Unfortunately the addon don’t work in my PC. I use FF 3.1 b3 in Windows XP.
I don’t know if some extension cause the error or if is otherwise.
Greetings

ooh. I see contextual actions are there already (although the ‘map’ button doesn’t work for me). Cool.

There are many ways to use search now, but not all of them are integrated into each other.
1. automatic redirection to default search engine when typing on the url bar
2. using bookmark aliases e.g. “wp firefox” for searching wikipedia
3. ubiqiuty scripts
4. search bar

What i’m concerned with is the integration of the first three. I have a lot of bookmarks that i use for search that I was hoping ubiquity could “detect” and install automatically.

If you are going forward with inline search, how are you going to tie everything together so that there won’t be redundant functionality or non-interoperating features?

Also, I like the idea of what you said in one of your videos about what someone typically does next.

I usually hit up Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and Digg when I fire up the browser.

I used an extension called Speed Dial and another one called Fast Dial. I could place my personal frequent sites in these extensions and I’d have quick access to what I needed.

But the new tab UI could definitely do this, and better if it could predict what I usually do after opening a particular page.

Just a thought!

-Matt

I’d like to graciously disagree with @Calvin Spealman on his thoughts about throwing the project to add-on developers. While I think the add-on developer community for Firefox is wonderful I think that a basic new tab screen should be implemented by Mozilla and it should be integrated into Firefox 3.5 if possible.

Calvin makes some great points, but I think Aza and Alex are on the right track here. It’s important to understand that the browser has a certain responsibility to the users to provide a complete experience and a new tab screen that’s blank doesn’t provide the user with any basic features. So if Aza and Alex can get this off the ground, even in it’s current form it’s a “big win” as Aza put it because at least a new tab has something going on.

There are already add-ons that can provide this type of functionality, but I think it’s really important that Mozilla take control and provide users with basic new tab UI functionality like we’re seeing here. Keep up the good work guys.

-matt

Another comment, In the Search box, the magnifying glass should be on the right to match the search boxes everywhere in the application.

I feel that Calvin Spealman and Matt Wilkinson both have important points concerning the extensibility of this new tab page.

The question of what to include by default and what to leave up to extension developers is a very important one, especially for an application that prides itself on it’s extensibility.

Defaults that exist across all installations of firefox, such as the text curser ending up in the awesomebar whenever a new window/tab is opened, are very important for people who have to work across multiple installations of firefox (library, university, laptop, multiple operating systems and so on) where we can’t optimise everything every time they want to use a new computer.
That being said, there seems to be little reason to not open up the new-tab page for extensions. The extensibility of firefox is one of its strengths.

Firefox does a very good job of providing a consistent base install that is efficient on many computers and which works for most people while allowing some users to customise to their hearts’ content. You can’t get everything right for everyone, but you can aim to provide something that generally works for most people.

@Sad – About:Tab is an experimental and development extension from Mozilla and it only works on Firefox 3.1 or Shiretoko.

You can get the beta here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Am I right in noticing a Canon Cat trick here: showing a screenshot of the page (as it was lastly shown) until it’s loaded? Works well here, would be nice to do that with Firefox itself, so that waiting for it to start is less annoying.

@Jan Hopmans
You just rephrased what I typed above

Tabbed browsing is my modus operandi, so I’d like to get my $0.02 in while the gettin’s good. This may not be the best place for it since I’m not testing the extension yet, but I haven’t seen any better. Not that I don’t want to test stuff, but testing two experimental things combined with eachother is just asking for trouble….

On me: I’m an electrical and computer engineer. I’m easily distracted, and I find distraction exquisitely irritating. I get strong feelings about the most logical ways for things to work, and I find things that conflict with them to be distracting. I use a MacBook at home, where the right hand is always near the one-button trackpad and the left hand is often off on more important missions. The most efficient interfaces for that are buttons, menus, and gestures, and I find any non-typing task which requires the left hand to interrupt its work and attend the meeting (e.g., modifier key pressing) to be distracting.

On Firefox: I like it (as I did Mozilla and Netscape and Mosaic), in part because it is so tweakable. I rely on about:config to kill text blink, GIF animation, the “Awesome” Bar (a.k.a. “Bar Clippy”), the Get Add-ons Pane (a.k.a. “Add-ons Clippy”), and Internet Keywords (a.k.a. “URL Clippy”). I rely on userchrome.css with about:config to inter the user-hostile “Ashen” theme (a.k.a. “Firelight”, “Slate”) and compact the remains (although I’m still working on using FF2’s Toolbar-small.png to restore buttons that don’t waste space and do use shape and color to communicate information to the user, without resorting to an overkill non-Mozilla download.) I rely on extensions “No-Script” (in blacklist mode) to block Flash animation and its network hoggage (among other things), and “Toolbar Buttons” to add more one-finger trackpad goodness.

On tabbed browsing: I’ve been pretty happy with most of Firefox’s capability and customizability, especially 3.0.x, and I hope subsequent tabbed browsing implementations don’t reduce any of that. I use Preferences, about:config, and userchrome.css, to: open new pages in new tabs, always show the tab bar, open links in new tabs in the background, load new-window tabs in the background, protect existing tabs from being clobbered by folders of bookmarks, clean off “blank” tabs (although the icon is proving stubborn), and as previously mentioned, minimize the font and height of tabs and clean off the Ashen theme.

One FF3 tab improvement I was particularly excited to find was browser.tabs.tabMaxWidth . On FF2 this was internally fixed at 250 pixels, so unless tabMinWidth was also set to 250 (a logically unimodal but unappealing solution), the resulting behavior was arbitrarily trimodal. Now set to my screen width of 1280, the behavior is more linearly bimodal, which I enjoy very much.

