Trying out Fission for location bar preview of links
Mike Beltzner
> Remember how we talked about having the target URL show up in the
> URL bar when you hover over a link?
>
> Fission has a rudimentary implementation of this. Doesn't change the
> color etc, but nice for a quick impression of how it would feel.
Trying now. Quick impressions:
- I never liked the progress bar in the address field before, and
now I do; I wonder if that's because I use graphite and having it fill
in with grey feels less noisy than blue
- the link preview thing makes the location bar a little to a lot
jittery, but I actually got used to that pretty quickly
- one thing that also feels faster is that since the location bar
contains the destination URI, as you hover -> click -> load the page
the flow feels very smooth and natural since you don't actually see
the URI changing after the click
- there's some obvious cleanup we need to do in terms of making this
work better with the site identity button and illustrating the
difference between a link preview and the current URI
I have ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, though.
cheers,
mike
Johnathan Nightingale
page load "feel" faster for me. Though on pages that lag with some
background resource, the progress bar makes that lag more visible, as
well.
I wish I liked how it looked more, but that's amenable to styling.
J
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Johnathan Nightingale
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Mike Beltzner
> Giving it a shot as well. First impression is that, yes, it makes
> page load "feel" faster for me. Though on pages that lag with some
> background resource, the progress bar makes that lag more visible,
> as well.
That's true, and I think it's fungible in some interesting ways. Like,
if the page has rendered to a point where we're letting a user
interact with it, we could probably just push the status bar all the
way and leave some small indicator that some other resources are
coming in. Cheatz, a little, but valuable ones.
cheers,
mike
Neil Lee
> Giving it a shot as well. First impression is that, yes, it makes
> page load "feel" faster for me. Though on pages that lag with some
> background resource, the progress bar makes that lag more visible,
> as well.
>
> I wish I liked how it looked more, but that's amenable to styling.
Yes - for example, the GrApple theme bakes in some decent Fission
styling:
http://snaps.beatnikpad.com/fission-20090730-153546.png
I've had it installed for a long time and really like it, mainly
because it keeps everything address-related in one place. I don't have
to look down to the status bar to see if a page is loading, what the
address is I'm about to go to is, etc.
Neil
Dan Mills
skeleton addon the other day.
I had this idea, which I'm not sure if would work out--I was going to
leave a portion of the current URL on the left, and fade it out with a
gradient, then have some sort of icon (arrow?) and the new URL. The
hope was to make it more obvious that you haven't changed the current
URL and you're looking at the linked one instead.
Dan
Gervase Markham
> On 28-Jul-09, at 4:00 AM, Alexander Limi wrote:
>
>> Remember how we talked about having the target URL show up in the URL
>> bar when you hover over a link?
>>
>> Fission has a rudimentary implementation of this. Doesn't change the
>> color etc, but nice for a quick impression of how it would feel.
Couldn't I just surround the entire page of http://www.evil.com/ with <a
href="http://www.paypal.com">...</a> and do URL bar spoofing this way?
Gerv
Rob Campbell
preview. Funny how ingrained "look at the status bar to see where
you're going" is, even subconsciously, because I don't really like the
preview down there.
If we were to do something like this with the location bar, I think
we'd want to play with animations or some background color to draw the
eye to the locbar on link hover.
One unexpected bonus with the link preview is for toolbar bookmarks.
Paradoxically, I find hovering over them and seeing the immediate
feedback in the locbar quite nice. Possibly because of their proximity
to the awesome bar. I never really noticed toolbar bookmarks updating
the status bar before, or have forgotten about it.
On 10-Aug-09, at 10:09, Mike Beltzner wrote:
> On 10-Aug-09, at 7:13 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>
>> Couldn't I just surround the entire page of http://www.evil.com/
>> with <a href="http://www.paypal.com">...</a> and do URL bar
>> spoofing this way?
>
> You could, yes. This is why the change in how the URL bar looks when
> you're previewing a URL needs to be pretty apparent.
>
> Though anywhere that you clicked would take you to Paypal, wouldn't
> it?
>
> cheers,
> mike
Dan Mills
disorienting at first, but by now I've pretty much gotten used to it
up there.
I've disabled the status bar, since I don't really need it for
anything else, and I'm very happy with the change overall. I do wish
it was more obvious that it's a link and not the current URL, I've
been fooled once or twice for a second (then I move the mouse and it's
obvious).
Not sure how to best convey it visually, but just changing the favicon
is not enough imo.
Dan
On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 6:37 AM, Rob Campbell<rcam...@mozilla.com> wrote:
> I'm using Fission again too and find myself hunting for the link preview.
> Funny how ingrained "look at the status bar to see where you're going" is,
> even subconsciously, because I don't really like the preview down there.
>
> If we were to do something like this with the location bar, I think we'd
> want to play with animations or some background color to draw the eye to the
> locbar on link hover.
