All posts in Firefox

Tab View vs. Application View

By On August 22, 2008 In Firefox With Comments Off on Tab View vs. Application View Permanent Link to Tab View vs. Application ViewPermalink

I posted on Wednesday about why the new Control+Tab feature should be changed so that it both displays all tabs and looks native to whatever operating system it is displayed on. To make the point of the importance of native look and feel, I posted Control+Tab as it would look designed exactly like Cmd+Tab on OSX.

With that image I wanted to make the point that looking native to the OS is important.  The final visual design of Control+Tab would need to factor in the differences between tab and application preview. So, here’s the version I’d actually like to see be in 3.1. Labels have been added to tabs, so that a user can perform textual as well as visual search. This is especially useful when tabs can look similar (application preview rarely results in indistinguishable icons). Also, I’ve decreased the opacity so that the text can be read on multiple backgrounds. This new opacity is the same as OSX’s opacity in “Quick Look” mode. I suspect that Quick Look is darker than Command+Tab for exactly this reason – text is displayed throughout Quick Look mode.

Also, being able to close tabs from this preview mode I believe is important. I suspect a use case will be that if the user has too many tabs open, accessing this Control+Tab preview will be a quick way for them to close the tabs they are done with without having to navigate to them individually. Because the user would only close a tab that they are targeting, the close icon does not appear on a tab until the user has targeted it.

Windows’ preview mode already has text, so the design there would be very similar to current Alt+Tab.

Tabs Want to be Seen

By On August 20, 2008 In Firefox With Comments Off on Tabs Want to be Seen Permanent Link to Tabs Want to be SeenPermalink

I’ve been posting lately about how browsing in Firefox could be greatly enhanced with visual navigation. Last month, I posted about Control+Tab, a new Firefox 3.1 feature which is the first step in this direction. Now, let’s take another step by improving Control+Tab to meet the needs of more users.

Design for everyone is hard…

The hardest thing about designing for Firefox is that the solutions have to meet the needs of everyone, and everyone is different. There are generalizations that can be made about how humans tend to behave, but each person works and even thinks differently – even from moment to moment. So, good designs for Firefox should support different ways of working and thinking.

An issue with the current design of Control+Tab is that it supports one way of working but neglects others. For people that often switch between two tabs, this is an excellent quick key-stroke. But for people who switch between three or four or hundreds of tabs, it isn’t very efficient. A better system would adapt as a user’s browsing session changes and allow for multiple modes of use, drawing on the many ways our memory encodes and recalls items.

…let’s go shopping (for existing solutions)!

If you’re on Windows or Gnome/KDE, hit Alt+Tab (Cmd+Tab on Mac). What you should see is a visual preview of your running windows or applications, and likely in most-recently-used order. This display does some important things that the new Control+Tab feature doesn’t. Most importantly, it allows for visual search as well as quick-switching. If your last used item is in your short-term memory, it’s a quick keystroke to flip back to it – just like Control+Tab. However, if you have an idea of what something looks like, just visually scan to the match. If your item is recent, tab over to it – if not select it with your cursor. Another benefit of this system is that it gives you a survey of your whole inventory so you can get a sense of not only what kinds of items are open, but how much content there is.  This is a positive solution for operating systems, and I believe it’s a positive solution for Firefox too.

This method even integrates well with operating system seach: Cmd, Alt, and Ctrl are all near each other, so you change between OS-wide and browser-wide preview by a shift of the thumb. It could also be designed to have a visual look identical to the current OS previews.

This new version would also solve some of the general problems with Control+Tab, such as only showing three previews at once and having to wait for distracting animations. Also, by introducing grid-view, the linear view of Control+Tab would no longer compete visually with the linear list of tabs in the shelf chrome.

This is, like the previous Control-Tab, is only a step in the right direction. There will be plenty more to do from here. For instance, application icons are recognizable and therefore don’t need labels – tabs probably do. There are also ways to enable search and content organization from this window eventually – but I’ll blog about that later. For now, I just want to continue the discussion on Control+Tab that’s currently going on in bugs and hopefully reach a consensus on what to build for 3.1.

Control-Tab: A New Feature for Firefox

By On July 16, 2008 In Firefox With 141 Comments Permanent Link to Control-Tab: A New Feature for FirefoxPermalink

As many of you know, Dão Gottwald has been working for awhile on his Ctrl-Tab add-on. Ctrl-Tab has two parts: a filmstrip that allows the user to quickly jump to recently used tabs, and a tab preview mode. These features have been widely used, and lately we at Mozilla have been working to give them a home as a Firefox feature.

Dão and I have been working on the design of a feature based on Ctrl-Tab, while Dão has been building patches. We’re happy to announce the filmstrip of recently-viewed tabs landed today and will show up in tomorrow’s nightlies as a new Firefox feature: Control-Tab.

Since this change will affect current Firefox users’ workflow, I want to describe briefly how Control-Tab works, why it is being added, and what changes you’ll see.

How does Control-Tab work?

