Alex Limi

Safari adopts proposed Firefox download manager design

Alexander Limi — 2011-05-03T22:25:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

Working for Mozilla on designing the next versions of Firefox, one of the great benefits is that we get to do our designs in the open, and improve all web browsers, not just our own product.¹ ¹ People are often surprised when we tell them that we’re not trying to “win the marketshare game,” but instead make sure that there is a thriving, diverse ecosystem on the web, with no single dominant player — which at this point, Mozilla has succeeded spectacularly at compared to a few years ago, when the browser market was stagnant, and one browser dominated the web.

That’s why it’s so exciting to see our designs being adopted by other browser makers. A while back, I wrote a comprehensive overview on download managers in the major web browsers, and made some recommendations on how to fix them. I also encouraged other browsers to implement this approach.

You can read the entire article, but it’s probably a bit too in-depth for you right now, so I’ll give the short version. Here’s the proposed design that was posted in that article:

Sketch by Stephen Horlander.

Today, I was very happy to see that Safari has implemented our design in their upcoming release, as evidenced by screenshots posted at Dustin Curtis’ site, here’s the image he posted:

There’s of course a lot more detail to this than just a couple of screenshots — covered in the in-depth article — but they seem to follow the overall design path we described there.

So what’s the status of this work in Firefox? You can follow along over at the Download Manager feature page, but the short story is that it’s currently being updated to the new panel UI that was introduced in Firefox 4, and is currently undergoing review. The aim is to land this as soon as possible, which with our new, accelerated release cycle shouldn’t be far away at all.

Also of note, implementing this for Firefox is being worked on by a volunteer to the project, Paolo Amadini, and he’s doing a great job.

The best part? Mozilla is hiring UX designers, so if you’re a great designer that would like to work on a product that reaches 400 million users — and have the freedom to design in the open & improve every web browser out there — apply to join the Firefox UX team today!

UX improvements in Firefox 4

Alexander Limi — 2011-03-15T18:55:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

With Firefox 4 right around the corner — we might have the final release as early as next week — it’s a good time to take a quick look at some of the user interface and user experience improvements in the release. There’s a million (only slightly less, really) improvements in Firefox 4, and other blogs and our own fantastic engagement team will tell you about the other great improvements — but I thought I’d publish this quick “changes we think you should take a look at” post for those of you who can’t wait.

New look

As you probably know, we have an entirely new look across all our platforms — Windows, Mac OS X & Linux/BSD. Among the improvements:

Tabs are now on top — and they move into the space in the titlebar when running in maximized mode on Windows,
Full Windows 7 & Vista integration with Aero Glass,
Less busy layout, improved icons and glyphs,
More space for your web pages,
Whole-window Personas,
…& you can even choose to not have a dedicated search box for an even cleaner look, since you can enter searches directly in the location bar now, and always get a predictable search result.

Firefox 3.6 vs Firefox 4 on Windows 7:

Firefox 3.6 vs Firefox 4 on Mac OS X:

…and since I don’t have a Linux setup available for screenshots right now, you’ll have to trust GNOME and Linux hacker Jeff Waugh on this one:

More efficient menu

New single-access menu for Windows 7, Vista & Linux, which was adopted by Opera (and in a similar vein, Chrome unified their two menus into one, too) soon after we put our original designs online¹ — they managed to ship before we did, which is fair game — and a side effect of doing designs in the open!¹ And for the record, we think this is great — everyone wins, and we get a better UI in all browsers when this happens!

Faster, faster, faster

In addition to the impressive speed from our new JavaScript and HTML5 engines and making use of hardware acceleration, there are a lot of improvements in Firefox 4 that make the user experience much faster, especially when it comes to starting your browser:

Startup: Firefox 4 starts up in a fraction of the time that Firefox 3 did, and we’ve put a lot of effort into making every part of the Firefox experience just a little bit faster and more efficient.
New home page: The home page is no longer loaded over the network, which means you never have to wait for it to load. Our goal was to get you to your web pages as fast as possible.
Faster restore of a previous browsing session: When restoring a previous session, we load less pages in parallel, which makes everything more responsive and faster. If you switch to a different tab while these are being loaded, that page will get priority.
Updating add-ons: If you use one of the many amazing Firefox add-ons, you are probably tired of waiting for them to upgrade when you start Firefox. This now happens in the background, and gets out of your way.

New functionality

There’s a lot of new functionality in Firefox 4 too, here are some of our favorites:

Sync: Getting the same experience across all your computers & devices is increasingly important. It’s pretty common to have desktop computers, laptops and mobile phones, and you want them all to have access to your open tabs, history, passwords and bookmarks. Unlike other services, we encrypt all your data, before sending it over the network, making Firefox Sync the most secure option if you want to keep your devices in sync. Adding new devices is also incredibly simple. Remember, Firefox 4 is available in the Android Market for your phone, and if you’re on the iPhone, you can use the Firefox Home companion app.
App tabs: If you use web apps like Pandora, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook or any other site that you keep open all day, you’ll love our new app tabs. With a simple right click on any tab, you can pin it to the left side of tabs, which makes it always available, and takes up less space. It will also notify you with a discreet light bulb when there’s new content in the app tab.
Tab Groups: If you’re one of those people that have a lot of tabs open, you are probably working on several projects at the same time. A new feature in Firefox 4 called Tab Groups — also known as “Panorama” — lets you group these tabs into projects, and get the projects that you’re not working on right now out of your way. This makes it easier to focus on what you want to do next.
Install add-ons without restarting: Tired of having to restart when you install a new add-on? Firefox 4 adds the capability for add-ons to avoid this restart, and as they are updated to make use of this, you shouldn’t have to restart your browser much anymore.
Add-ons manager: There’s an entirely new add-ons manager in Firefox 4, which gives more space to managing your add-ons, and makes it easier to find and install new ones.

Streamlined

Some of my personal favorite improvements in Firefox 4 are a collection of small tweaks and improvements — there are many, many — and they add up to a significant amount of saved time and reduced friction while using the browser:

Fewer dialogs, fewer questions — our goal was to balance the questions we ask you, so we don’t interrupt you unnecessarily — while still keeping you in control.
It’s easier to dismiss notifications — those things that tell you about geolocation, password saving, &c. — you can click anywhere outside the notification to close it, and you can get it back if you closed it accidentally.
If there is an open tab with the same name as a page you’re looking for, you can switch to it directly from the location bar results. (aka. “Switch to tab”)
Modal dialogs can no longer block other tabs:
Bookmarks bar and add-ons bar are only shown if you are actually using them, and easy to turn on and off.
Firefox will no longer automatically put you into offline mode unless you ask for it.

…& lots more. But I promised this overview would be quick, so I’ll end it here. There’s lots of goodness you should explore by downloading and testing it on your own!

We’ve already started on Firefox 5, 6 & 7 designs under our new accelerated release schedule, and can’t wait to show you what’s next for Firefox.

Now, go download Firefox 4^RC already!

Comments? Find me on Twitter. Looking forward to hear what you think about Firefox 4!

Mythbusting: Why Firefox 4 won’t score 100 on Acid3

Alexander Limi — 2011-01-25T00:00:00Z

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Update, September 16, 2011: The Acid3 test has been updated to drop the tests that weren't relevant to modern browsers and standards, so any version of Firefox going back to — and including — Firefox 4 will show as scoring 100. Thanks to the authors for updating the test. Original article follows.

Acid3 was a test written by Ian Hickson in 2008 that tests a limited selection of web browser features, and assigns a score from 0 to 100, depending on which features are supported.

Every once in a while — especially around the time of an upcoming new release — people argue that Firefox isn’t standards compliant, since it doesn’t score 100 on this test, but has been scoring 97 for quite a while, and will probably never implement what’s required to reach a score of 100.

Here’s why, explained by Mozilla engineer Boris Zbarsky, from a comment on Slashdot, and reposted with permission — emphasis added by me:

Those remaining 3 points are SVG Fonts.

Opera and Webkit implemented (very brokenly, in at least Opera’s case) a small subset of SVG 1.1 Fonts; basically just enough to pass Acid3.

