New-tab page... distracting?

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I've been living with the new-tab page and I think that I find it very
distracting. When I'm opening a new tab, it's almost always with the
keyboard and so that I can either search or type into the awesomebar.
Having all of those thumbnails pop out at me, calling me to do something
else than what I intended is a little frustrating for me at least,
because I struggle with maintaining focus and this feature seems
designed to defocus.

1) Is there a way to keep the same intent but decrease the visual noise?
2) Is there a way for users to turn this off? I poked briefly at the
"Tabs" section of prefs but didn't find anything especially useful.

--BDS

[Stephen Horlander]

There is an X icon in the upper right corner that turns off the thumbnail display.

- Stephen

> _______________________________________________
> dev-apps-firefox mailing list
> dev-apps...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-apps-firefox

[Jared Wein]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Benjamin Smedberg" <benj...@smedbergs.us>
> 2) Is there a way for users to turn this off? I poked briefly at the
> "Tabs" section of prefs but didn't find anything especially useful.

There is a small button in the top-right of the New Tab page that hides all of the thumbnails. Does this satisfy what you are looking for?

- Jared

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Heh yes! I figured it just closed the new tab.

--BDS

[Myk Melez]

On 2012-02-06 14:42 , Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> 1) Is there a way to keep the same intent but decrease the visual noise?

> 2) Is there a way for users to turn this off? I poked briefly at the
> "Tabs" section of prefs but didn't find anything especially useful.

It might also be useful to distinguish between keyboard- and
mouse-initiated tab opens, on the theory that the new tab page is more
useful for the latter case (whose users are already holding the mouse)
than the former (whose users may be typing with two hands on the
keyboard and have to move one hand to the mouse or press the tab key
several times to get to the entries on the new tab page).

-myk

[Asa Dotzler]

that was in the plans. we decided to get the basics down first.

- A

[Asa Dotzler]

We have bad glyphs there. The button should communicate the toggle
between the speedial like feature and the blank page.

- A

[Asa Dotzler]

IE, Opera, Chrome, and Safari all have a speed-dial feature similar to
this. It's one of the most often requested features in Firefox and less
noisy, IMO, than the other browsers and we already desaturate to the
point that I start to lose the color recognition value of the tile and
am mostly using pattern recognition so I don't think we should tone it
down any further.

We do have designs that suggested making it mostly invisible if the user
opened the new tab from the keyboard. That would be in a future iteration.

As others have noted, we do support switching between the Awesome Tiles
(I just made that up) and the blank page that a number of us have grown
accustomed to over our many years of exclusive Firefox use. That is a
first iteration ship requirement.

- A

[Daniel Cater]

There were mockups from Faaborg last year that had different designs for a new tab opened with the keyboard vs with the mouse but that idea doesn't seem to have carried over to the implementation.

http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2011/06/10/home-tab-and-new-tab-conceptual-mockups/

I think adding an option for this to the preferences dialogue is a good idea. I don't have access to other browsers right now, but I'm pretty sure at least IE has this option:

A new tab should open:
- The "new tab" page
- Your homepage
- A blank tab

[Daniel Cater]