Comments on: Designing Firefox 3.2

By: Alexander

Alexander — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:42:37 +0000

As you mention the library concept, persistance and structured access to bookmarks and media content is the missing key aspect. It is not about tabs, bookmarks are the critical point! I have not seen a adequate concept of storing the knowedge you get from the web; and as the size of your personal web grows, hierachical orders suck. An ontology approach with auto tagging and auto links to related context should be the way to go. A nice idea is favo.com, a visual bookmark explorer; however, until we’ll get a media based object oriented file system, there is a long way to better browsing.

By: Dread Knight

Dread Knight — Sun, 24 May 2009 07:30:12 +0000

I’m a graphic designer / usability expert among other things and i want to say i love the mockups :) Great job!

By: PaulH

PaulH — Sun, 24 May 2009 01:36:56 +0000

Here’s an idea. Look at Flock. Then look at Orca. Then make your own fork. Please, Please, Please don’t ruin Firefox. There are already add-ons that do nearly everything you want. Either make an add-on that does what you want, or if you are interested in making RSS invisible to users so I can have tens of thousands of sites in some history for future site cum media catalog type thing. I use Firefox as a research tool, means of communication, and entertainment. I go through 300+ sites a day. It takes 3 minutes with a quad-core processor and 6 GB of Ram to open bookmarks. I have 12,000 bookmarks that I can search through to easily find any point of reference I am looking for that I have found before. You are trying to turn an extremely customizable tool into a toy.

By: Jai Leeworthy

Jai Leeworthy — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:41:45 +0000

On a different note…i noticed something about History and the way it’s organized in one of the screenshots. If we’re trying to find something in history, well, if we’ve been looking through a website for a while, we get a lot of pages showing up from the same website, but perhaps we weren’t looking for anything in this website at all, it required a bit of scrolling, with sharp eyes if it doesn’t have a favicon. Couldn’t history be organized better, like grouping pages from a website, showing tabs and websites in a more innovative way? This interests me.

By: Kurt Cagle

Kurt Cagle — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:39:21 +0000

Interesting discussion.

One idea that I've been thinking about is the concept of a context. In essence, when you start the browser, you create a context. Any time you open a link from the nav bar, the link gets added to the current context, though you can change the context from the navbar at any time (or create new contexts). Links opened up from pages in a given context will also open in that context. Contexts are initially named for the first link opened in that context, though they can be renamed at any given time, and each context retains its own history, state and (potentially) icon.

The key behind a context is that it normally requires no effort to put a given link into a context - normal browsing activities will keep things in that context. You can change a browser tab so that it is in a different context, however. You can also set the context view so that you either view in the current context or you view all tabs in all contexts, even though at any given time only one context is valid.

Similarly, if external apps or plugins launch web pages, these pages are launched in an associated context to that app, though again, they can be moved to different contexts as appropriate. Thus, if I"m using something like TwitterFox, all of the pages that I open up from there will be in the TwitterFox context.

Contexts can be changed either from a context drop down on the nav bar or from a gallery page that will display each context as a folder and each link in that context as a thumbnail, and these can be sorted across multiple facets - alphabetical, most recent, most popular, by keyword and so forth.

Contexts can also have taxonomic keywords assigned to them. Anything within that context will share these keywords, and searching on the keywords will bring up all contexts that have these keywords assigned.

By: Paulo

Paulo — Tue, 19 May 2009 07:42:58 +0000

I think the Opera Browser does that already in a very interesting way but it hasn´t been developed over the last few releases.

The first page you see when you open the browser is called "Speed Dial" which has a selection of 9 of your most visited websites, in a visible thumbnail size, that you whish to see if there´s new content at the moment, and you can even set how often those thumbnails refresh.

The only problem is that, it only allows you to see 9 webpages, and that´s that! If it expanded that feature to work along with the great bookmark system included in the browser, it would accomplish everything you mentioned in this article very well.

By: Johannes

Johannes — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:47:30 +0000

« Today, twenty+ parallel sessions is quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; »

Please consider "normal" users. Apart of geeks, not many people use that much tabs.

My girlfriend, father & mother, as well as a lot of friends, only use ONE website at a time.

There are more people using 1 tab at a time than people using more than 3.

It would be interesting to have real usage studies.

But please think about normal users, not geeks!

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sat, 16 May 2009 10:40:34 +0000

One thing that would be useful would be to be able to view pages hierarchically with the parent being the page you linked from. This would be particularly useful when carrying out research. To close down a branch because it was found to be uninformative, misguided or because you had gleaned sufficient information and did not want to pursue it any further would be useful. For example, when looking for a journal article there may be a number of sites that are found but only a few of them actually make the article available. To open all the sites, find the article on one of them and then close all the sites would be such a nice feature to have.

By: Shanx

Shanx — Sun, 03 May 2009 12:47:09 +0000

The Speed Dial extension for Firefox already does something similar. It’ll be good to have that functionality built into the browser of course. Opera has had speed dials for a long time. Better than tabs.

By: Thom

Thom — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:36:33 +0000

“God said” tabs are bad in the context of web pages, not the web browser. As far as Firefox is concerned, a web page is a web page and so they are all homogeneous. I know this is only somewhat true, but I think it would be a mistake on Mozilla’s part to assume it understands how we wish to organize our browsing experience.

I do think the sidebar approach is a good idea, however… I posted my own take on it on my blog: http://digg.com/u12GWx