We don’t particularly want to do that small subset in Gecko, since it gives no benefits to authors or users over the existing downloadable font support (beyond the brownie points on Acid3).

On the other hand, support for the full specification in a UA that also supports HTML is… very difficult. SVG fonts are just not designed with integration with HTML in mind. Once you put an in a glyph, all sorts of issues arise — both in terms of the spec being under-defined and in terms of the behavior being very difficult to implement, no matter what the spec said.

At this point, the SVG working group has decided that SVG Fonts will no longer be a core part of SVG but will be a separate specification, and that it might need some serious work if anyone is ever to implement it in full.

Related, Robert O’Callahan has a post on why not implementing features is hard, and why it’s sometimes even important. In other words, the WOFF font standard is more appropriate, works in more browsers, and is a better way to handle custom font support in browsers. Implementing just enough of the standard to pass a test is disingenuous, and has nothing to do with standards compliance. Acid3 was useful at the time to give the general public a way to see where some of the browsers were falling down expressed as a simple numerical rating — but nearly three years later, with all the major browsers supporting these features, it’s not really relevant anymore.

The next time someone posts a comment about how Firefox still doesn’t score 100 on Acid3, please link them to this article. I wrote this post since there isn’t a highly ranked piece on this if you search for “Firefox Acid3,” and there should be. Hopefully my site’s search engine ranking can be useful for something.

Help us finish Firefox 4

Alexander Limi — 2011-01-24T10:25:00Z

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We’re very close to releasing Firefox 4, and the team & contributors are doing amazing work these days to fix the final remaining bugs, and get the new version out the door.

The current plan is to ship two more betas — beta 10 & beta 11 — so we have until the end of the month — that’s 7 days as of this writing — until beta 11 freezes. More information in Christian Legnitto’s post about the release schedule.

If you’re an employee or contractor for Mozilla, your job is pretty clear:

Get the number of hard blockers down to zero.

In addition to the “hard blockers” — essentially, bugs we will delay the release for — there’s a category called “soft blockers.” These are bugs and improvements that we wouldn’t hold the release for in isolation, but if we didn’t fix any of them, the product we’re shipping won’t of be the quality you expect from Firefox. So it’s an aggregate way of looking at it, and we’d like to fix as many of these as possible before release.

This is where you as a community member can make a difference. If you’re a community member — or have exhausted the hard blockers you are capable of helping with — your next step should be to look at the list of soft blockers, and help resolve these.

A large number of UI bugs naturally falls into the soft blocker end of the spectrum, since they are often a case of “this is unfortunate, but not a showstopper” — with some obvious exceptions. We know we can’t get them all fixed before the release, but that won’t stop us from trying!

How do you choose which soft blockers to pick up if you want to improve the user experience of Firefox 4, and have exhausted the hard blockers you can help with? There are some bugs that we’d like to call out, that we think would make Firefox 4 a lot better:

Fix one of the very visible bugs in the main window — A large number of these bugs are tracked via the live updated, annotated screenshots on areweprettyyet.com¹. ¹ The name started as a reference to its sister site, arewefastyet.com, which tracks Firefox JavaScript performance against other web browsers. Of course, we list things that are more about interactions and that are more than skin deep, but the name stuck, and “pretty” in this context means more than just pixel-level polish. Make sure you take a look at all the different areas listed under the “Project” menu, and also note that you can list all the bugs in a particular project in Bugzilla form by going to “Actions” → “View all bugs in a Bugzilla table.”
Help clean up the “traditional” menu (used on Windows XP, Mac OS X and some variants of Linux) — this is mostly simple fixes to move or remove menu items now that the necessary infrastructure support for this (bug 607224) has landed. See Alex Faaborg’s comprehensive overview of the changes that need to be done.
Help simplify the add-ons manager — the tracking bug for this is bug 623250, and Jennifer Boriss has also blogged about this. Several of these are a simple matter of just knowing enough about CSS to help out.
Update Start page with no string impact — bug 627301
Remaining work on the URL preview — bugs 625952, 625945, 625956.
Add-on bar missing shortcut — bug 616015
Animation when closing doorhangers, so it's obvious how to get them back — bug 610545 (requested soft blocker)
Styles for geolocation and password manager (bug 615471) + site identity (bug 610053)
Streamline search field, has patch that works on all platforms except XP right now, bug 592909
Search field isn't tab-specific when tabs are on top, which breaks the conceptual & visual hierarchy: bug 565740
Any other bug on the soft blocker list.

Firefox 4 is already an amazing release — you’re running the betas, right? — and this is your chance to help put it over the top by fixing one of the soft blockers. If you have any comments or need help getting started, you can find me on Twitter.

A fresh Firefox for the new year

Alexander Limi — 2011-01-04T21:45:00Z

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Happy new year! It’s time for a fresh start. One area where you can help us improve Firefox 4 — if you run the beta or nightly build, which you should! — is to make sure you are using the product that our users are actually encountering when they download it.

Right now, whether you remember it or not, you are probably carrying around a lot of preferences and settings that were set sometime during Firefox 1.x, 2.x or 3.x — either by yourself or by an add-on or upgrade step. This means that your experience is probably very different from that of a new user. I took a look at my own preferences, and was surprised to see the amount of non-standard prefs I have set, even though I try to keep my browser as stock as possible.

With Firefox Sync, it’s easier than ever to keep your bookmarks and passwords/form data, but reset your preferences so that you are running a vanilla Firefox 4.

The basic process is:

Set up Firefox Sync if you haven’t already.
Go to Preferences → Sync → Manage Account → My Sync Key and record your Sync Key and make sure you remember your login details from the Sync preferences.
Quit Firefox, and start it with the profile manager
Create a new profile
Open the Sync preference pane in the new, blank profile.
Click “Set up Sync.”
Since you already have an account, click “Connect”
Click “Sync Options” and uncheck “Preferences” from the list of things to sync. Click “Done.”
Click “I don’t have the device with me” to be able to enter Synk Key and username/password manually. Click “Continue” when you have entered the details.

You will now have a fresh, shiny Firefox 4 — but with your bookmarks and stored passwords present. It'll take a minute or two before everything is synchronized, depending on how much data you have — so give it a little time to populate your new profile.

Note that add-ons aren’t synced — but it might be a good time to take stock of what add-ons you really are using anyway, and re-install them when you really miss them.

You can also revert to your old profile at any point by selecting it from the Profile Manager — we aren’t deleting anything, just creating a new profile.

Running with this setup for a while will help you find default preferences that aren’t optimal, and see which ones we have fixed. Do we still lose your form data if you’re on HTTPS and your browser crashes? No. Do we still let JavaScript resize the main browser window? Yes. & cetera.

I’m sure you’ll have a couple of epiphanies during the first day or so, and don’t forget to file bugs when you find settings that have an annoying or unreasonable default setting!

Firefox UX Team update: Mozilla all-hands & beta 8, beta 9, beta 10 planning

Alexander Limi — 2010-12-07T18:35:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

Next week is the Mozilla All-hands, which means most of the people working for Mozilla will be in the office to hack on Firefox 4 and discuss the future. For the UX team, the main priority is to work on (and get help with!) a lot of the niggling and annoying issues about the current main UI. Many of these bugs are easy to fix when you’re in the same room with some kick-ass developers, so we’re hoping to make some real progress here.

Alex Faaborg has put together a great visual overview — updated live! — of some of the remaining fixes that are needed — have a look and see if there’s anything here you can help fix:

The team will be hanging out in the Holodeck room, we hope you can dedicate a few hours and help make Firefox better for our millions of users.