Pressing Control-Tab in Firefox will bring up a filmstrip view of your recently visited tabs. Pressing Tab repeatedly with Control held down will cycle through thumbnails of the tabs you’ve visited in order, with each press of Tab going one thumbnail back in time.

Why Is Control-Tab being added?

  • Fast Switching between Tabs. Control-Tab will show thumbnails of the last tabs you have visited in the order you have visited them. This means that if you’re on Site A, pressing Control-Tab will take you to Site B that you last visited. Pressing Control-Tab again will take you back to A, and again to B, etc. This is useful if you need to quickly flip between two tabs that aren’t next to each other and makes it easier to carry out tasks which require multiple tabs.
  • Visual Navigation. Control-Tab shows thumbnails of your previously used tabs, so finding them by sight is fast. This is especially helpful if you’ve opened up so many tabs that some are obscured.

What’s going to change?

Pressing Control-Tab will no longer open the next tab (Control-PageDown still will). We know that expert users are used to this shortcut, and changing it will mean an annoying adjustment.  However, we’re creating Control-Tab because we feel the benefits it offers are greater than the drawback of having to adjust your workflow.

Control-Tab is a first step towards increased visual navigation and content organization features, and we would love to hear what you think. Usage and feedback of Control-Tab will help guide future designs and features, so please leave a comment here or in the forums to tell us your opinion.

Is visual navigation ahead for Firefox?

By On June 24, 2008 In Firefox With Comments Off on Is visual navigation ahead for Firefox? Permanent Link to Is visual navigation ahead for Firefox?Permalink

The release of Firefox 3 has happened, and there was much rejoicing. And now, our sights are set for Firefox 3.1 and beyond.

As I wrote in a previous post, a lot of people’s sights are on better ways to incorporate visual navigation into Firefox (see posts from Madhava, Aza, Bryan, and Andy.)

Some ways of incorporating visual navigation are relatively minor and would actually bring more consistency to the Firefox interface, allowing the same navigation for tabs as already exist for bookmarks and tags. Two of these are:

  1. Awesomebar results giving indication if an item is already opened in a tab (see Madhava’s post )
  2. Tabs shown in the sidebar, and thus easily scanned, deleted en masse, and grouped by characteristics such as domain and frequency of visit

Another quick way to add visual navigation to content is to expand tooltips to include information such as thumbnails.

These changes are fairly basic and nondisruptive to the current workflow. However, more substantial ways of browsing content could pay off in increased efficiency online.

In brainstorming what some of these could be, I thought about the drawbacks of the current system of tabbed browsing. One problem is that tabs are displayed linearly, while the tasks they contain can be sprawling and nonlinear. In the following sketch, the user is visiting five domains, but the tab structure gives no visual indication of the link between the tabs other than the favicon and title:

Being able to group open tabs by domain is one way to address this problem. In the following sketch, based on an idea by Jay Sullivan, the user clicks and holds down a tab. This produces a drop-down menu which shows all tabs open for that domain. This interaction mirrors the operating system method of seeing all windows open for a particular application in that application’s menu.

Another way to bring visual navigation to Firefox would be to expand the metaphor of the desktop and bring its interactions into the browser. The current Firefox library is similar to an OS file directory, but with none of the visual navigation that OSes do well. Allowing the user to navigate their library visually would draw on a familiar metaphor, give visual navigation only when needed, and perhaps ease users into the browser and desktop beginning to merge. Certainly one could imagine dragging a “file” from the Firefox library onto the desktop, turning the item into a web application.

As always, more details are in the wiki and comments are very welcome!

Browser Functionality vs. Extensions

By On June 10, 2008 In Firefox With Comments Off on Browser Functionality vs. Extensions Permanent Link to Browser Functionality vs. ExtensionsPermalink

It was great to get so much valuable feedback in response to my last post about possible future interactions with tabs.

There was a lot of discussion about the role of browser functionality vs. optional extension functionality.  This is definitely a useful conversation to have, as our notion of what features should be in the browser will certainly change as we redefine what the browser is.  I do think that the extensions that are the most useful to the most people are the ones that eventually should work their way into the browser.

The way I see the browser is the way I see my beloved Honda Civic.  My Honda is not the sexiest car on the road, and it certainly doesn’t come with a ton of complicated features and aesthetic additions.  What it is is a solid and fun car experience for about any user.  And any feature added to a Civic, like seatbelts or a radio, has to pass many tests to be proven right for all drivers before it comes standard.  So one way to look at the incredible work of the Firefox extensions community is as a unique testing-ground for what users actually want the future browser to look like.  The features that are most popular give us a glimpse of how users want their browsing experience to change.  And because there are so many excellent extensions regarding tabs, I take that as a sign that people love their tabs but want them to work a little harder.

Improving tabs

By On June 8, 2008 In Firefox With 27 Comments Permanent Link to Improving tabsPermalink

There’s been a lot of recent forum and blog posts on the subject of tabs. Brian Clark’s and Aza Raskin’s posts got me thinking about how tabs are one of the tiny changes that redefined the web browsing experience, but they still have plenty of shortcomings. These shortcomings are primarily in the areas of preview and search, and are exacerbated when people use a superhuman number of tabs at once. The system wasn’t quite designed for this, but if it’s how people work best the system needs to adjust – not the users.

