December 7th, 2010

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

What the UX team is up to this week

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.

Here are the bugs we’re currently tracking, with an attempt to identify a milestone where it would make sense to land the fix. These milestones and deadlines are suggestions, and your input is most certainly welcome.

The always-updated list of these is available on the UX Priorities wiki page, but listed here for your reading/scanning convenience.

Beta 8

A smaller release UX-wise, to follow up on beta 7 issues + ship JPAKE in Sync.

  • bug 601022 — Add final visual style and graphics to add-ons manager
  • bug 592822 — Remove quit warning dialog

Beta 9

Goal: Attempt to get in most of the UI changes that require a feedback cycle.

UI tweaks that need at least one beta for feedback

  • bug 572160 — Put tabs in the title bar when the window is maximized on Windows
  • bug 615435 — Move home button to right hand side
  • bug 455694 — Tab rearrange/detach animations
  • bug 613909 — Disable gestures since they see a lot of accidental triggering (zoom, swipes left/right/up/down) but make it easy to re-enable these. Possibly move Panorama to three-finger tap and keep top/bottom three finger swipe for top/bottom of page.

Doorhanger notifications

See Visual bug list for notifications

Start page

First draft of an initial implementation.

  • Visual design from Stephen Horlander
  • bug 612453 — Figure out how hard it is to include Google Suggest support, so we have the same capability as the search field in Firefox itself (people definitely switch their home page away from the Mozilla one to get this, less so for Google Instant, which seems to be something that is popular among a smaller set of people.
  • Figure out if we can have links to things that are privileged, in particular a “Restore my previous session” link on the page

Third-party add-ons

  • bug 596343 — Users should have exclusive control over selecting their add-ons
  • bug 597598 — 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

Add-on bar

Add some of the missing capabilities, and better visuals.

  • bug 616014 — A close icon on the add-on bar to dismiss it.
  • bug 616018 — Render add-on bar on glass on Windows Aero glass in Vista & Windows 7
  • bug 616016, bug 599229 — Group old status bar add-on icons in the new add-on bar
  • bug 616017 — Add gradient to add-on bar on OSX for operating system consistency
  • bug 616015 — Add a keyboard shortcut to reveal and hide the add-on bar
  • bug 616625 — Add-on bar should be left-aligned for LTR locales
  • bug 616472 — Unify sizes of toolbarbutton images to make life easier for extensions
  • {{Bug|598920} — Icons should not have borders in add-ons bar
  • bug 609127 — Leave enough space in the corner for resizing the window
  • Blog post about why we’re doing it, and what new capabilities it gives us (Boriss, Limi will help out)

Add-ons Manager

Do a second pass and clean up unnecessary UI and apply some spit & polish.

  • UX team should create list of easy wins + file bugs for these (similar to what we did for the add-ons bar recently)
  • AMO integration: Should be possible to install and add-on directly from the “Get Add-ons” pane (template for detail pages instead of bouncing people to the web site)
  • AMO integration: Make “Get Add-ons” be a little less intimidating, it’s very crowded right now

Status/progress bar

Add back some of the capabilities from the old status bar

  • Meta bug 613390
  • bug 603777 — Show “Connecting to” / “Waiting for” states in URL bar after N seconds
  • Free up more space (no http, possibly use the reload button space)
  • reset the google search vs url bar width
  • Strip http:// from previewed URLs
  • Show the new URL inline with current URL when you’re not previewing a new server hostname

Session restore finalization

(Assuming that we got bug 592822 into beta 8) We need to fix this properly post 4.0, we currently have a set of “softly persisted” bookmarks in the shape of Panorama + App tabs, not optimal. Here are some mitigation strategies in the meantime.

  • Figure out what our solution for restoring a session should be, whether the current approach (Restore Previous Session in menu) is sufficient, or whether a lot of people perceived it as data loss in beta 8. Suggestions: Add Restore Session link on about:home and/or in Panorama, only show doorhanger for session restore if you created app tabs or made changes in Panorama.

Panorama

These issues need to be synced up with what the Panorama team priorities and existing bugs.

  • You can’t click a group
  • detach a group to a window
  • multiselect not supported in groups
  • Text editing doesn’t support arrow keys
  • app tabs "leak" between groups
  • Private mode ungroups your tabs
  • Groups are not restored properly
  • App tabs are not restored properly
  • Creating a new group and clicking in it should just create a blank new tab
  • When you close the last tab in a group, you automatically get sent to another open group, is this what we want?
  • Groups from Panorama should show in List All Tabs: bug 596017

Beta 10

Final adjustments to UI, heavy on Primary UI fixes.

Primary UI fixes

XP theme

  • bug 590945 — Implement the rest of the window frame in xul (necessary for XP theme + proper personas)
  • bug 569850 — Theme Specific Background Tabs for Windows XP
  • bug 569830 —Theme Specific Glyphs for Windows XP

Linux theme

Overview: bug 572482, in particular:

Add-ons opt-in

Adjust based on feedback from Beta 9.

Status/progress bar

  • If there’s still demand for the old-style progress bar, separate out the old code into and extension between the beta and RCs. The current extensions out there are all lacking some of the old functionality.

Installer / first-run improvements

  • bug 516362 — Mac installer improvements
  • bug 420525 — Better default window size
  • Opportunistic: Auto-import of bookmarks would be a nice improvement, as would a Chrome bookmarks importer

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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