UX sore points in Native Fennec

[Lucas Rocha]

Hi all,

We've made some pretty solid progress in terms of stability and
feature-completeness on Native Fennec in the last few weeks. Web
rendering is much less clunky and feels very usable, most of the core
UI elements are in place and looking good, and so on. That's great!

I've been using Native Fennec as my primary mobile browser for some
time now and it has become clear that we have 2 major UX sore points
right now: Tabs and Startup.

The major issue with tabs is responsiveness and stability: switching
tabs often takes seconds, adding tabs sometimes takes seconds,
thumbnails are not always there, etc. Tabs are a core aspect of our
UX. They have to be solid. I tagged all current bugs that affect
tabbed browsing's UX with "tabs-ux". See current list here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=prod%3A"fennec
native" wh%3A"tabs-ux"

As for startup UX, we currently have a confusing behaviour when
starting Native Fennec in different ways. The interaction between
opening a link, restoring session, showing about:home, replacing
startup screenshot, and others is not solid right now. I tagged all
startup-related bugs with "startup-ux".

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=prod%3A"fennec
native" wh%3A"startup-ux"

I plan to work on startup-related issues as soon as Design team posts
their "big picture" plan for startup on bug 721008. The list of tab
issues is a bit longer. It would be really nice if some developers
dedicated some time for those too. I realize that we have tons of bugs
on other parts of Native Fennec. This is just a heads up about 2 major
areas that I think we should keep close track of in order to deliver a
solid set of initial features in Native Fennec.

>From my perspective, the goal for our first Native release should be
about getting the basics right. This means, on a fundamental level,
three things:

1. Pages should render consistently well.
2. Users should be able to smoothly open pages in tabs and quickly
switch between them.
3. Users should have be able to quickly open links from other apps
with consistent UX and performance.

I think we're on track for 1 (with a lot of room for improvements, of
course). 2 and 3 are mostly covered by the bugs I mentioned above (and
the ones we haven't filed yet). We're off to a good start if we get
those right on our first Native release.

Comments, thoughts, suggestions?

Cheers!

--lucasr