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Thursday, 28th August 2008, No Comments »

My Mozilla Concepts

I’ve wanted for a while now to get more into contributing to open projects, however time and being to get actual achievable results had put me off. Until Mozilla called for participation, particularly from designers, re-ignited my interest in contributing. So here’s some ideas I started earlier this month, that I’ve finally got around to finishing…

Overall design

Given the amount of work the Mozilla team has put into Firefox 3 adapting to the look of the operating system it’s running on, I felt it was best to stay that way first off. These are just really quick concepts mocked up in photoshop and are far from perfect.

One thing I had observation I’ve made while watching ‘normal people’ use browsers was how they unknowingly treated the address bar like a command line. This obviously influenced my idea of effectively dropping the additional search field and combining the address bar with search. A user can then ‘rotate’ the ‘verb/noun command’ and start typing. Then, of course, I saw Ubiquity.

Another small idea I added to the address bar is ‘personal data notifications’ e.g. how many unread emails do I have, which of my friends are online and what RSS feeds haven’t I read yet.

Browser history

After watching Wei Zhou’s Bookmarking & History Concept I really felt that the biggest part of browsing history was missing, time! So basically the concept is a personal browsing timeline is generated and displayed. The ‘higher’ the view (more than one day) the less is displayed (i.e favicons) but the user gets a sense of how they browsed through different paths to get to the sites they’ve visited. The ‘closer’ (a day or hour) more information about the sites and pages the user visited is revealed in perhaps a similar fashion to Wei Zhou’s concept.
Edit, an additional concept which I never fully explored was overlaying the personal data notifications (email, RSS and chats with friends) on to the timeline.

Exposing metadata

One thing that’s held back microformats in Firefox 3 was the there was never any agreement as to how to expose (microformats). This concept is based on Apple’s Exposé, however in this case the metadata of the viewed page is exposed to allow the user to bookmark, subscribe to an RSS feed and get any additional microformat information.