>
> One unexpected bonus with the link preview is for toolbar bookmarks.
> Paradoxically, I find hovering over them and seeing the immediate feedback
> in the locbar quite nice. Possibly because of their proximity to the awesome
> bar. I never really noticed toolbar bookmarks updating the status bar
> before, or have forgotten about it.
>
> On 10-Aug-09, at 10:09, Mike Beltzner wrote:
>
>> On 10-Aug-09, at 7:13 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>>
>>> Couldn't I just surround the entire page of http://www.evil.com/ with <a
>>> href="http://www.paypal.com">...</a> and do URL bar spoofing this way?
>>
Gervase Markham
> On 10-Aug-09, at 7:13 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>
>> <a href="http://www.paypal.com">...</a> and do URL bar spoofing this way?
>
> you're previewing a URL needs to be pretty apparent.
Except that there wouldn't be a change for this particular page - the
bar would be static on that particular page because you would always be
in mouseover mode.
"Wow, a few months ago you saw the name of the organization in green
when visiting Paypal's site. Now instead the background of the URL bar
is fuschia. <shrug> I'm sure they'll decide what colour scheme to use
one of these days."
I guess my concern here is that over the past couple of years, we've
tried to make changes such that the URL bar is trusted UI, with sites
having very little control over what it says in terms of trying a spoof
- and those remaining bits of control, such as favicons, do have the
potential to cause problems. Displaying a totally site-controlled string
in the URL bar area sounds to be like a regression of that aim.
> Though anywhere that you clicked would take you to Paypal, wouldn't it?
<a href="http://www.paypal.com" onclick="return false;">...</a>.
Gerv
Dan Mills
> On 10/08/09 14:09, Mike Beltzner wrote:
>>
>> On 10-Aug-09, at 7:13 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>>
>>> Couldn't I just surround the entire page of http://www.evil.com/ with
>>> <a href="http://www.paypal.com">...</a> and do URL bar spoofing this way?
>>
>> You could, yes. This is why the change in how the URL bar looks when
>> you're previewing a URL needs to be pretty apparent.
>
> Except that there wouldn't be a change for this particular page - the bar
> would be static on that particular page because you would always be in
> mouseover mode.
If it was clear you were looking at a preview, the fact that it's
non-changing won't matter.
e.g., something like my (potentially ugly? dunno) idea of doing something like:
[link icon] http://origi...[fade out] [arrow] http://link-url/
It would be hard to confuse that for the current URL, imo. And as
soon as you mouse up to the location bar it will revert to the current
URL, the page has no control over that.
Dan
Alexander Limi
> On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Gervase Markham<ge...@mozilla.org> wrote:
> > On 10/08/09 14:09, Mike Beltzner wrote:
> >>
> >> On 10-Aug-09, at 7:13 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> >>
> >>> Couldn't I just surround the entire page of http://www.evil.com/ with
> >>> <a href="http://www.paypal.com">...</a> and do URL bar spoofing this
> way?
> >>
> >> You could, yes. This is why the change in how the URL bar looks when
> >> you're previewing a URL needs to be pretty apparent.
> >
> > Except that there wouldn't be a change for this particular page - the bar
> > would be static on that particular page because you would always be in
> > mouseover mode.
>
> If it was clear you were looking at a preview, the fact that it's
> non-changing won't matter.
>
> e.g., something like my (potentially ugly? dunno) idea of doing something
> like:
>
> [link icon] http://origi...[fade out] [arrow] http://link-url/
>
I like this idea. Probably all comes down to how pretty we can make it if
we're going to pull it off, but it's the best solution I have seen so far. I
definitely agree with Gerv that there is a potential security issue here, no
matter what color we make the target URL text — and I should have mentioned
that in my initial post.
— Alexander Limi (almost back from vacation, just checking in for a little
email action)
Bryan Clark
> On 28-Jul-09, at 4:00 AM, Alexander Limi wrote:
>
>> Remember how we talked about having the target URL show up in the URL
>> bar when you hover over a link?
>>
>> Fission has a rudimentary implementation of this. Doesn't change the
>> color etc, but nice for a quick impression of how it would feel.
>
Ok, I've got some long term impressions now that I've been trying this
for a while.
I like it.
It does make the page load feel more fluid than it normally does. I
have often felt that we left people in the dark when they click a link
where we should be very explicit about the activity taking place.
There is something still a little jarring about this. I'm not sure if
it's styling, color or what. But when a page loads fairly quickly I
would rather the progress meter be more faded in the background.
However when a page stops loading or loading progress slows down I'd
like progress to be more obvious, throbbing? Something along the lines
of velocitation, I want speed to appear like a blur when I'm going fast
but things should be clearer and more obvious when I'm going slow.
~ Bryan
Neil
> I have often felt that we left people in the dark when they click a
> link where we should be very explicit about the activity taking place.
We used to have a spinner cursor for this ;-)
--
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