Team priorities this week

Overall, most of us are getting everything in line for the all-hands, so we can work effectively on closing a lot of the remaining issues for Firefox 4. Outside of that, the team is focusing on:

Jennifer Boriss: Blog posts on add-ons bar, collecting feedback on add-ons manager; Attend and present at Add-on Con; Third-party extension opt-in work; “Get add-ons” pane; Content area message for “install third-party add-on”
Stephen Horlander: Finish about:home Designs; Patch for updated Bookmark Star and History Dropdown; Get clarity around making everything 16x16 icons; Fix more bugs!
Alex Faaborg: Track XP changes to main window; Sync: Creating overview of remaining UI issues, first sync issues: people shut down Sync too early,; Create visual bug overview for Sync; Add-on selection screen error cases; File a bug on integrating plugins into the add-on selection screen
Alexander Limi: Set up work session to review the add-ons manager & identify what some easy improvements we could make.; Gather wider list of Panorama issues, compare to current bug list, and file bugs on the ones that aren’t handled yet.; Making sure all our bugs have beta targets, and that UX Priorities is up to date, and duplicates as little information as possible.; Make sure all our tracked bugs have beta targets.; Second pass on Roadmap for 2011, UX & product-centric view.

Firefox UX Team update: Focus for final betas

Alexander Limi — 2010-11-14T22:50:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

It’s been a while since our last update on the UX front — we’ve been busy working on Firefox 4 beta 7, which was just released this past week — and it’s kind of a big deal.

There’s amazingly fast JavaScript performance, app tabs, Panorama, hardware acceleration, WebGL & improved session restore — including “hidden” BarTab functionality — and beta 7 is the “feature complete” Firefox 4, which means that we’re mostly working on making the things that are in beta 7 better in the next couple of betas, before we move to RC early in 2011 — and not adding any new major features.

If you haven’t downloaded Firefox 4 beta 7 yet, you really should. If you haven’t tested any of the previous betas, this is the perfect one to start with, as it is functionally very close to the product we’ll be shipping in a few months. Did we mention that it’s ridiculously fast?

You can download the Firefox 4 beta here.

Over the past week we’ve been putting some time into clarifying what we should be focusing on for the upcoming betas before we get to the release candidate. After talking to the rest of the UX team, we came up with an updated list of priorities.

As always, we track the full, detailed list of UX priorities on the Mozilla wiki — but we call out some specific improvements and fixes here, so you know what to expect from the final product — and where you can help out, if you can.

Status bar & progress bar: With the new progress indicators and moving URL preview to the URL bar, there’s still some information lacking in the status part of the URL bar. Recommendations:
- Show “Waiting for example.com” for pathological cases, e.g. when we have been waiting for a server more than N seconds,
- Drop http from the preview, and drop hostname if it’s on the same domain,
- The gray color used right now is too weak, improve contrast,
- Right-aligned URL is hard to scan, instead anchor location in the middle at consistent starting point for more efficient visual parsing.
This is tracked in bug 613390.
Add-ons bar: This change is causing a fair bit of confusion & frustration among our users since it’s still incomplete and needs some edge cases worked out. It’s also hard for them to understand what advantages the new approach gives them. Recommendations:
- Limi will sit down with Faaborg and identify what’s missing,
- We then talk to Dietrich & Drew Wilcoxon and figure out how to prioritize fixes.
- Finally, write up a blog post to clarify where it’s heading (possibly with Boriss?)
XP theme: Nobody’s owning the XP theme on an implementation level right now. It looks okay, but isn’t quite there yet, and probably needs an owner.
Add-on menus: Extensions that add menu items on XP will not add on Windows 7 and vice versa.
- We should talk about this in the Firefox team meeting or on the lists, see if there’s a way to solve this.
Disabling slipstreamed add-ons: Disabling add-ons the user never asked for (on upgrade) is currently unowned, and should be a priority for a smooth upgrade and startup experience. This is bug 596343. Will need a few betas for feedback and managing expectations. Bring up in the Firefox team meeting.
Tabs in titlebar on Windows: A large part pf the reason for moving tabs on top was to make use of the Fitts’ Law edges for the new Firefox menu, tabs — both sides & corners. This is bug 572160.
App tab behaviors: There are several issues and edge cases from having a navigation toolbar — if we’re supposed to test without toolbars, it needs to be in a beta soon. This is bug 585445. Also, closing an app tabs with Cmd-W shouldn’t be possible, you make them persist for a reason.
New about:home design: Unowned right now, but Stephen is probably the best person to take this on. Need to figure out when this should land, feeling is that it’ll require at least two iterations to shake out any edge cases.
Doorhanger notifications: Recall button doesn’t really look clickable right now, hard to discover how to dismiss, hard to understand how to (or that you can) bring it back. Not keyboard accessible. Recommendations:
- Add “click outside to dismiss” message for first N interactions to teach behavior,
- Add visual effect to show where it disappears to when dismissed.
- Convert notification bars to doorhangers: HTTP auth: bug 567804, Popups blocked: bug 588317, XPI install: bug 588266.
Non-modal dialogs: JS alert/confirm/prompt shouldn’t be window-modal, bug 59314.
Menu cleanup: Reducing clutter in the old-style menus is now possible, since we have the infrastructure to support a separate hierarchy for accessibility on Windows now. Recommendation:
- Faaborg to provide mapping of what is moved/removed/added, file necessary bugs.
Panorama: Still has a lot of bugs and quirks (window close, orphaned groups/tabs, visual appearance, first-run experience). App tabs still "leak" into groups they aren’t supposed to be in. Aza to provide update once he’s back from travels.

In addition to these, Alex Faaborg has also been working on a visual overview of the tweaks needed to the main window to make it work and look like intended. More about that shortly.

If you can, please help out with making the above issues get worked out in the upcoming betas, and do consult the full list of things we’re tracking if you’re looking for a smaller project. Contact us on the dev.usability group/list if you want to help out.

What’s been fixed

While battling in the trenches, we sometimes forget to look back and point out the tremendous progress the Firefox team has made in actually fixing issues — as well as the amazing amount of improvements since the last beta. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the more noticable fixes:

Combined Stop/Go/Reload bug 544816
Better progress bars bug 544818, bug 578028
URL-on-link-hover bug 587908
No reloading of plugins when window is re-parented: bug 449734
Move RSS button to secondary UI bug 578967
Windows XP menu bar styling bug 575870
Restore Session on-demand at startup bug 588482
Loading N tabs in parallel on startup instead of all of them bug 586068
No text in beforeUnload dialog + change to “Stay on page” & “Leave page”: bug 588292
Allow abort of modal alerts: bug 61098
Paste & Go bug 492544
Check for Updates button in About window bug 585475
External links from within app tabs should open in new tabs bug 575561
Focus color change when tab has dialog or changes title or snippet addition on Home tab bug 577096
Basic version of the start page as about:home bug 563723
Set default of browser.sessionstore.privacy_level to 0: bug 424872 — we should to save users from dataloss, and figure out security implications (timeout, clear on exit)
Ghost the reload button instead of ghosting the Stop button so we don't add N ms to every page load: bug 596428 — this makes every page load seem slower
External links from within app tabs should open in new tabs: bug 575561

Thanks to everyone that has participated in making beta 7 a great release!

24 bugs we’d like to see fixed for Firefox 4

Alexander Limi — 2010-09-18T07:25:00Z

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A lot of great stuff has landed in Firefox 4 on the UI front over the past few days — combined stop/go/reload buttons, in-tab progress bars, hovered URLs in location bar, theme fixes & more. The release clearly shaping up to be a great one, but there are always more things that could be improved.

Earlier this week, we posted a list of the bugs that the UX team is tracking to ensure that Firefox 4 will provide the best & most efficient web browsing experience on the planet.

We did make a very basic mistake when publishing the original list, however — as we didn’t consider our main audience, and ended up showing you the full list of what we’re tracking. While this is relevant for the UX team, it ended up being pretty hard to digest — and a bit intimidating — since we’re tracking a large number of bugs. It wasn’t very actionable.

To fix this, we sat down and transformed that list into a much more manageable overview of the top issues that aren’t receiving the attention they should right now — sorted by priority. There’s of course a lot more being worked on for Firefox 4 already, these are simply the bugs that are stuck in one way or another, or don’t have any implementers assigned to them yet. So if you want to help make Firefox 4 the best browser it can be, these are good bugs to help out with getting resolved. Some of them are small, some are larger in scope, but all of them are important as far as the UX team is concerned.

