Firefox 2 was announced as finalists in the 2008 IDSA (International Design Excellence Awards) in the Interactive Product Experiences category. The IDSA is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design.

Visual design can be such a subjective thing that it's always nice to get some quantifiable data that either validates your approach or suggests ways to improve.

I blogged about this a bit on Download Day, but now that enough time has passed to let it all sink in I’d like to take a more in-depth look at the redesigned Mozilla.com. Not only is it the primary means we have of distributing Firefox, but it’s also many people’s first exposure to the Mozilla Project in general…in other words, lots of ground to cover!

Refreshing the icons in Firefox usually occurs in the later beta releases during the development cycle. This is partly because we have to stabilize the UI design before we know what icons we are going to need, partly because dropping in new images is pretty low risk in terms of performance and stability regressions, and partly because producing a large number of icons takes awhile.