Ben Goodger, the mind behind several UI components in Firefox, has updated his blog with interesting news regarding the upcoming version V of the preferences window, which will be more fitting with the Mac and Gnome.

Prefwindow V

For the past week I've been working on a new Preferences window for Firefox - one which will solve a number of the problems present in the current one, such as the fact that it's a modal sheet on OS X and GNOME.

The current Preferences window (aka "Prefwindow IV") dates back to April of 2000, and so is among the oldest XUL/JavaScript code in Firefox. I wrote it before the advent of XBL, and so the new version utilizes a XBL tagset to simplify the content of the preferences panels.

I'm developing this on Windows, since that's where the good debuggers and editors are, the modality/instant-apply-ness of the window will be controlled by a hidden pref. Much is left for me to do, but here's a sneak peek of what's coming: http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/options/prefwindowv/options.png

More information

• Inside Firefox: Prefwindow V