These bugs…

…do not currently have blocking status,
…are not polish bugs — of which there are many, and with the understanding that we should be able to block on polish bugs when we get to later phases, especially theme-related,
…the UX team consider to be major wins for Firefox 4,
& we’d like to see people pick up, provide fixes for — or possibly even mark as blockers.

These do not include issues from: Panorama (that team is building an equivalent list of their own), Sync (which is part of the Services team, not Firefox team), and the Add-ons Bar (which we have a hard time evaluating from a UX perspective right now). It’s not because we think these aren’t important, just that this is the list we ended up with right now.

The current version of this list is always available on the Mozilla wiki, but reproduced below for your reading convenience.

In order of priority:

Block unauthorized third-party extension installs — critical to a fast user experience, particularly for startup time.
Remove duplicate add-ons — we had this happen with the Java console, where lots of versions of the same add-on would slow down the browser, and it might be happening with other add-ons too.
Tabs in titlebar on Windows on maximize — this is expected functionality that already exists in other browsers, and makes more screen space available.
Painting of browser window slow compared to 3.6 — starting Firefox 4 on Windows looks really broken right now.
URL autocomplete should be enabled — how quickly a user can get to a site is a key part of the perceived performance, we also need to do a better job with the audience that “speaks URL.”
Support form restore for HTTPS — we should protect users from data loss, and figure out the security implications (timeout, clear on exit).
Ghost the reload button instead of ghosting the Stop button so we don’t add N ms to every page load — this makes every page load seem slower.
Display the domain in black and the path in grey — makes domains more readable and prominent, parity with other browsers.
Animated tab dragging/detaching — it’s currently hard to see immediate results when dragging and detaching tabs.
Streamline the visual appearance of the search field — there’s a lot of visual noise in the Stop/Go/reload area now, should be minimized.
Add zoom controls to the Firefox menu — having a good zoom control available is important for accessibility.
No reloading of plugins when window is re-parented — when you detach a page containing e.g. a YouTube video, the Flash player starts from the beginning, which is not a good experience.
External links from within app tabs should open in a new tab — when using app tabs, we should open off-domain links in regular tabs, so you never lose your app tab by browsing.
App tabs should be chromeless by default, option to turn it back on — one reason why app tabs are useful and better is that they make better use of available screen space.
Tab multiselect — Has a really well thought-out design spec and implementation; it’s also a feature no other browser currently has.
Non-modal JS dialogs — modal dialogs are incredibly disruptive, and we should aim to make them only affect the current tab instead of the entire window.
Move RSS button to secondary UI — this button has extremely low usage, and doesn’t justify the prominent placement it has currently been given.
Groups from Panorama should show in “List All Tabs” menu — it’s confusing that you can’t see all your tabs in this menu, we should make it work.
“List All Tabs” menu should list closed tabs/windows for more obvious undo — Tabs belong in the tab menu.
Don’t let add-ons that are not compatible with an unsupported version of Firefox stop you from upgrading — i.e. an add-on that doesn’t work with 3.6 nor with 4.0 shouldn’t stop you from upgrading your Firefox 3.5 to 4.0.
Make Search bar local to the tab — now that we have tabs on top, the search box content should not be global.
Eliminate redundant text when multiple tabs have the same partial title — this makes it easier to distinguish different pages from the same site in the tabs.
Remove “Work Offline” & make sure you can’t get stuck in offline mode — this option doesn’t have any real use anymore, but before we can remove it, we have to make sure that people can’t get stuck in offline mode, and that we never put localhost and local networks offline.
Convert notification bars to doorhangers: HTTP auth, blocked pop-ups, XPI install — all of these notification bars should use the new doorhanger notification infrastructure.

Theme bugs that are not polish-related — also see the Theme wiki page for images that illustrate these:

If you have the skills and time to work on any of these bugs, you’ll make everyone’s experience with Firefox 4 a lot better — let’s make it happen!

Firefox UX Team update: Preparing for Firefox 4 feature freeze

Alexander Limi — 2010-09-14T21:30:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

We’re in the final stretch of Firefox 4 development as far as features go, with the fantastic new JavaScript engine landing and lots of other infrastructure improvements making it to the nightly builds — but there’s also a comprehensive list of things we keep track of to ensure an overall good user experience. These things range from the very low-level like startup performance, memory fragmentation and window drawing, to things like visual design, colors, and minimalism — and everything in between.

The UX team keeps an updated list of what we think is important from the perspective of the user, and you can view the always-updated version of this list over at the Firefox UX Priorities page on the Mozilla wiki.

Since I know that a lot of you read this using an RSS reader of some sort, here’s a copy of the list from the wiki — have a look and see if there’s anything you think you can help out with. Firefox 4 is shaping up to be an amazing release!

User Experience Priorities for Firefox 4

How can you help make Firefox 4 the best it can be? Here are the top priorities identified by the UX team. They are in order of project priority, and internally ranked by importance in the project.

(Some of these are still missing bug numbers, make sure you consult the original wiki page for updates)

New Theme

Owner: Stephen Horlander

Tabs in titlebar on Windows on maximize bug 572160 (available as option on the Mac) — SoapyHamhocks is stuck, ask jimm?
Location bar improvements:
- Combined Stop/Go/Reload bug 544816
- Better progress bars bug 544818, bug 578028
- Site identity block bug 587901 — either finalize the URL representation in its various states, or put favicon back in. adw is willing to look at this, also need to talk to johnath.
- URL-on-link-hover bug 587908
Make Search local to the tab (at least for tabs-on-top)
Improved visual style of AwesomeBar results: bug 587909
Tab improvements, including Frank Yan's patches:
- Animated dragging/detaching bug 455694
- Improved tab ordering on open and close bug 578327
- Tab multiselect bug 566510
- Tab overflow improvements bug 570564
- Animation for drag/drop of tabs bug 455694
- Eliminate redundant text when multiple tabs have the same partial title bug 583890
List All Tabs menu should list closed tabs/windows for undo power
- Groups from Panorama should show in List All Tabs bug 596017
Clean up the stop/go/reload area: bug 592909, bug 430627
Move RSS button to secondary UI bug 578967
Windows XP menu bar styling bug 575870
Overall Windows XP theme progress
Linux implementation of the Firefox menu: bug 585370
Linux: Tab improvements
Make find-in-page local to the tab: bug 565552
META: Pixel polishing to get the themes closer to the mock-ups during the polish phase, Stephen has a great overview here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/New_Theme/Timeline
Polish: Fitts' Law improvements: close buttons, tabs (when on top), maximized Firefox menu should all be clickable on the edges

Startup performance, perception of performance & papercuts

URL autocomplete bug 566489
Ghost out the reload button instead of ghosting the Stop button so we don't add N ms to every page load, bug 596428
Window drawing during startup on Windows is worse than before
Session Restore improvements (owner: zpao)
- Restore Session on-demand at startup bug 588482
- Loading N tabs in parallel on startup instead of all of them bug 586068
No text in beforeUnload dialog + change to "Stay on page"/"Leave page": bug 588292
Non-modal JS dialogs, bug 59314
Allow abort of modal alerts: bug 61098
Paste & Go bug 492544 (dolske volunteered to review this once ui-review is cleared up)

Under consideration:

Memory fragmentation on OS X, use jemalloc on OS X: bug 414946
Resource Packages: bug 529208 (owner: jlebar)

Firefox menu

Check for Updates button in About window bug 585475
- upgrade UI should be in About Window
- add link to support
- add link to privacy policy
Making sure Work Offline is removed (ie. never stuck in offline mode)
Put Troubleshooting item back in Help Menu

Under consideration:

Menu cleanups for the context menu and traditional (XP, Linux) menu

Add-ons Manager

Owner: Dave Townsend Meta: bug 550048

Disable add-ons the user didn't install + known performance ones on upgrade, ask the user to re-enable the ones they actually use
Silent updates (works for restartless add-ons, what about non-restartless? follow up with Mossop and rs) bug 511529, partially fixed in bug 562622
Complete visual design bug 586066 (meta)
- Detail view implemention: bug 562902
- List view implementation: bug 585950
Blocking third-party extension installs bug 596343
Removing duplicate add-ons bug 596392

Confirmation that an add-on has been installed
"Get Add-ons" implemented (AMO dependency, talk to Fligtar)
Allowing backgrounds and themes to be used together: bug 520124

Under consideration:

Blocking add-ons that are more than two versions behind, compatibility-wise (ie. an add-on that doesn't work with 3.6 nor with 4.0 shouldn't stop you from upgrading your 3.5 to 4.0)
Centralize CSS & resources for reuse in other in-content pages (polish)

App tabs

Owner: Paul O‘Shannessy Meta: bug 551849 (dependency tree)

Updated specification: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/App_Tabs#Design_Specification — we'd still love to have these be global, since there are a lot of issues when not having them global from a UX perspective, but we realize that it might be hard, especially on the current Firefox 4.0 timeline.

