June 15th, 2010
Firefox UX Team update: Preparing first beta of Firefox 4, return of Madhava & the Mozilla Summit
What the Firefox UX team is up to this week
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.
New & noteworthy
Several pieces of the UI for Firefox 4 have started landing in the nightly builds in preparation for the upcoming first beta in a couple of weeks. Most of the elements are still a bit rough — and not in their final form or position — but it’s very exciting to see it all come together. Download a nightly build if you’re interested in testing the current state. Windows is the platform that has landed the most changes so far, hopefully Mac & Linux will follow shortly.
Status reports on current UX priorities:
Notifications
Alex Faaborg:
- Gavin is waiting on reviews for the Geolocation work.
- Need to ping Stephen Horlander about 64×64 icons.
- Need to brief Dolske & Frank on account manager, HTTPauth & password manager mockups — account manager mockups are brand new!
- Need to hear back from Neil on platform changes — not required for beta 1, though.
Firefox menu
Alex Faaborg:
- Landed in the nightly builds! Implemented as a toolbar for now, but a good start.
- The lack of edit controls in beta 1 is considered to be okay as a temporary tradeoff, since right-click & keyboard shortcuts work as usual.
- Need to start moving towards a panel instead of a native menu to get the right apperance, will get new high fidelity mockups done.
Site identity
Alex Faaborg:
- No changes last week, we are in an acceptable state for beta 1, though.
Firefox Sync
Alex Faaborg:
- Met with Ragavan, MConnor & Justin to discuss our approach to strong privacy versus convenience & user understanding.
- Going to work on a series of mockups at different levels of security: Single password with really good feedback vs. automatically generated military grade passphrase that you have to save.
Tab video
Alex Faaborg:
- Filmed the opening last Friday.
- Audio narration finished over the weekend.
- Should have first draft ready today, just editing & tweaking in After Effects left.
Beta Feedback button
Alex Faaborg:
- Updated mockups for Jingua.
- Somehow we got back to a double notification per study (but single opt-in before sending)
- Beltzner mentioned that his impression was that we had always been at double notification, the issue was double-opt-in — for privacy reasons we must start notifying when we begin collecting information, don’t think we want to move away from that.
- Implementation is waiting on panel notification changes? Gavin & Jono need to chat.
- Again, need to hear back from Neil on platform changes — but not required for beta 1.
Home tab & App tabs
Alexander Limi:
- Blair’s initial implementation of app tabs is up for review.
- Home tab is being worked on by Marco, current focus is on reusing the search engine strings from search service, which should be the last remaining thing to fix before the simple implementation of the start page is ready.
- Current implementation of Home tab should be simple enough to backport to 3.6.x if required, according to Marco.
- Question: whats the plan for getting app tabs for home page customizations?
- Limi to Clarify with Marco whether the app tab part of the Home tab is going to make it into beta 1 — or whether it’s just the locally hosted start page.
Download Manager
Alexander Limi:
- Nothing new since last week, Mehdi’s patch for library location & correct content type icons still waiting for review.
HTML5 form controls
Alexander Limi:
- Posted HTML5 constraint validation mock-ups.
- Next steps: Start designing the individual widgets.
“Paper Cuts”
Alexander Limi:
Paper cut overview bug is here.
- Frank Yan posted a patch that enables multi-selection & range selection of tabs, very cool.
- Next steps: Blog post today! Aim to highlight solved issues, what we should target next, and exciting work that is ongoing in this area — as well as talk about which groups we should prioritize.
Main window refresh
Stephen Horlander:
- Initial Firefox Button landed in the nightly builds! Is implemented as a toolbar for now, but will be moved once we can draw in the title bar.
- Bookmarks Menu Button has an almost-final first iteration patch up for feedback.
- Mac theme improvements are being reworked by Markus to pass review, hopefully they can land before beta 1, but not considered a blocker.
- Updated mockups for all platforms: Mac theme mock-ups & Linux theme mock-ups.
- Jim Mathies doesn’t expect draw-in-titlebar patches to be available until next week; this will either push back beta1 or we need to come up with an alternative — more discussion below.
