Comments on: Firefox Home Tab Concepts

By: mat

mat — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:10:17 +0000

Left Nav and Timeline are my favorites, the first because it seems to allow more functionality for the home tab than any other and also because it fits in with the new addons manager and the future in-content options panel, and the second because it expands greatly on the idea of history/downloads that firefox already has, while also looking pretty and straight forward for any user to understand.

The Spokes concept also seems the most interesting for fennec because it saves the most space while still providing functionality.

If you want some inspiration for new ideas you might want to check this javascript demo ( http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/canopy/ ), I’m sure if the home tab had something as amazing as that (maybe an ever expanding Discover function? Who knows!), it would make firefox even more unique than it already is.

By: Peter Lairo

Peter Lairo — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:44:28 +0000

I get the impression that people designing the Home Tab want to cram too much stuff into it. I think I would prefer a more clear jumping off point for my actual browsing and not some place that is trying to be an end in itself.

I think it would be worthwhile exploring the possibility of having the Home Tab show only a grid of “frecently” visited sites, with the ability to “pin” sites into the grid, or, at a minimum, give such a grid at least two-thirds of the total space in the Home Tab. Look at Safary.

By: skierpage

skierpage — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:33:27 +0000

There’s a lot to like.

I like Sessions and Discover.

Post in the Middle could be awesome. Often you want to make a “post” bringing together ideas from several tabs, so it needs access to them and your history, and a smart drag and drop that creates the web link and title and tags the pages you reference in your History. I assume it will be easy to change the posting provider, for example, I make notes to myself in TiddlyWiki. If it provides enough flexibility then you wind up with The Grid or an iGoogle-style widget page; not that there’s anything wrong with that!

By: SilverWave

SilverWave — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:13:37 +0000

Interesting stuff…

Like the WordPress one, but thats probably due to familiarity.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 20:35:57 +0000

Lots of neat ideas here! It looks like there’s a lot of room for exploration of both the types of functionality that could be provided from a Home Tab, and the designs that would present this functionality to the user.

Some of these concepts give the impression of being a collection of separate “widgets” or tools. As there are many such widgets that could be useful, users might be interested in customizing their own Home Tab. Is there a plan to make the Home content easily customizable and extensible (e.g. via Jetpacks)?

By: Tiago Sá

Tiago Sá — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:45:31 +0000

One of the things that worry me is that many (including you) seem to be under the assumption that the home tab won’t have the navigation toolbar, and, as far as I know, this hasn’t been decided yet.

And I should sure hope they decide to let it have the normal navigation bar, otherwise you’ll see loads of people going “oh no! Firefox doesn’t have a place for me sites!”

Other than that, awesome work you’ve got going on there! Great stuff! I’m looking forward to more!