Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss

Fennec UI discussion

2 views
Skip to first unread message

mad...@mozilla.com

unread,
Aug 13, 2008, 8:19:11 PM8/13/08
to
This is a placeholder post to start a Fennec UI discussion. I'm about
to point to it in a blog post as a place to have a discussion. Sorry
for the extra message, those of you getting this by email.

janice....@gmail.com

unread,
Sep 10, 2008, 1:50:23 PM9/10/08
to

Hey Madhava. I've noticed this a couple of times and decided to wait
and see if you managed to either detect/fix or just fix it but i
hasn't happened yet... so here's a comment about it!

For some reason, your otherwise usable site (..../egotism) has had
screen shots embedded that refuse to play nice with the rest of your
formatting. Have you noticed? It's got so I can't read it. (Not
that I'd likely understand it all, mind, but without being able to
read it, we'll NEVER KNOW ;-)

FTR: I'm using the latest non-beta Firefox on Vista Home Basic. JIC
it matters. Somehow.

Best of luck with this.

Your friend,

/janice

breck...@gmail.com

unread,
Oct 2, 2008, 10:37:21 AM10/2/08
to
On Aug 13, 5:19 pm, madh...@mozilla.com wrote:

Hey Madhava, this UI looks great, I've got a thought to consider.
Perhaps hiding the Awesome Bar directly after page load would make for
a better user experience. I find myself scrolling down far enough to
hide this 100% of the time anyway, and it'd be nice to have full
screen real estate from the start. Panning to the right could then
bring up the browser chrome with the Awesome Bar highlighted and ready
for further typing, bookmarking etc. I know this could cause a
problem with the current URL bar serving some security notification
purposes, but there's probably a good work around there.

Thoughts?
-Bret

Ravedave

unread,
Oct 2, 2008, 12:12:09 PM10/2/08
to

When are you (Mobile team) going to make a video again? I think a
video of this running on an N80 would probably make some decent
headway on digg/reddit. Though you may want to wait until there is an
Alpha for Windows Mobile.

Aza

unread,
Oct 3, 2008, 12:39:09 PM10/3/08
to Ravedave, dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
Great idea -- it's been on my list of things to do for a while now: a follow
up to that original video.

-- aza | ɐzɐ --

> _______________________________________________
> dev-platforms-mobile mailing list
> dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile
>

madhava

unread,
Oct 3, 2008, 6:01:07 PM10/3/08
to

This is definitely a good thought - a video will get things across
much more clearly. I think that we'll do a video walkthrough once we
hit alpha.

Aza

unread,
Oct 7, 2008, 9:45:37 PM10/7/08
to madhava, dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
Any reason why we should wait on this. Going out early and often would be
good for getting more folks involved and participate.

-- aza | ɐzɐ --

Niranjan

unread,
Oct 9, 2008, 5:38:03 PM10/9/08
to Aza, madhava, dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
Hi,

The Fennec UI looks great for devices like N810. But I have few comments on the UI mainly after clicking any button on the browser-controls.

1. Bookmarks: It opens a transparent urllist-container with the browser canvas in the background. This occupies the full browser screen. There is a "close" button at the bottom to go back to the browser screen.
(This is part of the urlbar but when the browser-controls are open, it appears to be part of the browser-controls).

2. Bookmark-star: It opens a non-modal dialog. Users can still pan/zoom on the visible browser screen at the bottom and they need to click on the "close" button to get rid of the bookmark dialog.

3. Back/Fwd: Corresponding action is performed and the UI is back to full browser screen. No extra click/drag is required for the full browser screen.

4. Actions: It opens a panel on the right. It moves the browser screen on the left with a slight view of the browser. Only right drag (left to right) brings back the full browser screen. It requires a click to open the actions-panel and a right drag to close it.

After playing with Fennec for last few days, I just found it little bit confusing that when I need to click or drag for specific action. I would prefer a consistent way for opening, showing and closing any non-browser screen UI.

Thanks,
-Niranjan


-----Original Message-----
From: dev-platforms-mobile-bounces+niranjan=sta.sam...@lists.mozilla.org [mailto:dev-platforms-mobile-bounces+niranjan=sta.sam...@lists.mozilla.org] On Behalf Of Aza
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 8:46 PM
To: madhava
Cc: dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
Subject: Re: Fennec UI discussion

Any reason why we should wait on this. Going out early and often would be
good for getting more folks involved and participate.

-- aza | ɐzɐ --


On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 3:01 PM, madhava <madhav...@gmail.com> wrote:

Madhava Enros

unread,
Oct 9, 2008, 6:26:41 PM10/9/08
to Niranjan, dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
Hi Niranjan --

Thanks for the feedback! You're right -- we have quite the mixture of
dialogs and pseudo-dialogs, along with mechanisms for summoning them
and dismissing them, at the moment.

Of all the interactions you mention, the one in number 3 is on
purpose. That one seems like a good result to me, assuming that
there's some way of also moving more than one page in history back or
forward without having to load every intervening page.