- Blizzard contacted Red Hat, Ubuntu & Suse people for feedback on Linux theme work.
- Stephen should file a bug for switching tabs-on-top to default on trunk.
In-content page design
Stephen Horlander:
- No changes since last week.
- Need to update/create a project page.
Add-ons Manager
Jennifer Boriss:
- Final in-content design is scheduled to land after beta 1.
- Final pixel-perfect graphics being developed, Windows due this Thursday.
- Handled some last few bugs before code freeze.
- Blogging this week about what won’t make beta 1, and what will.
Jetpack & the Extension Bar
Jennifer Boriss:
- Blogging & a very helpful design session last week, know what to do next now.
- Met with Dietrich last Friday to talk about changes, he’s already working on it.
- Finishing up blog post that documents those changes.
Privacy
Jennifer Boriss:
- Last week: Sketching, planning Summit breakout session with Mehdi.
- Need to blog about mock-ups this week.
TabCandy
Aza Raskin:
- Removed all of jQuery from the code base, now using iQ.
- Working on getting more control over animation timing.
- Saw the first hardware-accelerated operations, is very smooth, but crashy. It does go to 11, though!
Post-Firefox 4 Home Tab
John Wayne Hill: (UX intern)
- Completed lots of sketching.
- Looking to group together some sketches/ideas into concepts this week.
Startup performance & perception
- John Wayne will blog about some of the implications of the startup video recording.
- Aza (& possibly Limi) explore/blog about session restore improvements.
Mobile
Madhava Enros:
- Putting together a brief for an Android theme; want to start generating concept mockups soon — good UI examples for Android are the Twitter client & Doubletwist.
- Finished a “Field Guide to Firefox for Maemo 1.1” blog meta-post about all the new features/UI changes.
- Android sharing story stable for our first version, figuring out Maemo — it depends on how centralized sharing system works.
- Working on a number of Maemo & Android platform integration issues
- See ongoing progress.
Feedback session
Quick feedback and/or blockers; for in-depth discussions, we do design sessions on Wednesdays.
Quick questions from Marco on the Home Tab:
- about:home or about:start? Everyone said about:home — of course, this isn’t visible in the UI by default, so it’s mostly an implementation detail.
- Marco: “Contents for now are still limited to the search field and Mozilla snippets (still miss marketing requirements). Do we have ideas to discuss? I think Beltzner suggested to add something like about:me contents to the page”
- Limi & John Wayne to contact the Engagement team (Limi, JW), where do we want to go next, and how far for Firefox 4
Other topics covered
- Madhava Enros (re-)joins the Firefox UX Team! Will still be working on Mobile, and we’re excited to have him on board for future work on tablets & slate-type devices, as well asn ensuring a consistent experience across all our platforms.
- General discussion on how are people feeling about Firefox 4 Beta 1. Consensus is that it’s in a lot better state than last week — it’ll be shipping with quite a bit of unfinished UI, but that’s okay.
- There’s an AIGA Design Week in San Francisco this week.
- Open Studios on Tuesday, Thursday.
- Design Week party at AutoDesk Gallery on Friday.
- John Wayne is going, possibly others.
- Stephen Horlander brought up alternative — and temporary — placement possiblities for the Firefox button if we can’t draw in the title bar:
- If we can’t draw in the title bar, we should put the menu button on glass, left of home as long as tabs are on top.
- We should probably ask Dão if we can move it to this location immediately, since it’s a better location no matter if the titlebar drawing lands in time for beta1.
- Some discussion around the strings in the new Bookmarks Menu, general agreement that it’s on the right track.
- Alex Faaborg wanted to know if App tabs should be toolbar-less by default? Decision: Be bold! Start without toolbar in the betas, then get feedback & adjust accordingly if it causes issues.
- Everyone was reminded to submit their Mozilla Summit talks & sessions, deadline tomorrow.
- Question for Firefox Dev meeting tomorrow:
- Retained Layers are in the critical path for extension bar + app tabs, when are they landing? Show sketches of what we’re trying to accomplish for context.
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? How is the new project-centric format working out for you? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.
