Since releasing an experimental new tab page for Firefox a week ago, we’ve got a lot of great feedback.
For the past week we’ve been using the feedback as a springboard for designing the next iteration. If you’d like to watch the design iterations as they happen, follow #mozconcept on Twitter.
Current Design
We’ve done away with the thumbnails as they just didn’t seem to be providing large amounts of value. As we played with different methods of taking screenshots, we discovered that it was the top-left corner that was most distinctive in identification because it generally contains the site’s logo. We have a much stronger association with a site’s logo or favicon than with the low information-density thumbnail of the page itself.
We’ve also turned the contextual actions into an actionable sentence. Previously, the actions were large, separated buttons. The actionable sentence connects the actions into a cohesive whole. Further, we now only show the contextual actions if the copy action has happened within the last 40 seconds, so that random chunks of text don’t appear on the new tab page.
Finally, the interface for undoing a tab close now uses the familiar info-bar. This gives less weight to the undo action, while still keeping it visible. By design, the undo doesn’t feel like a part of the page so the eye skips over it if your intent is to interact with the page.
Overall, the design feels faster, politer, and more functional.
The visuals still aren’t exactly right (help wanted!), but this feels much “righter”.
Instead of talking more about the design, give it a try and give us feedback:
Step 1. Download and install the latest development build of Firefox 3.1.
Step 2. Download and install the latest version of the New Tab prototype.
Step 3. Let us know what you think, including what works, what doesn’t and how we can improve the design.
You can switch back-and-forth between the old design and the new design by clicking the star in the lower-right corner.
Other Thoughts
There are still a lot of possible directions to take the new tab screen. Here are a couple of the ones we’ve played with. More to come soon. For instance, we want to revisit the first design.
With Thumbnails
Out There Designs
Oliver Reichenstein has joined Sean Martell to form a “new tab” visual design team. They’ve already separately produced almost all of these fantastic visual artifacts, and we are looking forward to more. If you’re a designer and interested in this project from a design perspective, this is a great opportunity to get involved in an open source project. Please jump onto either #labs on irc.mozilla.org or link your mockups in the comments section of this post.
Tags: announcement
Hi, I am french, and really want to be able to configure the search button to perform search on google.fr, not in google.com.
What about that or what about do the search by the engine in the search bar on the top right?
If it’s wiki on the top right, so search on wiki
Why right clic open link? it is not usual
Is there a way to choose which RSS feed is loaded into About:Tab? Often sites has more then one RSS and even more often I would like to see new content from other RSS then default one.
If there is no such option, then maybe you could add it?
I just noticed new “feature” after .32 update – delayed load of “Frequently Visited Sites”…and it’s quite annoying! I think it waits until all RSS will load but that could be very long! About:Tab should speed my web experience and right now it won’t do that because I type something in address bar faster than I’ll see “Frequently Visited Sites” (don’t mention to read them…).
One thing I noticed: If you have a bookmark with embedded login information, e.g. http://user:passwd@somesite.com, and you visit that often, it shows up in the New Tab’s Recent list complete with username and password.
That information should probably be parsed out.
One feature request:
It would be great if windows like the Downloads window and Error Console could be dockable.
This would make my life as a developer a lot easier, as well as being able to monitor the progress of multiple/large downloads far more easily!
Ok. I noticed why there is this delay…If I don’t move my mouse after ctrl+t there is some sort of circle with smaller circles with favicons. But right after I move my mouse it dissapers.
What it is?
In 0.32 the flavicons are arranged in a circle (without the text) before they are rearranged on the right-hand side of the window. Is it a bug or another design? If another design how can we access it?
Can I use this on FireFox 3.07 ?
@Frank,
Interesting how that would happen; shouldn’t the New Tab Page just see which pages on the history is viewed the most? If the u:p@site.com doesn’t display on the history, it shouldn’t display on the New Tab Page.
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I didn’t test this yet, but I hope there is no vuln whereas a site could put HTML in their site title and the HTML it is executed on the New Tab page to code a history-stealer and more.