The only tabbed browsing enhancement I use is HashColouredTabs+ . I tried a number of tab color extensions including Chromatabs and found HCT+ the least distracting. Perhaps more importantly, I finally learned how to hack it to implement my number-one most wanted function: the Perpetual New Tab. In the Modern Age Of Computing, there is no logical reason anyone should ever have to manually open their own blank tab. That’s what computers are for; they already possess all the necessary information. And yet that’s what Firefox currently makes everyone continually do who doesn’t have a second mouse/trackpad button and who doesn’t want to use up a whole other hand just to hold down a modifier key or who wants to use the Bookmarks Toolbar. To my further astonishment, no extension that did it ever appeared (to my knowledge), and I finally tired of waiting. Now I’ll never again even have to think about opening a new tab. Hey, New Tab Button — don’t let the door hit ya where the dog should’a bit ya. (I can also have them open whatever I want, but for now I’m happy with about:blank….)

A few years ago I tried out every tab enhancement out there I could find, and at the time, settled on Showcase. I tried to get into the habit of using it, but it was was just too much effort for what I got out of it. Distraction, I found, comes from three things: clutter, noise, and surprise.

Clutter is static. For clutter, the user is a state-machine: for any current state the user may be in, there is a set of desired next state possibilities, and that set is limited. Clutter is any possibility outside of that set that the user can detect. For example, if I am looking at the browser and can see the New Tab button but would never desire to press it, then the New Tab button is clutter.

Noise is dynamic. For noise, the user is a difference-detector. Humans evolved to detect prey and threats by the most minute changes in position, orientation, shape, color, brightness, sound, etc. Such changes cause sensory organs to generate signals to the brain which alter its operation. Animal physiology is incredibly good at it. If the signal is undesired, it is noise. For example, the popup ad.

Surprise is a failure of expectation. For surprise, the user is a modeller. The human brain works by modelling reality in an attempt to eliminate surprise, shift the execution of repetitive functions from the concious mind to the nervous system, reduce distraction, increase speed, and maximize efficiency. If the result of an action is nondeterministic, maximum efficiency can either not be achieved or not be sustained. For example, compare user performance with a “Recent Items” list to that of the Apple Menu.

Users form a spectrum. What one user desires to be able to do from a given state is not the same as for another, so what is clutter to one is not to another and is a desired option to a third. The noise that sucks one user’s attention away from their desired goal is undetectable to another and contains desired information to a third. The surprise that thwarts unconcious learning of hand-eye coordination may be intolerable to one user, unnoticeable to another, and fun to a third. So it is not a possibility for an interface designer to select any single level of clutter or noise or surprise and rightfully expect to satisfy any significant portion of the user spectrum. A user interface, regardless of baseline, cannot be good without having sufficient user customizability.

Regarding in-line search (a.k.a. “Search Clippy”), I’d want to turn it off. I don’t need or want my tools maintaining records of what I did in between sessions without my control, much less doing mysterious things with them or distracting me with their unsolicited opinions. But certainly feel free to implement as many versions of Clippy as you like, as long as you also always provide a way to prevent their execution.

Regarding the Cognitive Shield: your chosen name reminds me of “Reality Distortion Field” and “Slomin’s Shield”, and sounds like it blocks one from using one’s own brain…. But you described it as a “personal watermark”, so why not call it that? Or Cognitive Signet, Cognitive Crest, Cognitive Banner, Cognitive Medallion, Cognitive Coat-of-Arms, Cognitive Amulet, Cognitive Talisman, Cognitive Totem, Cognitive Periapt, etc.? Something with less “impeding” power and more “facilitating” power. One thing I can say is that the dynamic recent-items aspect would, like every other recent-items list, cause interference with my nervous system, so that like every other recent-items list, I’d probably ultimately turn it off. But I am very intrigued by all the other aspects of the GUI, and if its content could be made deterministic and controllable (e.g., Bookmarks Menu) then I could potentially dig it. Hmmm…that’s an idea…creating a local HTML file with Bookmarks Menu-like content and displaying it with the Perpetual New Tab function….

Ok, maybe that was $0.03.

…OOOOOH… I almost forgot..

where is V8 for firefox ? ..must HAVE (tracemonkey)…FF is still too slow WRT Javascript execution [methinks this is more to do with "a process per tab" metaphor in Chrome than JS performance since i experience JS performance in chrome as linear regardless of number of tabs open as opposed to Firefox's near-logarithmic (BIG-O(n)) behaviour] ..the core of the problem; in firefox, the Javascript-Heavy sites i have open LAG with multiple tabs; Chrome=no lag…But no cool extensions (like ubiquity) either :S !!!]

So …add one JS engine/Threading Model upgrade to my list of must-have and i’ll have ur babies :D

Cheers
Tiggr.

your plug in doesn’t works on firefox3.03. i just want to see results and do my searchs in new tab, not in same tab.

one thing that I would really like, though I’m not sure this is the place, is to have new tabs created directly beside the one you are in. I also like chromes layout with the tabs above navigation controls.

عرب جنس : اكبر اضخم موقع سكس عربي عرب جنس افلام سكس صور سكس قصص سكس مجانا
عرب جنس اكبر موقع سكس عربي يشمل افلام سكس و صور سكس و قصص سكس نكت سكس

Another comment, In the Search box, the magnifying glass should be on the right to match the search boxes everywhere in the application.

I executed a search, which opened in a new tab, but when I went back to the first tab to try and run a new search, I couldn’t get rid of the text in the search field from my last query.

nice post. thanks. :)