Firefox New Tab: Visual Update

1. Edwin Khodabakchian 4.13.09 / 5pm

   It is great to see that the banners are optional (adds a little too much noise for me) but I really like all the other aspects of the design. The best of the series as far as I am concerned. I definitely see myself using something like this.
2. Pete 4.13.09 / 6pm

   That looks really good, except that the big photo headers violate the principles of “politeness” you were talking about earlier – I think if I were making a new tab in a hurry one of those big, colorful headers might catch my eye and disrupt my train of thought.

   Otherwise, really good.
3. Aditya 4.13.09 / 7pm

   Why not make the horizontal thumbnails a background for the link/RSS boxes? This would save a lot of real estate while also allowing the “visual treatment” to be more prevalent and unobtrusive. Rele impressed w/ the development of this project tho.
4. David Naylor 4.14.09 / 1am

   I agree with Pete. How about fading the “banners”?
5. Peter Gasston 4.14.09 / 3am

   I hate to say it, but I think that’s a step backwards from the earlier revisions. The banners draw my eye un-necessarily, and only work on sites with a logo top left (admittedly the majority). I definitely preferred the more laid-back earlier iterations, especially the three-column one, which used thumbnails and favicons to good effect.
6. Jimmy 4.14.09 / 5am

   Is it still planed that highlighted text will end up in the action part of new tabs
7. Rory Marinich 4.14.09 / 6am

   Have you tested this on sites with overlarge headers? What would shawnblanc.net look like, a blank square? What about a Flash-only site? The problem with selective clipping is that not all sites are playing by the same rules.
8. Nox 4.14.09 / 7am

   Some of these problems could probably be solved by calculating the variance in colors for the sector chosen for the banner.
9. Francisco Tosete 5.1.09 / 1pm

   Hi Aza,

   more ideas about the tabs:

   http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftosete/3492180976/

   from Madrid, Spain, greetings
10. Jacky 5.1.09 / 11pm

    Hello there. I have blogged about a feedback to this tab page, includes an image. I hope you have a chance to take a look. http://www.iamjacky.com/?p=1138 Cheerios.
11. JLinks 5.10.09 / 9pm

    Hi Aza,

    I like the idea of having a place for commonly used websites, RSS feeds, and site search boxes in a way you are presenting here, but when I open a new tab, it’s always to do something unrelated to them, thus this would still interrupt my work flow. To get to any of these, everything I need is right up in the browser’s chrome already, opening in a new tab with a middle mouse button click.

    If the new tab page that your making was instead made into a Home page, that would be much more useful and discoverable to all users. I reeeally like many aspects of Jacky’s design above. The only thing I’m not sure about are the banners.

    All I prefer for a new tab page is maybe a Firefox logo in the bottom right corner, at a low alpha color value. Then the empty tab is distinguishable from loading and plain white web sites.
12. Francisco Tosete 5.16.09 / 7am

    Hi Aza,

    more ideas:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftosete/3535175613/

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/ftosete/3535993614/
13. Mardeg 5.18.09 / 11pm

    I think the fact that there is 36 revisions is telling you something.
    You need to make it infinitely customisable so everyone is happy.
    I’m talking *everything* is resizable/draggable/stylable/optional
14. Eric Jung 5.20.09 / 5pm

    Take a look at how Eclipse IDE handles the display of dozens or hundreds of tabs. I’ve taken some screenshots for you:

    http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/8404/screenshot1qwc.png

    http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/5880/screenshot2n.png
15. Gary 5.21.09 / 12am

    Nice! By the way, love what you are doing with Mozilla Jetpack!
16. Silvia 5.28.09 / 5am

    wow, i just love these new tabs for Firefox …!
17. Iain Dalton 5.31.09 / 4am

    I don’t like the banner. It doesn’t look clean, and I imagine there will be cases where it won’t work (site has no banner, Fx picks wrong image as banner). Why not use a site thumbnail as in earlier iterations?
18. Iain Dalton 6.1.09 / 3pm

    Just tried the latest iteration. It doesn’t have the banner, or RSS feeds. Why did you remove feeds?

