Firefox/Projects/Home Tab

This project covers the design and creation of a Firefox Home Tab, a small persistent tab placed at the far left of the tab strip that will serve as the user's home on the Web. The plan is for this interface to be locally hosted, customizable, and personalized to the needs of each individual user.

The second aspect of this project is allowing users to create "App Tabs," small persistent tabs placed to the right of the Home Tab that contain home pages or Web applications that the user very regularly interacts with. App tabs can not be accidentally closed, and they do get lost when viewing a large number of documents in separate tabs.

• Project lead: Mossop
• Project members: limi, mak, Unfocused
• Potential reviewers:
• QA contacts: marcia

Status

• IN FLIGHT
• General tracking in bug 551849
• Met with UX team to talk over the initial design. Beginning planning for how implementation will proceed

Goals

• Replace Firefox's start page with a local chrome page
• Add support for persistent "app tabs" that appear in every window and persist across restarts
• Have the home and app tabs only load when first viewed in a window

Non-Goals

• For the initial project the home page will not feature any dynamic content like history/bookmark lookups, but will just be a simple copy of the current start page.
• The initial project could even just reopen the app in new windows, and evaluate later the "single load" approach if it's hard to di immediately.
• Rewrite things we can inherit (If add-ons already did those, we can evaluate code and ask author to re-license it).

Timeline/Milestones

• 2009/04: [Complete] Meet with UX to get an overview of what the final design will be like
• 2009/05: Get more complete mockups for the initial stage blogged about
• 2009/05: Implement the locally hosted homepage as a normal tab
• 2010/05: Implement app tabs per-window
• 2010/05: Make home and app-tabs appear in every window
• 2010/06: Make app tabs persist across sessions and implement the migration path.

Delivery Requirements

• Requires an add-on compatibility changing application version increment
• Must be complete before the first beta of the target delivery vehicle

Testing

• Most of the home/app tab features should be able to be automatically tested by browser-chrome tests
• Migration path will likely need manual/mozmill testing unless we invent a new test suite.

Related Projects

• New Theme is not required but without switching tabs to be on top the chromeless app-tabs will look pretty strange.