November 14th, 2010

Firefox UX Team update: Focus for final betas

Wrapping up the final betas for Firefox 4

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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?)
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. Non-modal dialogs: JS alert/confirm/prompt shouldn’t be window-modal, bug 59314.
  11. 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.
  12. 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:

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

Alex Limi makes software easier to use. Founder of the Plone project, he currently lives in San Francisco, and previously worked at Jarn & Google .

He’s currently Firefox UX Lead at Mozilla .

“No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.”
—Marion Levy

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