    Instead of only looking at the clipboard, why not look at all selected text? If I select text (mouse), then copy it (keyboard), then make a new tab (kbd or mouse), I have to switch between keyboard and mouse. If I select text, then click the new tab button, I avoid the keyboard.

    Searching for text and mapping it should be on separate lines. As it is, the “map” button is beyond the reach of my non-maximized window. I suggest something like:

    [G | Search] 123 Main St. Anytown, CA 12345
    [Map] 123 Main St. Anytown, CA 12345

    Where the G part of the Search button is a pulldown menu where you select your search provider (populated by search plugins).
19. baruch 6.4.09 / 9am

    I think there are two distinct levels regarding tabs (and any other content):
    1. How to logically access it. I.e. how to index it.
    2. How to physically access it I.e. how to display it.

    I don’t like tabs too much. Normally I have tens of them open, some are less used, some have dynamic content that I want to periodically revisit, some I don;t want to lose and when I lose them (too many bookmarks anyways), I don;t care much until I need them again a few months further.

    With the flood of content, tabs don’t seem to me the right way to access it neither logically, since they have absolutely no logic associated to them, nor physically, because, well, I don’t really know to define that yet and don;t want to think about further.
    Following the example of “micro-blogging”, one may refer to tabs as “micro-web”/”micro net”, or “micro-search”, reflecting the status of one’s content interests. If that’s true, then why not handle it as such?
    (I wonder - do I have 140 open tabs?)

    I believe the solution should handle both levels. To handle the logical associated to it as well as the visual access.

    Perhaps I can refer to what I want from tabs as a simple change. Make them “tags” instead.

    For example, this “micro-web” may refer to the keywords and tags, or even the whole text, inside the pages and/or the link names. Another way to “logicisize” them is to allow the user to add keywords, tags or even links between them. Then access this user-entered meta-data. Another way is to create logical trains according to the “threads” of which tag opened which tag (and back-tracing of course). Timestamps of when the link was opened may also be helpful. There are probably many other logic criteria/rules that may be applied to content, tags included. So support them all, let the user decide.

    On the visual side, there are also several alternatives. For example the old nested file system/folders/threads representation. Another is a color/icon map of the logical criteria/categories (such as red for all tags marked under “human interface”). Another may be some graphical display such as perhaps bubbles or graph-bars etc. Yet another may be “desk roller” kind of display, or several of them, indexing the tags according to the various logics associated to them. All such graphical designs may enjoy graphical attributes to rely information, such as bubble size or color “strength” to reflect number of links under that category, color hue to reflect association between different categories. Best is to support all - like “skins”.
    Separating the logics from the physical has another advantage that developing “logic engines” on one hand, with standard APIs to all of them, and developing “physical skins” on the other, can be done independently and continuously by the community at large, each one working on what he likes more.

    These are my of-the-sleeve thoughts. I apologize if I repeated prior thoughts here or elsewhere which I have neglected to read. I’m not a follower of open source development etc.

    Thanks for reading,
    Baruch
20. SteveP 6.24.09 / 2am

    Sorry if this is inappropriate, but I’m trying to get Firefox to allow me to open RSS feeds from a dropdown list (from the sites in my bookmarks bar) - ideally by right-clicking and opening in a new tab.

    Currently, the functionality requires that I be on a blank (or unused) page, then select the RSS feed item I want to read. Ideally, I could run through the dropdown list, selecting several stories to read in sequence that would already then be open.

    Hope that makes sense.
21. Matt Wilkinson 7.9.09 / 4pm

    Any chance we’ll get to install a new version anytime soon?
22. Tyler 7.29.09 / 9am

    This project is looking a bit… stalled.
23. Frank J. 8.2.09 / 4am

    any news on this?
24. شات 11.27.09 / 4pm

    You are the utmost extravaganza!
25. دردشه صوتيه 12.4.09 / 8am

    Is it still planed that highlighted text will end up in the action part of new tabs
26. شات صوتي 12.25.09 / 2pm

    Any chance we’ll get to install a new version anytime soon?
27. شات 2.17.10 / 5am

    This project is looking a bit… stalled. [شات كتابي][شات صوتي][كوت الكويت]

All material copyright Aza Raskin. But you can have the color magenta.

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