Firefox/UX index

UX Index

An overview of the areas where we are looking at improving the UI.

Things we still need to expand on during work week:

• Menu card sort, which options can go, and is there a better grouping? (limi)
• Preferences card sort + revisit how things are grouped and handled (Mike: “I don't want a cookie manager, I want one location that manages everything related to a site — cookies, geolocation settings, etc”) (limi)
• Discussion on openness vs. innovation

Content Creation & Input

• Caps Lock indicator in password field
• File upload indicators
• Easier Undo, Global Undo — for closing tabs, closing windows, clicking links, etc.
• Resizable input boxes
• Provide a great, default UI for contentEditable
• Improve contentEditable UI in general: table editing in particular
• "Delete this element" in a page
• Saving web pages in a way that doesn't suck — receipts, offline reading (“read later”), backup of bookmarks (faaborg)

Add-ons

• Better missing plugin experience
• Better add-on installation and upgrade experience
• New interface primitives for extensions, combine the multitude of hook-in points to a single interface (iPhone-like icon approach, you give us the shape, we render it?)
• Enable/disable multiple add-ons/themes
• Improved add-ons manager — what do I have? What needs an update?

Tabs

• Volume per tab or at least a "which tab is making noise" indicator
• Home tab (faaborg + limi)
• Sidebar tabs — partial thumbnails, grouping, filtering (limi)
• “App tabs” — a special class of tabs that can can remove the chrome, have notifications, are “sticky”/“pinned”, only show icon (similar to home tab) (faaborg, limi)
• Tab tearoff animations
• Visual navigation of tabs (Ctrl tab, etc)
• Awesomebar tab name matching (limi)
• Easier access to recently closed tabs (trash can?)
• Get data on new tab position behavior
• Ability to create shortcuts via tearoff, clearer, implemented
• Need ability to draw in title bar
• Too easy to accidentally create new window on drag, needs threshold
• Thumbnail view on page “media” tab

Install/update

• Improve installer experience on the Mac — currently, a lot of people launch FF from the disk image
• Visual design of the update dialog (Faaborg)
• Improve “stickiness” of the install — if you have launched FF 5-10 times, we ask you whether you want it as your default.
• Improve upgrade experience

Improved Native Behaviors

• Native OS X <select>
• Mac unified toolbar doesn't scale gracefully
• New Windows default theme
• New Mac default theme
• Fullscreen on Mac

UI/Widgets

• Eliminate unneeded windows (Downloads, View source) (limi)
• Make it easier to tell if a website is trusted, make it easier to identify brand
• Autocomplete for “about:” (limi)
• Toolbar customization is clumsy/ugly, needs improvement (shorlander)
• Reduce interface clutter — merge stop/reload, location/search, hide menubar, remove statusbar, unify add-ons entry points (faaborg)

Downloads (limi)

• In-page download manager
• Fix default behaviours to optimize for common actions (downloading a zip, playing an mp3, open a PDF)
• If OS knows how to handle a file type, let it!
• If user chooses to download with custom parameters (“Download as…”), let them get full control of action + location of the file
• Fix mime type declarations (“Stuffit file” for zip, etc)
• Download tab for in-depth handling of downloads (search, sorting, clear logs, stats, etc)
• Show the file type you're about to download in the cursor icon when hovering over binary downloads + PDFs (“the land mines of the internet”, no surprises when navigating) (faaborg + limi on the download side)

Process improvements

• Visible “Feedback” button in alphas/betas

“Places” improvements

• History as a parallel timeline (limi)
• Can't edit “Smart” bookmark folder
• Adding people to Places — sync my contacts across sites, let me use my Facebook people elsewhere, autocomplete people (with faces)
• Library/bookmark/history management — better navigation of places, separate window fail
• Places in the content area, search + browse actions (“Bills”) (faaborg)
• Improved “bookmark this page” dialog
• Get rid of URLs when displaying favorites
• Vista/Win7 explorer-like interface for navigating favorites (faaborg, limi)

Content

• Better indicator for how much of a page is downloaded (maybe even separate indicator for page vs resources on the page? ~limi)
• Zoom indicator when zoom level deviates from the standard (limi)
• Built-in translation function
• In-browser PDF display
• Show the file type you're about to download in the cursor icon when hovering over binary downloads + PDFs (“the land mines of the internet”, no surprises when navigating) (faaborg + limi on the download side)
• Visual improvements to “find text in page”
• Flick navigation with UI feedback (for fullscreen?) (faaborg)

One input / Taskfox

• Combine URL and search bar, make common actions available (limi)
• Attach “add custom search” onto search form completion dropdowns (possibly with threshold, 3 times etc) (limi)
• Share link from browser (email, Facebook, etc)

Performance

• Web page quick look (limi)
• Resource Packages (limi)
• Selective tab loading (limi)
• Start new session / restart / redraw / refresh
• Look at memory management defaults — “I closed all my tabs, but the browser is still taking up 2GB” (limi)
• Preloading HTML pages on hover (limi)
• Separate process for update, watching hangs, feedback for automatic recovery (faaborg)
• about:perf — locally log UI performance metrics, button to submit information (faaborg)

Notifications

• “Oops, this is embarrassing” is insanely small
• No dialogs that are unprompted! (faaborg)

Security

(do this as part of Weave)

• Can we have timeout for SSL form saves?
• Caps lock indicator on
• Let people set master password without having to enter it when starting FF
• What is my username?
• What accounts do I have here?
• Do I have a password saved?

More far-out ideas

• RTS scroll model for fullscreen (faaborg)
• Ability to define certain sites as using the IE6 rendering engine for Enterprise deployments (limi)
• Expose platform-native widgets for web apps that work like client apps + Prism