Here’s some problem with the current system:

  • No way to preview content in tabs
  • Current tab disambiguation with favicon and title often identical for many tabs
  • When many tabs are open, most are obscured under excess tab menu. This prevents the user from quickly finding the tab they want and getting a sense of how many tabs they have open (see Aza’s post).
  • No way to detect multiple instances of the same tab.
  • No way to search open tabs textually or visually.
  • No way to tell loading status of tabbed content.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been sketching some possible first steps at solutions to these problems.

Prototype 1: Tab preview

The first prototype is for a quick way to preview tabbed content as thumbnails. The user goes to any tab and drags down to see thumbnail previews of the tabs at the top. If the user continues to pull down, he sees thumbnails of previously obscured tabs. If a tab is only partially loaded, this is represented by a semi-transparent loaded bar over the tab.

This addresses the problem of many tabs looking identical by allowing the user to get a quick view of what’s open and what’s loaded.

The user can drag a tab to the left, right, or bottom of the screen to move all of their tab previews.

Sketch 2: Tab Management

These sketches are for a separate “tab management” window, where the user can organize and view tabs visually. They can view open tabs as a grid, a list, or in “scatter,” mode. Scatter mode provides the user with a free-form arrangement of tabs (and possibly history) which they can organize spatially. The user can choose to view their tabs in scatter mode:

  • By site. This groups tabs together by what domain they were reached through. If the user has ten articles open from the New York Times, these will be grouped together with the New York Times homepage being largest.
  • By topic. This groups tabs together by what searches they were accessed through. If the user has performed a Google search on San Francisco restaurants, all tabs resulting from this search are grouped together.
  • By recency & frequency. Using the idea behind the Awesomebar, sites which are visited frequently and recently appear larger in tab view and are thus easier and faster to recognize and click.
  • In freeform.  The user can resize and move tabs, grouping them in whatever way fits with their working model for a project.  They can add labels and fields to help create organizational systems and save their tab configurations for future sessions.

More details and sketches on these prototypes can be found in the wiki.  I’d love to hear thoughts and feedback. These are in no way final solutions, but more of a way to move the discussion forward by addressing specific tab concerns.  So, please feel free to reply to this post or email at jboriss at mozilla dot com.

Hello!

By On May 21, 2008 In Firefox, Uncategorized With Comments Off on Hello! Permanent Link to Hello!Permalink

I’m Jennifer Boriss, but I go by just Boriss. Two weeks ago I started work at Mozilla as a user experience designer. I’ll be working alongside established superheros Mike Beltzner, Alex Faaborg, Madhava Enros, and Aza Raskin to make the Firefox the best online experience possible.

I’m joining Mozilla at an interesting and exciting time. The much anticipated Firefox 3 will arrive soon, and its first release candidate was released on May 17. The response to RC1 so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and deservedly so. Firefox 3 is a solid, excellent product, and everyone here and in the community is very thrilled to see it out the door. The Firefox 3 release is the latest in a long series of exciting events to happen at Mozilla. Ever since Firefox 1.0’s release in 2004, it’s been steadily gaining users in almost every country. Today, Firefox enjoys over 16%[1] market share online (28%[2] in Europe), and this is only growing. Fairly impressive, considering IE held 95%[3] of the market at Firefox 1.0’s release.

Like many, I found the success little open-source browser that could very exciting. Beyond the fast, clean web experience, the collaborative and open nature of Firefox’s development is exciting as a model for achieving projects online across many countries. And also like many, I found the previous lack of choice in browsing and the poor user experience of Internet Explorer disturbing. If the internet is the new medium of information, business, and communication, the experience of its users is too important to be entirely written by Microsoft. This is why I joined Mozilla and am pumped about what’s to come.

This is a formative time for Mozilla, but also the internet as a whole. The nature of the browser and online experience will go through a series of important changes – evidenced in part by the hype of web 2.0 and more recent development of rich internet applications. How we access and create content is still shifting and being rewritten. While no one knows the precise direction the internet will take, we can set broad goals and work through advancing technology to achieve them. My focus is on user experience, so some possible goals could be:

  • Accessibility and freedom of information
  • Protection of the user’s privacy and data
  • Ease of content access and creation
  • Ability to customize one’s personal online experience
  • A positive online experience for any task from work to leisure

    • These are fairly broad goals, and I surely don’t know all the specifics of how we should achieve them. And, given the number of very passionate Firefox users, the task of improving the user experience is a bit daunting. If Firefox were a poor product, this job would be easy. As it is, Firefox already has what I consider an excellent user experience, and I know the risk of fixing something that isn’t broken – I won’t do it lightly. That’s why I’m hoping this blog will be more of a conversation than a monologue. I’ll use it to post ideas and designs for Firefox, and hope that people will comment. I welcome all feedback, especially negative. After all, my job at Mozilla isn’t to implement my own personal visions, but rather to be an advocate for the users. So rant, rave, complain, tell me what makes your grandmother angry, whatever – let’s start the conversation.

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