Global presence across windows bug 587873 (is postponed unless we can find an owner)
- No reloading of plugins when window is re-parented bug 449734
Chromeless by default, option to opt for it on bug 585445
External links from within app tabs should open in new tabs bug 575561
Focus color change when tab has dialog or changes title or snippet addition on Home tab bug 577096
Faaborg to add "Enable notifications on changes" bug for App tab menu

Locally hosted Firefox Start page

Owner: Marco Bonardo

Firefox/Projects/Firefox_Start

Basic version of the start page as about:home bug 563723
Snippets capability for upgrade messaging etc.
Ability to async update the home page code
Visual design by Stephen

Panorama

Owner: Ian Gilman

Tracked here: http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/#todo

Combined Panorama + List All Tabs button — this assumes that we can get Panorama groups into the menu — bug 596017

Sync

Owners: Mike Connor, Philipp von Weitershausen

Email address as user name bug 589979
Generate Sync Key bug 591118
Change flow of setup wizard bug 591120
New style for setup wizard bug 591122
Design physical Sync Key artifact bug 591533
- Finalize the Sync key text + print artifact (Faaborg to ask Sofa about availability)
Primary UI element for Sync bug 589981

Notification improvements

Owners: Neil Deakin (platform, arrow panels), Stephen Horlander (visuals), Justin Dolske (converting notifications and dialogs to new format, tab modal panels), Gavin Sharp (geolocation)

Doorhangers
- Needs to land with specified visual style, especially the anchor marker ("diamond" edge) and split buttons bug 577927
Cleaning up doorhanger notification use + appearance: bug 554937
High priority notification bars/dialogs that need transfer to the new design:
- Geolocation (complete)
- Password manager - remember bug 567814
- Password manager - change bug 588309
- httpauth bug 567804
- Popups blocked bug 588317
- XPI install bug 588266
High priority Home Tab snippets:
- Ability to glow to draw attention when not focused bug 588589
- "Know your rights" bug 571584
- Firefox update available bug 588227
High priority tab modal panels:
- JS alert/confirm/prompt bug 562258 (Frank has WIP, some missing back-end pieces, at risk)

Extension Bar

Owner: Dietrich Ayala

Project page: Firefox/Projects/AddonUI

Status bar removal dependencies are listed in bug 574688

Remove status bar entirely (not just hidden by default)
Visual design: glass on Windows, gradient gray on the Mac
Don't display if no extensions exist
Display when modified
Needs to be a toolbar, so you can drag things to/from it (though the customize palette won't support this release).
API that inserts icons in earlier status bar now end up in extension bar, change ID of navigation bar and redirect that API to Extension toolbar too
Opportunistic: Extension panels for existing toolbars, with "pin" option, give sidebars an icon to display or entry in extensions

String freeze related

Rename Open in new Window to Move to new Window bug 593646

Other

Tracking search bar vs URL bar vs start page searches separately for metrics, bug 596439
Mac installer improvements, bug 516362

Priorities for releases after Firefox 4.0

Not in prioritized order, parked here until we have shipped 4.0. Most of these were things that didn't make the deadline for 4.0.

Also see the Firefox/UX index for other things we're looking at.

Home tab

Tracked in bug 544819

Details:

Upgrade experience
Have to be in all windows, and not be moved around
Needs its own icon
What happens with home pages that != Firefox Start
Locally hosted home page with chrome privileges
- Show bookmarks bar on home page?
- Links that open Bookmarks, Downloads, History, Add-ons, Options, windows
  - Session Restore opt-in link (see below)
  - Standalone XUL location bar

Various

Prefs reorganization and move to in-content pages
Improved Download Manager, bug 564934 & bug 564900 (being worked on by community member, has patches, needs guidance & review love)
Improved Sharing, bug 588508 (owner: margaret)
Privacy & Site-specific Preferences
- Site-specific preference panel, bug 573176
- Information in the Site menu (Larry?) about cookies and domains involved
Updated visual design of in-content pages
Tab opening behavior bug 533232
Paper Cuts, especially:
- Focus fixes, tracked in bug 565510 (plugins in particular)
- When creating a new tab or returning to one, always keep focus in the URL or search box bug 565575
- Web sites shouldn't be allowed to resize main window
- Web sites shouldn't be allowed to fake pop-unders using focus
- Remove 3-second delay from AMO installs
- Click-to-enable for certain plugins (Java, etc), allow same setting for Flash
- "Don't ask me to install this plugin again"
- Cmd/Ctrl-L doesn't bring up the AwesomeBar when location bar is hidden
Visually distinguish visible tabs in List All Tabs menu
Find in page improvements (move to top, overlay, tab-specific)

Firefox UX Team update: Preparing for Firefox 4 beta 6

Alexander Limi — 2010-09-05T23:20:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

There won’t be any UX team meeting notes this week due to Labor Day here in the US, but if you want to help out, please take a look at the list of UX priorities for Firefox 4, which we keep updated as we are getting closer to the final release.

If any of those tasks match your skill levels, please help out with reviewing, posting patches or testing.

See you all tomorrow!

Firefox UX Team update: Goals for Firefox 4 beta 4

Alexander Limi — 2010-08-02T23:05:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

The Firefox UX team posts weekly updates on what we’re up to. Instead of only posting individual after-the-fact updates, we also try to post more about what we’re about to do — which is usually a bit more interesting and higher-level, as well as gives you the chance to engage with us while we’re “in-process.” It will hopefully also give you a bit more insight into how we do our work. Our current focus areas can be found at UX priorities for the next Firefox release.

Goals for beta 4

The current list is what we’re working on for Firefox 4 beta 4 on the UX team:

Overall theme stuff, especially get the word out that we need assistance with the Linux side of things, Stephen will blog about this.
Location bar + progress bars needs to be well underway by this beta — Stephen will drive the changes outside of notification work & account manager.
Tabs in title bar (shorlander)
Limi is going to work with Paul & Dolske on Session Restore improvements.
Locally hosted home page needs follow-up, Limi to coordinate with Beltzner on this.
App Tabs — first iteration is in, needs better spec for next steps and capabilities, Limi is on this.
Sync: Faaborg working on a new iteration to make it clearer that you can create your own key (“favorite song lyric”, etc) & possibly an indicator when you are “cryptographically secure.” Also note that we can not help you recover your password if you forget it.
Boriss will coordinate to get site-specific preferences working, testable, layout as close to final as possible.
Tab Candy is aiming to be in beta 4.

Status reports on current UX priorities:

Notifications

Alex Faaborg:

Mockups in progress.

Firefox menu

Alex Faaborg & Jennifer Boriss:

i5 mockups done, bugs all triaged. Work tracked in bug 583386.

Site identity

Alex Faaborg:

No progress outside of notification and account manager.
Lots of progress on site-specific preferences - plan to have working, testable by beta 4.
Needs icons, but layout in UI should be fairly close to end goal.

Account Manager

Alex Faaborg:

Talking with Dan about registration, looks like it will be handled by content.

Firefox Sync

Alex Faaborg:

Need to update mockups based on feedback.

