Firefox UX Team update: Summit Summary

What the Firefox UX team is up to this week

This is an older update that wasn’t published because I managed to break my blog in interesting ways while testing the new & very excellent Plone 4 beta release. Since it happened just before the Mozilla Summit, I didn’t have time to fix it, so I’m publishing these two older updates today too. Apologies if this is confusing anyone. The date in the header is the correct date for when the meeting happened.

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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.

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New & noteworthy

This week is a bit special, since we were all away at the Mozilla Summit last week, so the traditional project updates do not apply this time.

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Firefox Beta 1 shipped before the Summit — hooray! — and we spent most of this meeting this time identifying what we should focus on for the upcoming betas. Firefox 4 has a seriously aggressive beta schedule, with a new beta shipping roughly every two weeeks until we get to the final release in Q4 2010.

The list of items that we identified:

• Session Restore: cascading loading + UI
• Home tab
  • snippets infrastructure
  • UI for session restore
• Extension bar: need to make sure this isn’t scoped as only Jetpack
• Menu bar cleanup (both new & traditional menu)
• Context menu cleanups
• Chrome menu cleanups
• Customization of tabs/menu etc
• Sync UI
• Sharing
• Mac installer improvements
• Minimum tab width & redundant buttons
• Focus issues: tab-modal dialogs, content should never steal focus from chrome, new tabs should always be focused, flash steals keyboard shortcuts (Neil Deakin might have advice here?)
• Improved “List all tabs”: Recently closed tabs, only show tabs outside of the visible set
• Find in Page fixes
• Download manager as panel
• HTML5 widgets
• Panels needs focused effort
  • we need to use them for tab modal dialogs
• Location bar
  • stop/go/reload
  • Identity block (+ geo, + activity manager)
  • Styling of the AwesomeBar results
  • Progess of active tab loading
  • autocomplete (speak URL)
  • URLs on hover — since status bar is going away
• Progress indicators in general

Outcomes and conversations from the summit

• People very excited about the new theme!
• Lots of talk about Apps, feels more solid — nobody questions whether we want to do specific apps anymore. Much design work and standards work left.
• Discussions on add-ons as things that are not installed by the user (crapware), happy to see this discussed
• Discussion on the extension bar was very useful, some ideas on how to do toolbars & related matters
• Device UI session was good, lots of feedback, figure out the conceptual model, figure out how it should look on OEM devices
• Talk to product group about opportunity in slate devices this holiday season — would be good to be a better experience than IE8 on these devices.
• Tabs in titlebar should be possible (but not default, obviously) on the Mac — just like with the Firefox menu button
• Fixing session restore had a lot of support
• Work offline: need to make sure there aren’t any real use cases for it that we’re missing — nobody has given any real reasons yet, there’s a lot of “superstitious behavior,” however
• Check with platform team what the status on fixing caching (possibly in the dev meeting tomorrow)
• Linux: Found that Gnome is heading in this direction (custom window decorations) anyway, so makes less sense for us to do this. Still support FF menu button in the tab bar instead.
• Are there quick wins on UI effects (fading icons in, fade between back/forward) that we can make use of easily?
• Site-specific privacy talk led to good feedback, new ideas, people willing to help
  • State of privacy defaults (third-party cookie behavior) still seems very up in the air, a number of ideas that perviously seemed promising have been partially abandoned
  • We should try and sniff out current state of this from Dan Witte, Sid Stamm, et al.

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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.

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Is there anything that you think can be improved in these updates? Send feedback to limi@mozilla.com.