As for the others, as you say, they're not really consistent at the
moment. Generally, we're going to try to move to modelessness
wherever possible. In the bookmarking case, as in others like text
entry, it makes sense to allow a person to still move around the page
beneath. The nav screen (the one withe the awesomebar) and bookmarks
screens use an (x) for now, but it's an inelegant approach that I'd be
quite happy to replace, whether that's with a gap (tapping on content
below to get out of the screen) or a bar that the user can tap or
swipe out of the way, or some other as-yet-undefined mechanism. These
screens are a bit of a special case, in my mind anyway, in that aside
from whether the dialogs are modal or not, technically, they do need
most of the screen and represent the beginning of a new task,
(usually) unrelated to what's going on in content, so they're needs
are a little different from those of a bookmarking details area.

The prefs/downloads/add-ons section that you talk about in point 4 is
a bit of an experiment at the moment. If we're going to show some of
the content area, we should let the user grab and pull it back to get
back to it, not just tap on a button again. If we're _not_ going to
allow that, though, we shouldn't show any content area, and pressing
the button should be the way to get back.

What do you think should be the standard way of getting rid of a
browser "dialog"?

Madhava

>> _______________________________________________
>> dev-platforms-mobile mailing list
>> dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
>> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile
>>
> _______________________________________________
> dev-platforms-mobile mailing list
> dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile
> _______________________________________________
> dev-platforms-mobile mailing list
> dev-platfo...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile

--
Madhava Enros
User Experience Designer, Mozilla Corporation

madhava

unread,
Oct 17, 2008, 3:29:43 PM10/17/08
to
This reply actually from Niranjan -- it came through in email, but not
in the group for some reason:


>there's some way of also moving more than one page in history back or
>forward without having to load every intervening page.

That is true. But currently, I think every page in history back or
forward is loaded before we move to the next page. I understand that
this can be change easily with our current design.

>In the bookmarking case, as in others like text
>entry, it makes sense to allow a person to still move around the page
>beneath.

This might be true on a desktop but not on a mobile phone. There might
not be enough space to do anything before we get rid of the
"bookmarking" screen first.

>If we're going to show some of
>the content area, we should let the user grab and pull it back to get
>back to it, not just tap on a button again.

I think that the visible content area on a prefs/downloads/add-ons
panel is just taking too much space on the screen just to provide a
way to get back to the full browser screen. This also provides some
effect (which is important too) but I will prefer just a "close"
button and the panel taking up full screen.

>What do you think should be the standard way of getting rid of a
>browser "dialog"?

My preference will be to always have a "close" button on all the
browser dialogs. I know there is nothing fancy in it but this will
provide a consistent way to users to get back to the full browser
screen from any place. The drag can be limited to browser panning and
showing/hiding the tablist/browser-control.

Thanks,
-Niranjan

> > On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 3:01 PM, madhava <madhava.en...@gmail.com>  


> > wrote:
>
> >> On Oct 2, 12:12 pm, Ravedave <davidcra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> On Aug 13, 7:19 pm, madh...@mozilla.com wrote:
>
> >>>> This is a placeholder post to start a Fennec UI discussion.  I'm  
> >>>> about
> >>>> to point to it in a blog post as a place to have a discussion.  
> >>>> Sorry
> >>>> for the extra message, those of you getting this by email.
>
> >>> When are you (Mobile team) going to make a video again? I think a
> >>> video of this running on an N80 would probably make some decent
> >>> headway on digg/reddit. Though you may want to wait until there is  
> >>> an
> >>> Alpha for Windows Mobile.
>
> >> This is definitely a good thought - a video will get things across
> >> much more clearly.  I think that we'll do a video walkthrough once we
> >> hit alpha.
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> dev-platforms-mobile mailing list

> >> dev-platforms-mob...@lists.mozilla.org
This reply actualy

> >>https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile
>
> > _______________________________________________
> > dev-platforms-mobile mailing list

> > dev-platforms-mob...@lists.mozilla.org


> >https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile
> > _______________________________________________
> > dev-platforms-mobile mailing list

> > dev-platforms-mob...@lists.mozilla.org

madhava

unread,
Oct 17, 2008, 3:32:19 PM10/17/08
to
Video walkthrough of the Fennec as of alpha 1 is here:

http://vimeo.com/1981300?pg=embed&sec=1981300

please comment there or here!

Madhava


On Oct 7, 9:45 pm, Aza <a...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Any reason why we should wait on this. Going out early and often would be
> good for getting more folks involved and participate.
>
> -- aza | ɐzɐ --
>

> On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 3:01 PM, madhava <madhava.en...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Oct 2, 12:12 pm, Ravedave <davidcra...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Aug 13, 7:19 pm, madh...@mozilla.com wrote:
>
> > > > This is a placeholder post to start a Fennec UI discussion.  I'm about
> > > > to point to it in a blog post as a place to have a discussion.  Sorry
> > > > for the extra message, those of you getting this by email.
>
> > > When are you (Mobile team) going to make a video again? I think a
> > > video of this running on an N80 would probably make some decent
> > > headway on digg/reddit. Though you may want to wait until there is an
> > > Alpha for Windows Mobile.
>
> > This is definitely a good thought - a video will get things across
> > much more clearly.  I think that we'll do a video walkthrough once we
> > hit alpha.
> > _______________________________________________
> > dev-platforms-mobile mailing list

> > dev-platforms-mob...@lists.mozilla.org
> >https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platforms-mobile

0 new messages