Firefox 157 Nova: Mozilla's Biggest Redesign in Years

Open Firefox for the first time in a few weeks and the browser chrome barely looks like the one you left. Rounder tabs, a redrawn address bar, pop-up menus that feel lifted from a different decade of design — Mozilla has just shipped its biggest visual overhaul since 2021.

What actually changed in Firefox 157

The update, built around a project Mozilla calls Nova, replaces Proton, the interface Firefox has carried since 2021. Nova touches the tab bar, sidebar, menus, address bar, pop-overs, search boxes and info bars, giving them rounder corners and a lighter, more modern feel. It ships with twelve themes, each available in light and dark variants, so the "new Firefox look" isn't really one look — it's whichever of two dozen combinations you pick.

Compact Mode is also back. It trims the spacing around tabs and toolbars so more of the actual webpage fits on screen, which matters a lot on the smaller or lower-resolution laptop displays still common outside premium price brackets. Notably, the redesign stops short of the browser's "floating island" toolbar concept and the frame around web content itself — those are still on Mozilla's roadmap, not in this release.

One quieter but genuinely useful change: Firefox can now use hardware AV1 decoding for WebRTC video calls on supported devices. In plain terms, AV1 is a newer, more efficient video codec, and WebRTC is the technology behind browser-based video calls (think Google Meet running straight in your browser, no app install). Offloading that decoding to your device's hardware instead of its general processor means smoother video calls that drain less battery and chew through less data.

Why Mozilla is doing this now

This redesign isn't happening from a position of strength. Firefox's global market share has been sliding for years — industry trackers have put its desktop share falling from roughly 5.9% in mid-2025 to under 4% a year later, with Chrome and Chromium-based browsers (Edge, Brave, Opera) absorbing most of what Firefox loses. A fresh coat of paint won't reverse that on its own, but it signals Mozilla wants Firefox to stop looking like a legacy holdout next to Chrome and Edge's more frequent visual refreshes.

A browser nobody notices the design of is a browser people stop noticing at all — and that's the real risk Firefox has been running for years.

There's an interesting detail buried in beta release notes that didn't make it into Mozilla's final summary for the stable build: mentions of simplified settings language and a toggle to switch off AI features entirely. Whether that shipped quietly or got pulled before launch isn't fully confirmed yet, which is worth watching in the next point release.

What this means if you're browsing from India

Chrome's dominance on Indian desktops and Android phones is close to total, and that's exactly why Firefox's pitch matters here more than the raw numbers suggest. A huge share of Firefox's remaining global base is made up of people who deliberately chose it over Chrome for privacy reasons, and India's own privacy conversation has only gotten louder since the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act — the country's main law on how companies can collect and use personal data — started seeing its rules take effect, and more Indian users are actively looking at what their browser tracks by default, not just what app permissions they grant.

The AV1/WebRTC change also lands differently in a market where mobile data isn't unlimited for a lot of users and where video calls — for work, for telemedicine, for connecting with family — are often the single heaviest data activity on someone's plan. Lower data consumption per video call is a small technical change with an outsized real-world benefit for anyone on a capped Jio or Airtel plan rather than home broadband.

If you've been curious about browser choice beyond Chrome, it's worth reading our rundown of privacy-friendly browser alternatives for how Firefox stacks up against the rest of the field.

Should you update?

A few things worth knowing before you dive in:

• Nova ships by default in the latest stable release — there's no separate opt-in needed, it simply replaces Proton on update.
• If you rely on specific extensions for toolbar customization, check them after updating — interface changes this broad occasionally break older add-ons until their developers patch for the new layout.
• Compact Mode is tucked under Firefox's density settings, not turned on automatically, so switch it on manually if you want the old tighter spacing back.
• The AV1 hardware decoding benefit only kicks in on devices with AV1-capable hardware decoders, which rules out a lot of older or budget hardware still in daily use.

Redesigns like this rarely move market share by themselves. What they do is buy a product permission to be judged again by people who'd written it off. Whether that translates into anyone actually switching back from Chrome depends less on how round the tabs are and more on what Mozilla does with the next few releases — particularly whether that AI toggle and the floating-toolbar concept actually show up, and whether they give privacy-conscious users in markets like India a genuinely different reason to stay.