Home tab & App tabs

Alexander Limi:

Working on a better specification for app tab behaviors this week; talking to Beltzner about teh locally hosted home tab.

Download Manager

Alexander Limi:

Paolo has posted some patches in bug 564934, we’ll keep iterating on it.

HTML5 form controls

Alexander Limi:

Nothing new on the UX side of things this week.

“Paper Cuts”

Alexander Limi:

Paper cut overview bug is here.

Lots of progress, multi-monitor issues fixed, and web page can no longer steal focus from the UI. Summary update coming next week.

Main window refresh

Stephen Horlander:

On vacation last week.

In-content page design

Stephen Horlander:

On vacation last week.

Add-ons Manager

Jennifer Boriss:

Windows mockups done, finishing up Mac.
Dividing into components, Blair will be working on the styles.

Jetpack & the Extension Bar

Jennifer Boriss:

No change, Dietrich is in Japan, should find out this week what’s left to implement

Privacy

Jennifer Boriss:

Mehdi has continued improving the site-specific prefs.

TabCandy

Aza Raskin:

We are working on landing parts of Tab Candy:
Work continued on App Tabs integration.
Goals for this week:
- Continue getting Ts regression to below 2% and figuring out plan for 0%.
- Create more unit tests.

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)

Prototype built, but very buggy. This has and will continue to allow me to better understand the experience of Home Tab.

Startup performance & perception

Alexander Limi & John Wayne Hill

Mostly focused around dirty profiles & session restore; Shawn is starting analysis on the profiles this week, session restore & cascading loading work starting as soon as Sync lands.

Mobile

Madhava Enros:

Not present.

About the meetings

The UX meetings are open to people from outside Mozilla — if you want to listen in, use the numbers for our conference call system and join conference room number 268 every Monday at 14:30 PST. We post agendas to dev.planning & dev.usability before these meetings.

For people at Mozilla: We are scheduling regular work sessions at 13:00 PST on Wednesdays every week — as part of this we also accept drop-in visits if you want to get assistance with any user experience task. Contact us a bit in advance to coordinate.

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.

Firefox UX Team update: Getting ready for Firefox 4 Beta 2

Alexander Limi — 2010-07-18T23:50:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

New & noteworthy

Firefox 4.0 Beta 2 is being released this week — or early next week — and adds tabs-on-top for Mac, as well as the first iteration of App Tabs. There’s also an expanded Test Pilot study included in this beta to help us get more data on how people use the new menu and other elements of the redesign.

With one week disappearing to the Mozilla Summit, and with Firefox 4 betas being on a two-week release schedule, this beta release lands a few important milestones, but not a lot more on the UI side. Lots of exciting stuff on the infrastructure side:

Retained Layers — which, among other things, makes scrolling a page very smooth,
JS performance improvements,
CSS transitions & transforms,
& a fix for the bug that was causing multiple dock icons on OS X when plugins are running.

Status reports on current UX priorities:

Start page video for the new UI

Alex Faaborg:

New video is coming for beta 2, waiting until freeze happens. Also would like to do the captures on OS X.

Notifications

Alex Faaborg:

Low priority right now, but we need to get the panel stuff done (for instance geolocation is still styled as as tooltip on windows, and the combo button looks like a drop down control)

Firefox menu

Alex Faaborg:

Lots of work completed over the weekend, spec of intended design, tracking how commands are migrating over, and a projected heatmap of usage that also got some nice attention in the press.

Site identity

Alex Faaborg:

Need to discuss planned changes with the UX team before we propose anything more officially
Need to get mockups done for Frank of the different states

Firefox Sync

Alex Faaborg:

Top priority now.

Home tab & App tabs

Alexander Limi:

First iteration of App Tabs have landed! Just in time for beta 2. Doesn’t support drag operations yet, but is available from the context menu on tabs for now.

Download Manager

Alexander Limi:

No changes this week, but plan to get in touch with Paolo, who I talked to about this at the Summit.

HTML5 form controls

Alexander Limi:

Had some conversations with Tantek, he has expanded & updated the HTML5 wiki page.

“Paper Cuts”

Alexander Limi:

Paper cut overview bug is here.

We’re arranging a “Paper Cuts” hacking session this Thursday in Mountain View for Mozilla employees, and anyone that wants to follow along on IRC.
If successful, we’ll try to do this at the end of every week for the developers that are interested.

Main window refresh

Stephen Horlander:

Most of the major pieces are in.
Still need progress bar on tabs and combined stop/go/reload.
Focus on Windows/Mac on refinement bug fixing.
Need to evaluate Bookmarks Menu Button feedback.
Next major thing is going to be theming the Window frames/controls for non-Aero configurations — XP, Aero Basic, Classic.

In-content page design

Stephen Horlander:

Will wait until add-ons redesign has a first implementation ready.

Add-ons Manager

Jennifer Boriss:

Still on track — “Personas” has officially changed to “Backgrounds”, so making new mockups to incorporate the change
Mock-ups still need a few tweaks. Working on these now.
Talk of combining plugins and extensions into a single category — what does the UX team think?
Disable/ask about extensions on first-run — Boriss to ask add-ons team about what data we have that can inform this. (e.g. do we know when extensions were first installed, which extensions have binary components, &c.

Jetpack & the Extension Bar

Jennifer Boriss:

No change from last week.
Action: contact Dietrich and ask about what state it’s currently in.

Privacy

Jennifer Boriss:

Mulani still working on the implementation of the site-centric prefs.

TabCandy

Aza Raskin:

We are in the process of getting review. Missed beta 2.
We’ve created a Reviewer’s Guide for those wanting to get into the code.
Starting to look at doing a video intro for the first-run experience.
Need to do a deep-dive on app-tabs + TabCandy.
Need help with deciding keyboard shortcuts — a veritable bikeshed factory.

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)

Continuing to work on details of concepts in between startup experience stuff, put new sketches online, working on higher fidelity ones
think more about notifications from add-ons, non-Firefox installed add-ons, &c.

Startup performance & perception

Alexander Limi & John Wayne Hill

Startup Experience overview page is up.
Filed all necessary bugs.
Got some champions for bugs.
Need to get champions for newly filled bugs, prioritized the list in terms of effort and value.
We’ll bring the list to Tuesday’s developer meeting.

Mobile

Madhava Enros:

Not present.

Feedback session

Quick feedback and/or blockers; for in-depth discussions, we do design sessions on Wednesdays.

Questions for the Firefox Development Meeting

Startup Experience prioritization & feedback on feasibility for Firefox 4.

About the meetings

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.

Firefox UX Team update: Summit Summary

Alexander Limi — 2010-07-11T23:50:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

This is an older update that wasn’t published because I managed to break my blog in interesting ways while testing the new & very excellent Plone 4 beta release. Since it happened just before the Mozilla Summit, I didn’t have time to fix it, so I’m publishing these two older updates today too. Apologies if this is confusing anyone. The date in the header is the correct date for when the meeting happened.

New & noteworthy

This week is a bit special, since we were all away at the Mozilla Summit last week, so the traditional project updates do not apply this time.

Firefox Beta 1 shipped before the Summit — hooray! — and we spent most of this meeting this time identifying what we should focus on for the upcoming betas. Firefox 4 has a seriously aggressive beta schedule, with a new beta shipping roughly every two weeeks until we get to the final release in Q4 2010.

