Firefox’s long-awaited Nova redesign lands in Nightly with mixed opinions

Ever since Mozilla announced the Nova redesign in May, people have been eagerly anticipating the stable release. Now, it’s available to try in Firefox Nightly, suggesting that the stable release is inching closer.

Mozilla officially posted on Reddit that Project Nova is now available to try. The post highlights the major design improvements and urges people to provide feedback to refine the design further.

I’ve checked for the availability of Nova myself. Immediately after opening Firefox Nightly, I noticed an update, so I’d recommend checking for that first if you’re interested in trying out the redesign in Nightly. The latest version is 155.0a1 (2026-07-28).

Sure enough, the Nova redesign was already available immediately after the browser updated and restarted.

The image attached below compares the updated design of the New Tab page to the old one. The search bar is smaller and has more rounded corners, some options at the top-right have been shifted, the size and spacing of the Widgets is now different, the tabs look different with more rounded corners, and there are some more subtle changes.

Personally, I think the search bar’s spacing and size don’t look very good. It’s not symmetrical, and it looks odd since they’ve chosen to make it smaller. However, it does look better if vertical tabs are turned off.

Another image I’ve attached below shows the difference in the UI of the Settings page. I like the newer one with ronuded corners better.

Commentary online was rather divisive, with some people liking the new style. Others felt that the corners are too rounded, and that the browser’s design looks smoothed over. There was also criticism around the design looking like an Opera or Microsoft Edge knock-off. General opinions also mention that Firefox’s originality has been lost in favour of “modernity.”

While all of these comments carry some merit, the overall design is still not finalized. Firefox is actively looking for more feedback to refine the design. If you notice any issues in your testing, you can file it yourself in Bugzilla.

There’s no official word on an exact release date yet; since it’s already in Nightly, it would ideally launch to the public in the next few months. I’m hoping that Mozilla continues to make design refinements, since the current version is kind of a toss up.

While the Nightly channel is on v155, the stable version recently got the v153 update which fixes a tiny annoyance you never knew had a name. However, it also breaks a popular workaround for accessing advanced settings on Android.

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