Mozilla Labs is experimenting with a design for a new tabs page in the Firefox browser that will show a circle of the top sites you visit that is reminiscent of the circle of friends design you see on many mobile phones. (Except, who needs friends, when you’ve got the Internet?) When you open a new tab, instead of a blank page, you would see a watermark of icons representing the eight or so sites you visit most often. By mousing over the circles, the the tab page would fade into the actual links.
This is just a concept design, but using that blank page when a new tab opens up makes sense. Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs calls the watermark a”cognitive shield” because it is supposed to protect users from the clutter of all the links unless they explicitly mouse over the watermark. Also, it doesn’t appear if you start typing something into the address bar. He says he is considering making the circles themselves clickable, which would be more intuitive and eliminate a step. Giving users the ability to customize which sites show up in the circle would also be helpful.
The add-on only works on the development build of Firefox 3.1 right now, and may or may not find its way into a future general release.
I wish that Mozilla labs would ‘play’ with speeding up the browser and reducing the memory bloat, and this is coming from someone that doesn’t even use any extensions.
Now that is sexy!
Would the wizards of Moz also take a look at the “ATOM interface, DERI” ?
I doubt the DERI guys will use patents to prevent Mozilla from using such an impressive enhancement in usability. But you can never say, since the greenback is indeed known to seduce many. Also there is prior art (it could be hidden in the most obscure of publications and revealed all of a sudden…) and competing patents. One thing about patents is that, AFAIK, they do not apply to registered non-profits. (troll)
The ATOM interface is awesome indeed.
Oh yes, i forgot … FINALLY!
Forgot to mention Kompose in KDE and slide sorter view in OO Impress. Ummm….. mouse gestures?
I think it have ‘played’ pretty much good with ‘Speed’ but yes I agree that they have to work on Memory Usage problem.
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Whilst I agree with you in principle, don’t forget that the people working on this may not have the technical ability to be able to work on those issues.
If they don’t (and I agree that this is a big “if”) then working on this won’t make any difference to addressing the concerns you have.
Mozilla’s version of Opera’s Speed Dial?
how is this any different than chrome’s pseudo home page speed dial thingie? not that innovative i must say.
agreed. open social in the cloud at its finest.
It’s no different to Chrome’s effort but it’s a nice addition all the same. Why only 8 though? Something could be done with the time spent on pages effecting the size of the circles.
It is a good post and I really agree with Peter (first comment) that mozilla is should concentrate more on speed rather than fancy stuff and if they don’t then chrome will take over because with faster internet connections Chrome works lighting fast.
Mohammad Afaq
Free Website Traffic
Safari 4 beats chrome, opera and firefox in start page design.
Download it and take a look, you’ll see the bar has been raised a lot.
Safari do this already and I love it, if only the new safari would stop crashing I would use it more often.
Google toolbar does this on firefox. It gives list of recently closed tabs as well.
I don’t know how many years the other browsers had this already – using the new tab blank page for accessing history, top sites, etc. Even IE8 have this now. Yes, it’s new for Firefox, but not innovative.
Regular users just want links on the blank page to be clearly laid out and easy to navigate. This circle of top sites, etc. it’s not even intuitive. Mozilla/Firefox – You did a good job with the Awesome Bar, so let’s cut the fancy design and get back to providing real value.
Like Google Chrome ,Mozilla too trying to bring something new tab page like most visited sites to Firefox,I think they have to improve mFirefox ’s speed ,it is very slow now a days and crashing.
As usual, something which Opera resolved way ahead of the pack, yet which some other browser will end up getting credit for being the first to do.
They’ll never get the credit they deserve if they remain on 1% market share though.
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It’s the same feature as I see every day in Google. I don’t know what I pressed in my settings
but when I open Google it gives me a table of 9 websites of my latest visit.
FastDial is an addon for FF that does a similar thing.
It creates a folder in your bookmarks, you fill it with links, set the grid size and new tabs open a fast dial page. Only difference is it previews the page, which is kind of cluttered.