New Tab Concepts - For FX
by ShahI’ve read the Firefox Proposal: A Better New Tab Screen from Aza’s Thoughts. Watch the video below.
He’s right - a better tab concept can improve the web experience. However, I’d like to suggest the following.
When one opens up a tab, one usually does a search. In the above video, a “Search the Web” text box appears within the window. I don’t believe this is appropriate. How many textboxes are present? 3!!! You’ve one as the address bar, the one for the search bar, and the one introduced when a new tab is opened.
Beep! Major UI ugliness issue. Just switch the focus to the search bar. I open a new tab, the tab focus is not in the address bar but in the search bar. (Of course, one may argue that pressing tab to switch focus is quicker.)
The next question is - how does one personalise the search box after the focus switch? Wait, it already is.
I also want to point out that if one has FX installed in the default way, typing a word in the address bar and pressing Enter leads to the results on Google (or any other search engine provided you’ve changed the settings.) So, someone may not want to switch focus and want ‘The Awesome Bar’ to be merged with the address bar itself.
The big thing that I believe should be integrated is the integration with 3rd parties. Refer to the video whereby Delicious bookmarks are shown when a word is being typed in the ‘Awesome Bar.’
I do agree that the “see text, copy, open tab, go to web service, paste and execute” concept is wrong.
So is the prototyped concept in the video. Why not just highlight the piece of text, right click over it, and select the type of search or activity right away. There is no need to open up a new tab. It gives the user more control and avoids the privacy issue stated in the video.
Contextual sequences is brilliant. Kudos Aza!
Again, the UI issue comes up again. Why have a page displaying “You normally visit…” followed by 2 or more thumbnails of the sites. Please, don’t make me scream “oh my eyes! my eyes!”
Use the bookmark tab bar. How? Give it a carousel-like structure. Say in the morning, user X visits Slashdot followed by TechCrunch. The bookmarks tab bar (or there can be another toolbar on top aside which offers such functionality) which displays the suggested sites to visit next(depending on user browsing stats saved by the browser.)
It’s sleaker. And hovering over the sites listed on the bar, will result in the display of thumbnails.
There’s another concept based on Media RSS which I’d like to pitch in but I’ll keep that for another blog entry.
What do you think?
