In-content preferences panel
Tiago Sá
is the one in charge of in-content UI. He's shown his awesome mockups
in a recent blog post [ http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/in-content-ui-visual-unification/
] but, from what I understood, there's still loads to do and think
about in all this. I really don't have a deep understanding of
Firefox's development process, but I would like to give my feedback or
contribution to the in-content preferences panel. I've been making a
few mockups (for a while now) about how an eventual (and needed)
redesign of the preferences panel would look like. And here's what I
have to show, at the moment:
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/9754/62439107.jpg
It should be noted that the new Home Tab functionality is also
addressed in these mockups (Alexander Limi [ http://limi.net/ ] is in
charge of that), with what I consider to be the needed options for the
current concept for the Home Tab/Pages. I should say I think the
current concept (or my understanding of the current concept) is not
particularly efficient at dealing with users who are used to a
specific kind of Home Page functionality (the current Home Page
functionality). I have expressed my opinion about how we should handle
custom home pages from Firefox 3.6- into Firefox 4 here [
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=544819#c19 ], and I've
also talked about chromeless tabs being a bad idea in another post
here in the forums [ http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.usability/browse_thread/thread/0dd173f268a16f34
].
So, my question, again, and to sum it up, is what should I do (more)
about these ideas of mine? I don't know if Limi or Horlander will read
this, but I believe they are the ones that have the answer for my
question.
Cheers,
Tiago Sá
Boriss
> about these ideas of mine?
Hey Tiago -
Thanks very much for the feedback and mockups - there's a lot of great
ideas here. I particularly liked your suggestion to allow opening
multiple pages at startup. This is a feature request we get a lot, as
many users begin each browsing session by "checking in" with a few
pages before beginning their work or browsing.
I was also wondering if you'd thought about how search results for an
in-content search would appear and link to the preferences UI. This
is a bit of a difficult problem, as theoretically a search could be
for any string and thus results could be multiple types of controls.
Mike Beltzner
> So, my question, again, and to sum it up, is what should I do (more)
> about these ideas of mine? I don't know if Limi or Horlander will read
> this, but I believe they are the ones that have the answer for my
> question.
This is the right place to bring them for discussion, and I'm very glad that you did so. Please understand that there may be some limitations to what we can do easily in the product and within the timeframes we have set for ourselves, but I think there's a lot of good ideas in your mockup, and it's always great to see this level of feedback!
cheers,
mike
Tiago Sá
> Thanks very much for the feedback and mockups - there's a lot of great
> ideas here. I particularly liked your suggestion to allow opening
> multiple pages at startup. This is a feature request we get a lot, as
> many users begin each browsing session by "checking in" with a few
> pages before beginning their work or browsing.
already have the back end technology for that. It's more of an issue
in terms of how we present that feature to the user (hence the
preferences panel discussion).
On Jun 2, 9:18 pm, Boriss <flyingtoas...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was also wondering if you'd thought about how search results for an
> in-content search would appear and link to the preferences UI. This
> is a bit of a difficult problem, as theoretically a search could be
> for any string and thus results could be multiple types of controls.
Herlander proposed that search field in his original concept, and I
left it there mostly because it looks promising. I really haven't
thought about how it would work, mostly because it's, as you say,
difficult, and I'm not part of the team, but I will definitely give it
a try soon. I imagine linking to the option should be much easier with
the kind of organization in my mockup (compared to the current
organization), but in terms of what it actually searches for, and how
it searches it, I guess I'll have to think about it.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking lots of people will be asking
questions to the search field. Is it realistic to think of a search
function that detects a question (interrogation mark, or however the
language asks a question - "ka" in Japanese, for example) and, besides
presenting the search results, asks the user if he needs support (and
direct him to SUMO)? I'm thinking we'd also have to account for those
who ask questions without interrogation marks (detect lengthy queries,
maybe). Also, due to the limited number of possible results, search
results would probably need to be handled way differently than in a
normal search engine, and present results, even when they don't
include all words in the query.
Anyway, as I said, I'll think about it.
And thanks very much for the reply :)
Tiago Sá
> This is the right place to bring them for discussion, and I'm very glad that you did so. Please understand that there may be some limitations to what we can do easily in the product and within the timeframes we have set for ourselves, but I think there's a lot of good ideas in your mockup, and it's always great to see this level of feedback!
>
> cheers,
> mike
I understand time and technological limitations, and I tried to keep
them in mind. Hopefully I wasn't too ambitious, and hopefully the
ideas that do have merit will have an influence on the final product.
In any case, I'll keep working on the mockup, refining it and
implementing other ideas. It's not the product itself, so what really
matters is the concept behind it.
Thanks again for the reply.
Asa Dotzler
> First of all, Stephan Horlander [ http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/ ]
> is the one in charge of in-content UI. He's shown his awesome mockups
> in a recent blog post [ http://blog.stephenhorlander.com/in-content-ui-visual-unification/
> ] but, from what I understood, there's still loads to do and think
> about in all this. I really don't have a deep understanding of
> Firefox's development process, but I would like to give my feedback or
> contribution to the in-content preferences panel. I've been making a
> few mockups (for a while now) about how an eventual (and needed)
> redesign of the preferences panel would look like. And here's what I
> have to show, at the moment:
Tiago, nice work and well presented.
Without actual data to back it up, I really do think multiple tabs on
launch is a valuable feature for a large percentage of browser users and
so I really like your "use an open tab _v_" selection menu in your
proposed Preferences -> Basic -> Home Page mock-up.
Perhaps that same metaphor could be carried to the Preferences -> Basic
-> Home Page -> Multiple Home Pages panel of your proposed Preferences
panel. Being able to select from the current set of loaded tabs could be
even more valuable here than in the single home page case.
- A
Tiago Sá
> Tiago, nice work and well presented.
>
> Without actual data to back it up, I really do think multiple tabs on
> launch is a valuable feature for a large percentage of browser users and
> so I really like your "use an open tab _v_" selection menu in your
> proposed Preferences -> Basic -> Home Page mock-up.
>
> Perhaps that same metaphor could be carried to the Preferences -> Basic
> -> Home Page -> Multiple Home Pages panel of your proposed Preferences
> panel. Being able to select from the current set of loaded tabs could be
> even more valuable here than in the single home page case.
>
> - A
Hello Asa. Thanks for the reply. That "use an open tab _v_" was more
of an obvious solution for the impossibility to implement "use current
tab" than an actual idea that I though about longly. I guess that's
why I forgot about the Multiple Home Pages panel.
However, the whole thing behind the redefinition of Home Page with
Firefox 4 (and how to handle multiple home pages) needs to be given
serious thought. I'll create a new topic here (if there's none) to
talk about that, because there's a whole bunch of design issues that
need to be addressed, and bugzilla is not the place to discuss it.
Pavol Vaskovic
browsing history and bookmarks is if the "Add an address" field featured
Awesomebar autocompletion drop down.
Regards
Pavol Vaskovic