[commandar]

>Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere.

On the other hand, I really love the page design of Plus because it's nowhere near as claustrophobic as Facebook. The larger fonts and increased whitespace make me tend to slow down and read more carefully whereas I have a tendency to simply skim over Facebook posts as quickly as possible. I definitely appreciate the large photo thumbnails, too.

I don't know, it's kind of hard to put my finger on, but I'd almost say the layout feels more relaxed to me.

FWIW, Andy Hertzfeld was the UI lead on the whole project.[1]

>but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it?

FF5 was just released and FF4 won't be receiving any future updates, security or otherwise. Not supporting older versions seems in line with Google's rapid iteration approach.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld