the Privacy & Security section on desktop to invite your input. We were thrilled to hear the excitement and positive feedback about our early designs in a recent Reddit thread and would love to continue that discussion here. This work is still in the early stages and may change before you experience it in the Firefox release as we iterate on internal and external feedback.
Concept: Privacy & Security Settings
We’re updating the top-level categories to help users quickly find what they are looking for. You’ll see the new list on the left of the screen. The screenshots below are specifically for the “Privacy & Security” settings.
The goal behind this new design is to reaffirm that Firefox always has your privacy in mind and already puts thoughtful defaults in place while giving the flexibility to customize based on your preferences. To achieve that, we have split the settings into two pages - a primary page with information on how you’re currently protected while offering the most common customization options and a secondary page geared towards more tech-savvy users. Increases in privacy protections come with an increased risk of certain websites or functionality not working correctly. Therefore, we feel that it is important to distinguish these as ‘Advanced settings.’
These are early concepts, so expect them to change over time. You may also notice this doesn’t include all the existing options in our “Privacy & Security” section. We are not removing the options you don’t see here. Anything not included in the above design has simply been moved to another section of settings to improve discoverability.
Please let us know what you think!
This new concept is fresh off the press! We are reviewing it internally and reaching out to folks like yourselves for input. Privacy & security are critical parts of our product, we live by our Privacy promise, and we want to ensure everyone feels confident browsing with Firefox.
Thanks in advance for sharing your feedback. Once we're through with the early stages and ready to make the new settings design available in Firefox’s pre-release Nightly version, we will update this thread so you can test it out yourselves and provide feedback.
-Ashley
