Going Back; Fixing Paper Cuts

[Edward Lee]

There's a bunch of fixes for issues that people have reported here on
this list and on GitHub. Check out the details in the latest update:
https://mozillalabs.com/prospector/2011/03/29/going-back-fixing-paper-cuts

Please leave feedback on that post in this thread.

Ed

[sheepoverfence]

Could you have multiple context menus?

It would be nice if one right-click brought up a context menu with most used stuff, and a double right-click brought up a different context menu with more browsing based options.

So one right click will give you standard options, and second click will give you: forward, back, refresh, stop, bookmarks, etc.

[Pierre]

I really love Home Dash. And I'm happy to see how it evolved since version 1.
The latest improvements add even more value to this new UI.

But... the right-click approach gives raise to some usability problems on "touch" Mac, IMHO.

Indeed, I have two machines running Mac OS X 10.6.6 : a white MacBook (early 2008, so without multitouch, the trackpad only accepts one or two finger taps but none of the other 'modern' Mac gestures such as 3-finger swipe, pinch...) and an iMac with the Magic Trackpad (I don't use a mouse anymore, or rarely, when I need more precision, say when I'm using Photoshop... but it's a bit off topic !)

Problem is : "right-click" on any of these machines therefore means two fingers *tap*, at least with the way I configured it.
Emphasis added on tap. That means I can't "right-click" *and* hold this right click.

With my configuration, a two finger tap (what Windows people would name "a right click") will invariably invoke the 'classic' contextual menu, not the new 'in place' Home Dash menu.

Therefore, I have to reach the upper left Firefox icon if I want access to the new features of Home Dash 9 (back, reload...).

If I really want to access the Home Dash menu whenever my mouse pointer is, I have to use the Ctrl-click trick to invoke right-click, which is not usual for me and then somewhat breaks my workflow.

I understand this is probably be an edge case, and that the Prospector team is still experimenting with this whole new UI, but I'm confident enough in people at Mozilla to find a solution for that in future updates, because you always satisfy all your users, whatever their platform / hardware is ;-)

[Edward Lee]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 5:11 PM, Pierre <connect...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "right-click" on any of these machines therefore means two fingers *tap*

I'm using a unibody late-2008 MacBook with 10.6.7, and the Trackpad
options has a couple options for Secondary Click:

1) One Finger (Bottom Left or Bottom Right Corner)
2) Two Finger

Both of them work with Home Dash for me. If I activate (1), I can
press and hold a corner and still move the pointer. If I activate (2),
I can press and hold with two fingers then (optionally) remove one
finger to move the pointer. Using the two-finger tap and hold does
seem to prevent later two-finger scrolling (horizontal or vertical)
though.

Just checking, do you see the Firefox icon move/temporarily appear as
you do the Two-Finger tap? What happens if you depress the trackpad?
For me, I can confirm that just putting 2 fingers on the trackpad
doesn't trigger the Tap and actually doing a tap does cause the icon
to move then move back immediately.

Ed

[Edward Lee]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 12:05 PM, sheepoverfence
<sheepov...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> So one right click will give you standard options, and second click will
> give you: forward, back, refresh, stop, bookmarks, etc.

Just making sure I understood, you would prefer that the first click
brings up the usual context menu (open link in tab, back, view image)
and then a second right-click would dismiss that context menu and
bring up a different menu similar to what Home Dash 9 provides? Would
the second menu be an actual menu or show icons?

Any particular reason for this interaction? Is it that you don't want
to right-click then move the mouse to trigger the Home Dash menu? Or
that you don't like having to click-and-hold then release to trigger
an action?

Ed

[Pierre]

Thanks replying so fast, Edward.
Here are my 'in context' replies/comments ;-)

> I'm using a unibody late-2008 MacBook with 10.6.7, and the Trackpad
> options has a couple options for Secondary Click:

That's why I wrote I'm using an *early* 2008 MacBook. My MacBook
includes the old fashioned, white plastic trackpad, with the large
white button being a separate part, distinct from the trackpad
surface. The trackpad does not depress itself. Therefore I don't have
the options you described (one finger bottom left or bottom right
corner, or two fingers). I can only check an option "Use two finger
tap for secondary click". A two finger click is physically impossible
on this machine, and a one finger click on the button (again, a one
finger click on the trackpad is impossible, it could only be a tap) is
always interpreted as a primary (left) click.