The list of items that we identified:

Session Restore: cascading loading + UI
Home tab
- snippets infrastructure
- UI for session restore
Extension bar: need to make sure this isn’t scoped as only Jetpack
Menu bar cleanup (both new & traditional menu)
Context menu cleanups
Chrome menu cleanups
Customization of tabs/menu etc
Sync UI
Sharing
Mac installer improvements
Minimum tab width & redundant buttons
Focus issues: tab-modal dialogs, content should never steal focus from chrome, new tabs should always be focused, flash steals keyboard shortcuts (Neil Deakin might have advice here?)
Improved “List all tabs”: Recently closed tabs, only show tabs outside of the visible set
Find in Page fixes
Download manager as panel
HTML5 widgets
Panels needs focused effort
- we need to use them for tab modal dialogs
Location bar
- stop/go/reload
- Identity block (+ geo, + activity manager)
- Styling of the AwesomeBar results
- Progess of active tab loading
- autocomplete (speak URL)
- URLs on hover — since status bar is going away
Progress indicators in general

Outcomes and conversations from the summit

People very excited about the new theme!
Lots of talk about Apps, feels more solid — nobody questions whether we want to do specific apps anymore. Much design work and standards work left.
Discussions on add-ons as things that are not installed by the user (crapware), happy to see this discussed
Discussion on the extension bar was very useful, some ideas on how to do toolbars & related matters
Device UI session was good, lots of feedback, figure out the conceptual model, figure out how it should look on OEM devices
Talk to product group about opportunity in slate devices this holiday season — would be good to be a better experience than IE8 on these devices.
Tabs in titlebar should be possible (but not default, obviously) on the Mac — just like with the Firefox menu button
Fixing session restore had a lot of support
Work offline: need to make sure there aren’t any real use cases for it that we’re missing — nobody has given any real reasons yet, there’s a lot of “superstitious behavior,” however
Check with platform team what the status on fixing caching (possibly in the dev meeting tomorrow)
Linux: Found that Gnome is heading in this direction (custom window decorations) anyway, so makes less sense for us to do this. Still support FF menu button in the tab bar instead.
Are there quick wins on UI effects (fading icons in, fade between back/forward) that we can make use of easily?
Site-specific privacy talk led to good feedback, new ideas, people willing to help
- State of privacy defaults (third-party cookie behavior) still seems very up in the air, a number of ideas that perviously seemed promising have been partially abandoned
- We should try and sniff out current state of this from Dan Witte, Sid Stamm, et al.

About the meetings

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.

Firefox UX Team update: Beta 1 readiness & start page videos

Alexander Limi — 2010-06-27T23:35:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

New & noteworthy

This week saw tabs-on-top land for Windows, and excellent work being done all around — a surprising amount of UI code landed in time for Firefox 4 beta 1.

Status reports on current UX priorities:

Start Page video for the new UI

Alex Faaborg:

Overall goal is to help mainstream beta testing users quickly transition to our UI changes so that they don't bounce ("where did my menu go?", etc)
This is my top priority as we finish up beta 1
Plan is to re-edit the video for each beta release, with it getting longer over time as we continue to introduce new features (home tab, etc.)

Notifications

Alex Faaborg:

Currently in progress on the account manager mockups, but lower priority than Beta 1 tasks.

Firefox menu

Alex Faaborg:

Tabs-on-top landed on Windows!
Future work on hold until after Beta 1.

Site identity

Alex Faaborg:

Might want to get a get mockup of this out this week.
Lowest impact: what we have now: [site block] URL
Moderate impact: [site block] /path
More radical change [site block] title
This would also address concerns about no longer placing the title in the window frame, but will highlight other edge cases.

Firefox Sync

Alex Faaborg:

Had a meeting last week to discuss the ongoing debate of security vs. usability. Moving forward with mockups that include an automatically generated artifact for the user to save.

Tab video

Alex Faaborg:

Press reaction was neutral (there exists a video) to positive (there exists a video, we agree with the points).
Comment reaction was what you would expect with YouTube, Digg and Reddit.
Limi saw a lot of awesome, finally Firefox does the right thing, FWIW

Beta Feedback button

Alex Faaborg:

Visual changes done (thanks, Stephen!)

Home tab & App tabs

Alexander Limi:

Meeting with Blair & Frank later today to figure out next steps and any blockers.

Download Manager

Alexander Limi:

No changes.

HTML5 form controls

Alexander Limi:

Did initial work on the multiple upload widget, more to come.
Next steps: Publish the initial set of widgets, get feedback.

“Paper Cuts”

Alexander Limi:

Paper cut overview bug is here.

Sent out email to the multi-minute startup profile people, profiles have started coming in. Keeping sdwilsh in the loop for next steps.
Didn't get to do the Bugzilla sweep I planned. :(
Will try to fit in some gardening this week in between main tasks.
Any suggestions on good people to talk to about the Focus issues?

Main window refresh

Stephen Horlander:

Drawing in titlebar landed.
Lots of bugs and lots of fixes.
Windows XP and Aero Basic backend coming “soon”
Windows XP: Need to work out full window style bits.
Bookmarks Menu Button landed.
Mac: Buttons landed — tabs next, needs review.
Windows: Follow-up Beta 1 with lots of polish.
Linux Bugs filed.

In-content page design

Stephen Horlander:

Limi & Stephen meeting Wednesday at 1pm to create the list of what pages need attention + priorities — then publish, so we can get people to help out.

Add-ons Manager

Jennifer Boriss:

Mostly fixing beta 1 bugs, no blockers left.
Mossop is working on wallpaper/theme selector — has implementation already, very cool!

Jetpack & the Extension Bar

Jennifer Boriss:

Dietrich & al. working on this.
Displays based on whether there are things to show.
Customizable.

Privacy

Jennifer Boriss:

Mehdi & Boriss working on the site-specific prefs.
Mehdi posted a prototype on AMO.

TabCandy

Aza Raskin:

Not present.

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)

Good amount of work done last week.
Critique and Feedback session on Wednesday, 1pm.

Startup performance & perception

Alexander Limi & John Wayne Hill

Didn't get the wiki page created as we wanted yet — will do today or tomorrow at the latest.
After page is created we need to talk to particular devs on how to approach each issue and then find issue champions.

Mobile

Madhava Enros:

Sean Martell working on android theme mockups for real this week.
incorporating changes/ideas from last week's discussions in Mountain View for sharing UI and “unified start screen” &home-tab-esque screen.
1.1 (should be!) out this week.

Feedback session

Quick feedback and/or blockers; for in-depth discussions, we do design sessions on Wednesdays.

Critique and Feedback on post-Firefox 4 Home Tab, Wednesday, 1pm.

About the meetings

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.

Firefox UX Team update: Wrapping up the first Firefox 4 beta

Alexander Limi — 2010-06-23T08:05:00Z

(You are encouraged to read this article with its formatting and typography intact, instead of in this RSS reader)

New & noteworthy

This is the final week before we do the code freeze for Firefox 4 beta 1, and some UI changes have started making their way into the nightly builds.

There will be several more betas before Firefox 4 enters the release candidate stages, and we’d like to make it very clear that what’s in Firefox 4 beta 1 is not feature complete — neither on the UI side, nor on the functionality side. Mozilla subscribes to the “traditional” definition of beta releases — they are checkpoints where we lock down the code & functionality of the product, ship it to our testers and volunteers, and get feedback on selected parts of the whole picture. This isn’t like Gmail, which was “in beta” for 5 years, and most people were using it as their main webmail account anyway.

The main things to keep in mind for the upcoming beta 1 release of Firefox 4 on the UX front are:

The UI is not in any way close to the final shipping product, as most of the work done so far has been infrastructure work that can support the new menu approach, the new theme, & cetera.
The platform differences will be quite large, Windows will have features that do not exist in the Mac OS X version or the Linux version. This doesn’t mean we love any of these platforms any less, or that we’re not implementing those improvements on those platforms — just that the features and UI changes tend to land at different times on different platforms.
If something seems wrong, it probably isn’t done yet — that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t tell us about it, just that you can expect a lot of UI weirdness in the early betas.

If you have any confusion as to how your platform is intended to look or work, please consult the Windows, Mac OS X or Linux mock-ups that Stephen Horlander has lovingly provided to give you an idea of where we’re heading over the next few months.

If all that was too vague for you — the general rule is: Don’t Panic. Beta 1 will be a rough beta as far as the UI is concerned — but with much awesomeness on the infrastructure front — and later betas will be a much closer representation of how Firefox 4 will look and work.

Status reports on current UX priorities:

Notifications

Alex Faaborg:

Need to work with Stephen for an update on icons and styling.

Firefox menu

Alex Faaborg:

Need to file a few follow up bugs on things that are missing:
- Private browsing,
- Bookmarks submenu,
- Developer submenu,
- About and check for updates,
- Icons for significant item in each section.