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Very nice work Mozilla, always great to see you guys never stop adding new things =)
In re About:Tab v0.0.33,
I found a steep performance regression. It responds slowly.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; ja; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090305 Firefox/3.1b3 ID:20090305152042
Also, I’ve sometimes encountered crashes 10 to 20 seconds after opening a new tab and clicking somewhere in the content area. I’m not sure what’s the cause, but before updating to the current version, everything was fine.
Very good. I like it.
But the current design used only the half Windows.
My favourite are design 2 and 3.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3361919588/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3361902070/
Just got 0.0.33. Could you guys update the thread (or, even better, start a new one) each time you update so we know what’s up?
I also like the Frequently Visited Sites, with no thumbnails, it is easy to find a site with the icon
Now there is the possibility to drag and drop the sites, but the order isn’t remembered.
It would be nice when there was an icon to pin the site on the position we have set them
(Example: my most visited sites are Google, Windows Live and Yahoo!, I set them above, but the next time, they have a new order.)
Also removed sites are again visible next time we start Firefox.
Incorrect behavior with middle click (opens new page but starts scrolling current page)
It appears my earlier comment about focus not going to the awesome bar was due to TMP. I disabled it, and that works as expected.
However, my comment about the “Re-open” and “Undo” wording mis-match stands. I actually like how IE8 handles closed tabs. It gives me a list of recently-closed tabs in the left-hand column, instead of just the most-recently closed tab.
In early versions, I could set my homepage to about:tab, creating a nice list of frequent starting points when I start the browser or press the home button. The latest version (which I’m having trouble finding, 0.33?) no longer works.
To test, go to “about:tab” in the address bar — shows a blank page.
I also like the concept of
http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3361919588/
Having the blank space on the left doesn’t make much sense in my opinion, except for the fact that it probably speeds up loading times pretty substantially. A useful item that could be shown there might be (other than the items in design 2 above) to pull RSS feeds from the sites listed to the right and display a list of updates on the left.
The graphic that shows circles around the favicons of some random sites you visit is pretty cool, I must say, even if it doesn’t really do anything. It could, though!
Re: 0.0.34
I really prefer the visited sites on the right side of the window. It’s just cognitive preference (right/left-brained/handed?), but I have a strong tendency to veer right, in this context
I wish it were otherwise, since useful content tends to be left-aligned on most pages, but there you go. One does what one can. I’ve got the tab bar running down the right side, and my tool bars tend to be right-aligned.
Am I in the majority or the minority? I assume you’d want to catch the bigger group, given the “minimal configuration” emphasis.
Is there a way of getting this to work with Tab Mix Plus? So far, I can only get it to work if I disable TMP.
I’m going to try New Tab King, as well.
Just found the add-on conflicts with tab mix plus. The problem confused me a few days when I just installed the addon, I found the add-on option is gray. When I disable the tab mix plus, it works.
About Tab does not want to ply together with TAB MIX Plus for me. I tried to type chrome://abouttab/content/text.html into Tab Mix config but it does not seem to work.
Any Idea?
Is there anyway for the new tab to open as the homepage? I’m digging it so much it’s the first thing I want to see when the foxt opens
More keyboard accessibility would be awesome. I’m a huge fan of using my keyboard where ever I can; as a laptop user my hands are always on keys, rather than my mouse.
Hello, I had the same annoyance as Dean, and fianlly solved it. On opening a new tab you can choose whether you want to place the focus in the search field or in the address bar, by modifying a firefox setting : type ‘about:config’ in the address bar, enter, read and validate the warning message to access the settings, go to ‘newtaburl.focus_urlbar’, double-click on the value to change it, restart Firefox.
I think that just being able to customise the New Tab page (alot) is what would suit most users.
Some would like it blank – others could benefit from more of a “Web Dashboard” configuration..
Maybe this is what the aim should be? – A customisable dashboard similar to that used in Business Intelligence software where the user can create the overview of the daily (hourly) information that they NEED from the web.
Those who need nothing can select nothing!