> Just checking, do you see the Firefox icon move/temporarily appear as
> you do the Two-Finger tap?

Yes, I do.

> What happens if you depress the trackpad?

Unfortunately, I can't, see above.

> For me, I can confirm that just putting 2 fingers on the trackpad
> doesn't trigger the Tap and actually doing a tap does cause the icon
> to move then move back immediately.

Same thing for me.


However, now that I've tested it further, I have to admit that what
you describe (option 1 or option 2) works on my iMac with the Magic
Trackpad : I can hold a secondary click on this trackpad because this
trackpad can be depressed.

So the problem I originally described only applies to my old-but-no-so-
old MacBook (early 2008) with a non-multitouch trackpad.

So, I guess we're facing a "limitations-due-to-old-hardware" problem
here, and I would understand that you can't really support older
hardware (yet another reason to buy an all new MacBook Air ! Haha)
> Ed

[Edward Lee]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 5:42 PM, Pierre <connect...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I guess we're facing a "limitations-due-to-old-hardware" problem

Well, not all new hardware platforms support right-click, e.g.,
tablets. But in that setting, a long press is the usual way to bring
up the context menu. Something similar could also be applied to the
desktop so that click and holding for a second without moving could
trigger the Home Dash menu.

Ed

[HbbS]

Why do we have to keep right click pressed to access menu?

This behavior is killing my user experience (and my wrist)

Please, consider just one right click, move to Firefox icon,  then (without keeping any click button pressed) move around at will. To escape the menu, one click on the page.

[HbbS]

Forget to add that I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 on a Desktop.

[Pierre]

> Please, consider just one right click, move to Firefox icon,  then (without
> keeping any click button pressed) move around at will. To escape the menu,
> one click on the page.

This would be ideal for me, too. But... problem is it would conflict
with the current right click behavior, i.e bringing Firefox contextual
menu ;-)

[Pierre]

(well, actually it would not exactly conflict with the current
behavior, provided that the Home Dash Firefox icon does not disappear
as soon as you right-click !)

[Edward Lee]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 12:25 AM, HbbS <hebert....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Why do we have to keep right click pressed to access menu?

The menu was designed so that users could do an action like go back
with just one click. But supporting both that and a two-click back
should be doable.
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/204

Additionally, getting at the Home Dash menu could save an initial
click by automatically showing the menu when throwing the pointer to
the corner:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/205

We'll also try out various other methods of opening the Home Dash menu
like long presses too:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues/203

Ed

[Pierre]

All of that sounds very nice, Edward !
Looking forward to test it soon "in a browser near you" ;-)

[Lloyd Atkinson]

First off, thanks for the innovative experience! I'm definitely having to spend some time getting used to it, but it's a fun challenge to play with these new UIs.

I do have a couple questions about the Firefox button & Status text.

If the Right-Click menu is in place, is there still a need for the firefox button at the top-left?

I find that the Firefox button at the top doesn't jive well with the almost-but-not-quite full page reading experience, since it often covers-up links. For example, in this google groups page, the button and status text are sitting on top of the GMail/Calendar/Documents etc. row.

Related, and more annoying, I find the disappearing status text annoying with Dash. As you browse each page, your eyes are distracted when the status text disappears after timeout.

I would suggest some combination of the following:
 - Optionally disable the Firefox button & Status Text completely
 - Move them to the bottom left instead of the top left
 - Keep the status text permanent
 - Reduce the font size of the status text to match the font size of the standard status text bar

Thanks!

[Edward Lee]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 4:19 AM, Nobody <mlhpr....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Home Dash is missing option to customize the sites..
We hope to add this in soon where you could perhaps drag a history
result or an open tab (maybe dragging the favicon?) into the top sites
dashboard area to save it there. We would also like to create separate
dashboards for different topics -- perhaps default empty? -- kinda
similar to how tabs are automatically grouped but in this case, the
user can make manual groups.