Site identity

Alex Faaborg:

No owner for beta 1, this is okay for now.

Firefox Sync

Alex Faaborg:

Main priority this week.

Tab video

Alex Faaborg:

Complete, will be published later this week. (…and there was much rejoicing!)

Beta Feedback button

Alex Faaborg:

Inactive from my side, but need an update from Jingua and Aakash this week.

Home tab & App tabs

Alexander Limi:

Stuck in the review queue at the moment, Dão & Blair have different approaches, Johnathan is on it.
There’s no UI to play with for app tabs until it gets unstuck.
Unlikely to make beta 1 release, this is okay.
Marco is at a natural stopping point with the home tab content, waiting for unrelated non-code coordination.
Limi & John Wayne should talk to Engagement team about requirements for snippets and messaging.

Download Manager

Alexander Limi:

No change, still opportunistic.

HTML5 form controls

Alexander Limi:

Setting up a meeting this Tuesday to discuss the HTML5 chrome buttons & app tab implications (Section 4.11).
Wireframing of individual widgets.

“Paper Cuts”

Alexander Limi:

Paper cut overview bug is here.

Posted Paper Cuts update post, called out some new targets and talked about current work being done by the team.
Posted to Reddit asking for broken profiles, already have quite a lot of good feedback & volunteers with multi-minute startup profiles.
Next steps: A round of janitorial work to make sure things are in good shape, as I haven’t had time to follow bugmail for the past week or so, as well as get the profile analysis going.

Main window refresh

Stephen Horlander:

Filed Linux Bugs.
Updated Linux Mockups (again)
Ongoing email discussion with some Linux developers.
New Mac patches undergoing review (may make beta 1).
First stab at new Bookmarks Menu finished, awaiting review
Working on some last minute polish.
Jim Mathis posted several patches for drawing in the titlebar.
Code freeze on Wednesday to make a release before the summit possible.

In-content page design

Stephen Horlander:

Horlander & Limi to put together a list of what we want to change, and priorities, so we can get assistance from the community on implementation.

Add-ons Manager

Jennifer Boriss:

Bit of a crazy last week getting together last bets for beta freeze.
Icons found & created for freeze — props to Faaborg for being master of files in toolkit.
Final graphics work still going on — want to get Vista done this week, the rest should model off that.

Jetpack & the Extension Bar

Jennifer Boriss:

Blogged about add-on placement based on feedback from design session with Limi & John Wayne.
A few problems became clear:
- Asymmetrical browsing area caused by small status bar not acceptable - bottom right area prime real estate in website design.
- Need either modification of UI or different UI for touch devices with no hover state.
- Need a way in UI to open/close bar that works for all operating systems and in fullscreen mode.
Recommending a few tweaks:
- Status bar (still) off by default.
- All add-ons with UI that request the status bar turn the status bar on.
- Status bar has constantly-visible minimize button.
- A button still brings the status bar back out - what that looks like the remaining piece of the puzzle, but likely different depending on OS.

Privacy

Jennifer Boriss:

Missed goal last week to blog about designs — will this week or owe a round of beer.
Been talking with Mehdi about Summit workshop — will be about 15-20 minutes presentation, 20+ minutes discussion, Q&A, ideas.

TabCandy

Aza Raskin:

TabCandy 0.4 released: jQuery-free and much faster.
New Bugzilla Tracker!
Cannot use HTML5 drag-and-drop (non-settable ghosting or snapping).
Got a change to CSS transitions spec to allow bounce animation.

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)

More concept work this week. Plan is to present next week.

Startup performance & perception

Alexander Limi & John Wayne Hill

Lots of articles and posts about John Wayne’s blog post
(Re)starting and expanding the "Startup Experience" focus, want to get feedback on the list today, see below.

Mobile

Madhava Enros:

Sean Martell is working on Android theme mockups this week.
Will be publishing the 1.1 field guide with 1.1 release.
Working with front-end developers to build out the project details pages (and do some subdividing into subprojects) this week - see Planning 2.0.
Incidentally, looks like we’ll have to use our own mechanism for sharing on Maemo/Meego (example).
In Mountain View this week, so would like to talk to UX team about the home tab, notifications & modal dialogs amongst other things.

Feedback session

Quick feedback and/or blockers; for in-depth discussions, we do design sessions on Wednesdays.

Startup Experience

Alexander Limi:

Here are some ideas of things we should/could look at:

Track and refine the current work on recording perceived startup time.
Enumerate which dialogs can get in the way of starting the browser, and make sure their respective projects are getting them removed (add-on updates, application updates, etc)
- “Get in the way” in terms of time vs. distraction — some notifications (dialogs should all be phased out in 4.0) may make sense to show on startup, simply because the alternative is a relatively random point in the browsing session. There may be ways to at least assure that these won’t affect startup time.
Get some “broken profiles” from the community — ie. the ones that cause multi-minute startup times, etc — and get them analyzed and figure out what to do (reconstruct the profiles, fix the bugs causing them, examine if there’s any data loss, etc). I’m asking for these profiles on Reddit, since I had a good experience asking there last time.
Add additional criteria for startup performance:
- Time to focus in the URL or search bar.
- Time to complete the first address entry (URL or Title match).
Session restore performance, how quickly can you start using the browser:
- Cascading page loading, ie. restrict loading to 2-3 pages at once to keep the browser usable even when restoring 100s of tabs.
Switch prioritized tab on-the-fly if user selects a different one while loading.

Progress bar:

Frontmost tab has very visible, fast progress bar.
Separate progress from activity (ie. “when can I interact with the page”).

I’m sure there’s lots more we can track and improve. Suggestions very welcome.

Our goal would be to keep track of these goals, post updates and encourage people to get involved in fixing them. Find people that might know how to fix this. Stuff we can’t figure out how/if we can do: bring up at Firefox Development meetings.

Questions for the Firefox Development Meeting

Open call for reviews on the theme work, get list from Stephen which ones are critical & which are nice-to-have.
Shout out to Jim Mathis for getting drawing in titlebar done early in the week!

About the meetings

Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.

Alex Limi

Safari adopts proposed Firefox download manager design

UX improvements in Firefox 4

New look

More efficient menu

Faster, faster, faster

New functionality

Streamlined

Mythbusting: Why Firefox 4 won’t score 100 on Acid3

Help us finish Firefox 4

A fresh Firefox for the new year

Firefox UX Team update: Mozilla all-hands & beta 8, beta 9, beta 10 planning

Team priorities this week

Beta 8

Beta 9

UI tweaks that need at least one beta for feedback

Doorhanger notifications

Start page

Third-party add-ons

Add-on bar

Add-ons Manager

Status/progress bar

Session restore finalization

Panorama

Beta 10

Primary UI fixes

XP theme

Linux theme

Add-ons opt-in

Status/progress bar

Installer / first-run improvements

Firefox UX Team update: Focus for final betas

What’s been fixed

24 bugs we’d like to see fixed for Firefox 4

Firefox UX Team update: Preparing for Firefox 4 feature freeze

User Experience Priorities for Firefox 4

New Theme

Startup performance, perception of performance & papercuts

Firefox menu

Add-ons Manager

App tabs

Locally hosted Firefox Start page

Panorama

Sync

Notification improvements

Extension Bar

String freeze related

Other

Priorities for releases after Firefox 4.0

Home tab

Various

Firefox UX Team update: Preparing for Firefox 4 beta 6

Firefox UX Team update: Goals for Firefox 4 beta 4

Goals for beta 4

Notifications

Firefox menu

Site identity

Account Manager

Firefox Sync

Home tab & App tabs

Download Manager

HTML5 form controls

“Paper Cuts”

Main window refresh

In-content page design

Add-ons Manager

Jetpack & the Extension Bar

Privacy

TabCandy

Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab

Startup performance & perception

Mobile

About the meetings

Firefox UX Team update: Getting ready for Firefox 4 Beta 2

New & noteworthy

Start page video for the new UI

Notifications

Firefox menu

Site identity

Firefox Sync