Archive for April, 2009

Firefox New Tab: Visual Update

Monday, April 13th, 2009

All has been quiet on the new tab front for the last couple of weeks. We’ve been up to two things in the process of getting the new tab ready for potential uplift into Firefox. The first is we’ve been working on an overview of how the add-on was designed including performance and security. If you’ve ever wanted to get a guided tour of how something like the new tab is implemented, check it out. The second thing we’ve been working on is finding a visual style that blends in with Firefox.

Inspired by the horizontal styling of the thumbnails in Chris Stone’s answer to the call for participation, we’ve got some new designs that incorporate the learnings from the last 36 revisions while finally making it feel much more Firefox-y. Unfortunately, we haven’t implemented the new style yet so for the time being, it’s see only.

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TaskFox Mouse: Iteration 0

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Two of TaskFox’s goals are to: Work with existing workflows, not against them, and to help people complete tasks rather than be forced to laboriously jump through hoops.

We’ve been looking at what TaskFox looks like in the URL bar. It’s an interface that excels when you want to start a new navigation task or do something somewhat unrelated to what you are currently looking at. If you see an street address on a page, an artist you are interested in, or text in a undecipherable language, you should be able to start using TaskFox right there.

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Firefox.next: Tabs on the side?

Friday, April 10th, 2009

Inspired by numerous tabs-on-the-side extensions (in particular Tree Tabs by Piro-san), hall-way conversations, and Oliver Reichenstein’s recent blog post, we’ve been thinking more about the possibilities and ramifications of putting “tabs” on the side of the browser.

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Taskfox Prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

As a user experience exploration, Ubiquity has been incredibly successful. Over a million downloads have highlighted the need for the web to be connected more tightly with by the power of task-based interfaces. Due to the passion of users, the user tutorial has been translated into ten languages. Similarly, the thousands of commands written for Ubiquity illustrate a latent desire to be able to write tiny amounts of code that enhance the web in fundamental ways.

We are currently working on bringing some of that power to Firefox. For a more detailed look at some of the directions we’ve been thinking about, check out the mockups page of the project wiki.

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