Mozilla Firefox Home Tab Concept

User identities, a website launcher, browsing sessions, and a task-oriented ultrasmart searchbox define my concept. http://yatriksolanki.com/fx
And it's cool!

--Transcription--

Hey there, my name is Yatrik Solanki, and this is my submission for the Mozilla Labs Home Tab Design Challenge.

Many homepage concepts revolve around bringing a variety of feeds and content to one page. But that's not something I thought would make sense for a browser-based home tab.
It's more important in this case to enhance the browsing experience, not bring content from the web, to the user.

So, my idea revolves around four main concepts: user identites tied to the browser, a basic launcher for select websites, a sessions feature for multiple websites and browsing sessions, and a task-oriented Ubiquity-esque search box.

So let's run through the first-use case; when the user first downloads and starts firefox, they'll be presented with this page. A basic introduction to Mozilla Weave and Firefox is in the box on the top. Below, there's a search bar, an interface to add sites to the launcher, and an introduction to sessions.

So let's look at some more on user identities: on first startup, you can start adding your favourite sites, for example, Facebook.
Firefox, knowing your history, can autocomplete that URL.
Recognizing that it's a website with a login, Firefox can give you a login box, where you can save your information from the start. That's a pretty cool experience to start off switching to firefox.

The launcher is something that's almost essential - as you saw, adding sites is easy, and hitting a plus icon let's you add more (Firefox can search across your history and favorites, and give you reccommendations as well).
RSS data can also be pulled, for notifications of new content, and this can be synced across platforms ( that is, notifications for something you read on your phone will be marked as read on your laptop ).

The sessions feature is something different altogether. Sessions could be used to open sites commonly browsed together at once, in new tabs, or to return to a series of websites that you had saved. You can save a session at any time from the hometab.
This makes returning to research trails, or simply opening all your news websites at once, a really easy task.An addition to sessions is visual history, which basically shows a browsing trail across time. It's something that's really useful to recall how you got somewhere in the first place - or maybe I'm the only one with that problem.
You can also search your history, and get live thumbnails, showing dates of visit, et cetera.
And that's sessions and visual history.

One of the most important features, the ultrasmart searchbox is very much inspired by Ubiquity. Right below the box, you can add search engines and commands, or as you type, the searchbox can begin to match commands, exactly like Ubiquity.
In this example, maps is shown, and as you can see, the list of engines is replaced with other options, such as Google vs. Yahoo! maps.
Once again, a very Ubiquity-esque concept.

A quick addition - the ability to customize. Like everything in Firefox, personas and addons could easily change the hometab to something that's personal. Addons can extend (or reduce) the items on the hometab, to match the user.

Because after all, it's all about personality and ease of use with Firefox.
To check out the mockups as images, head over to yatriksolanki.com/fx, and feel free to leave a comment as critique/feedback!
Thanks for watching!


Really sorry about the aspect ratio - I don't know anything about rendering, etc.
http://yatriksolanki.com/fx

Music is In the Morning Light - Instrumental by The Heaven Seventies (Creative Commons).

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• mozconcept

[yatriksolanki]

Thanks everyone!

Thanks to your votes, I won People's Choice.

Thanks :]

[davilima6]

soundtrack is too loud which makes it harder for understanding the voice. please fix!

[yatriksolanki]

Hey davilima6,

I put up a rough transcription in the description (don't really do much video, sorry!).

[Reflect0tcelfeR]

@WhatWhenWhereHowWow And IE6 is the best, right?

[mookiefudgenuggets]

Nice, i like it



[Arkinko1]

hey there i have a problem, i cant open mozila firefox, i unistalled it and downloaded it again but it doesnt work , i dunno what to do plz help me :(

[xxRazorJadexx]

NO! TABS MUST BE UNIFORM! MY OCD WILL NOT HAVE THIS!

[rockstarmax]

Music is good in the start of this intro...but you need to stop it while explaining.

[13royalknight]

what add-on are u using

[0Munch0]

so...why do we not have this?

[17randomguy]

hi great video! :)

i have one question: how do i do if i want to have my homepage opened up every time i open a new tab? thanks for answering :)

[eminem222able]

fuck u

[punio4]

It's sad seeing the current situation of FF4 now, compared to this, and other awesome concepts.