> Theres an issue when going to full screen mode from home dash.
There seems to be a timing issue, and as you found out, pressing
alt-ctrl-shift-d once to disable then again to reenable should fix the
sizing. For now we'll just work around it with this issue:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues#issue/219

> firefox button moves away from cursor when clicked inside active iframes
Nice catch. We'll fix that here:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues#issue/218

Ed

[Edward Lee]

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 7:51 AM, Lloyd Atkinson <lloyda...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If the Right-Click menu is in place, is there still a need for the firefox
> button at the top-left?

Keeping it in the corner makes it easier to activate Home Dash without
needing to click something to start browsing. Just move the mouse to
the corner. We're adding a feature so that just pointing at the corner
will open up the menu instead of needing to click:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues#issue/205

> not-quite full page reading experience, since it often covers-up links

I suppose you run into this more when the status line is still showing
for pages that are pretty small to begin with? For now we'll add an
escape hatch for you to temporarily hide Home Dash without needing to
disable it. Hopefully giving enough time to read and/or click whatever
was hidden by the icon:
https://github.com/mozilla/prospector/issues#issue/206

> I find the disappearing status text annoying with Dash

So it's more that the change is distracting and not so much that you
wanted to see something but the status wasn't showing anymore? Would
an animation help? Or multiple stages of disappearing/fading?

Ed

[Lloyd Atkinson]

> I find the disappearing status text annoying with Dash
So it's more that the change is distracting and not so much that you
wanted to see something but the status wasn't showing anymore? Would
an animation help? Or multiple stages of disappearing/fading?

This point is definitely about the change being distracting when the initial page title text fades on timeout. I'm not sure if a fade would solve it, but it might be better and worth a try. 

Another experiment might be to put the status text back at the bottom of the screen, like the standard Firefox 4, and leave the Firefox button at the top. Shrug.

A couple more questions:

 - Is there a way to see a list of recently closed tabs? I find I use the "Recently Closed" list in Chrome quite often, searching through history is often too much for just retrieving the last couple tabs.

 - How is home dash expected to interact with existing new-tab addons? For example, I'm using "New Tab Jumpstart" which provides a "Page Dial", "Recently Closed List", and "Recent Bookmarks". However, with Home Dash enabled, neither of the lists show up, and the Page Dial boxes don't display their preview images. I'm not asking about compatibility with this specific addon, but just pointing out that there are a few existing addons that provide new-tab frequently-viewed, history, & bookmark access features that home dash may be trying to address as well. Have you thought about which parts of browsing should be integral to home dash, and which parts should come from other addons?

 - In one of the blog posts, something was mentioned about the user not really knowing the status of the tabs that aren't related to the current group. As in, maybe later, Firefox may unload tabs that havent been visited in a while. While I think that's a great idea usually, it might cause problems for tabs containing Web Apps, like say, Pandora, that a user may want to set and forget but remain resident. What's the current thinking surrounding tabs like that?

[AT]

I think there are a lot of interesting aspects of HomeDash and that it has real potential.  However, I find it paradoxically tiring and frustrating to use.  When I'm trying to navigate webpages quickly, I find myself giving up and going back to the regular user interface.

The biggest problem relates to being able to tell what tabs I have open and going quickly to the one that I want.  It's impossible to tell the tab that I want quickly and go straight to it if many are open. Often there are tabs that actually are open (as I thought) but I don't seem to be able to see them in HomeDash.  At other times, I'm sure I've opened a tab, but it's somehow gotten closed in the process. 

The most recent problem has arisen since changes were made (to support multiple platforms) that have HomeDash activated with a left rather than a right mouse keypress.  I was trying to complete an on-line form and everytime I positioned my mouse in a form box and clicked to begin entering data, the HomeDash display appeared.  This was distracting.  Is there a way to have a user option for it to work with right-click for those of us running windows?

I would also like the option to have my Bookmarks Toolbar continue to display across the top of my screen and use HomeDash for everything else.  To have to activate HomeDash and type in the initial part of a site name rather than just clicking an icon for sites that I use often seems highly inefficient.

Thanks for all of your hard work on this!