I personally would like a “Soft Bookmark” feature where I could Right Click a link and instead of opening this page in a New Tab, I can just add the link to the bottom of the New Tab under “TO LOOK AT…(When I have time!)” or “MARKED FOR FUTURE BROWSING”
This stops me from Bookmarking junk links that i never remember to look at in a few days time.
It also stops me from opening a New Tab, and being distracted by the new site.
A similar feature would be to “Close and Save” to New Tab page, so that i can start Firefox Quickly (i.e. Just the New Tab page), and then selectively browse the pages from my last session….
As far as using the page to show frequently visited or most used sites… Well I have those on my shortcuts toolbar anyway.. So in my case this feature is just duplication.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to work for me at all. I’m running Firefox 3.1b3, and the behavior is the same on both my laptop (Intel, Mac OS X 10.5.6) and desktop (PowerPC, Mac OS X 10.4.11).
It seems like the first time I copy something to the clipboard, I get the “search for xxx” in the top-right corner. Other than that, absolutely nothing shows up on the page; just a big white blank.
Disregard my last! I was trying to browse to “about:tab” instead of “chrome://abouttab/content/text.html”.
Even thought it’s against the concept guidelines, there should be a configuration page, because ajax heavy sites, like GMail, will never get onto the recent sites list because of their lack of linking urls.
The Frequent Site list should also show sites from bookmarks, not only history
Just noticed that the latest build crashes upon opening.
Mac OS X 10.5.6 with a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2GB 667 HHz DDR2 SDRAM…
Very useful! One small design nitpick — I’d prefer the text under “You Might Want To…” *not* to be small caps. Especially at that size, it’s significantly harder to read than sentence case.
Definitely with Thumbnails, frequently used and recently closed would be good.
1. Remember what a user does on the page. Any Wikipedia page that shows up loads the RSS feed for Wikipedia which is completely useless, I change the number of items to show to 0 and when I restart Firefox it starts showing three items again.
2. If I remove something I don’t want it to show up again, ever. (Related to #1)
3. There is a massive amount of unused space on the right-hand side.
I like the way Chrome did it, give 9 thumbnails for the most visited sites and provide a list of recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs/windows.
I strongly support Norse’s comments. Yet, if I accidentally removed something useful from the list, I should be able to add it back from the “+” button. Until I choose to add it back, it should be gone forever.
I know it’ll lead to the need of configuration, and I think the actual algorithm is simple because it’s based on frecency. But what about adding a penalty to it, like using an external text file as “black list”?
I think the the last three choices with thumbnails makes the page really useful especially with links to certain net utilities such as gmail.
But the choice of with or without thumbnails should be left to the user. For instance I can sacrifice a little speed for a little looks, other than that I think for some users thumbnails will be much more clearer than basic text and favicons.
The idea of adding a ubiquity search bar is brilliant, it would be really useful.
Also I think adding the bookmarks list, would make it perfect, the bookmarks sidebar takes up space and with the new tab page that problem would be solved.
The extension shaping up to be a very good one. Keep up the good work.
Removing the close tab function where only one tab is opened is a mistake. If one has “Show my windows and tabs from last time” set closing Firefox ensures that the next time you start it you get the last tab loaded even though you may not have wanted to see it again. The right behavior is to allow closing the last tab and the browser separately as it happened in the previous versions. This has the added benefit of closing the last tab to get a fresh tab if you are done with the current content and would like all the flash, etc. to be unloaded.
Closing the browser when trying to close the last tab is equally annoying. It is equivalent to closing the browser with the last tab still showing content. For a discussion of why firefox should revert to the previous tab behavior see above.
I think that this can be very useful and I love it in chrome. There are bugs in the order switching of the sites. And it’d be cool if the movement wasn’t so rigid, if you could make a smooth animation iphone esque. Otherwise, great stuff.
It’s a bit minimal… I am not a hardcore tabbist and so feel a bit clumsy using this. The list with sites is longer than my screen is high. I hate it when the screen is only partly used, esecially when I know that there are other links that I cannot reach. There are multiple links with the same name but leading to a different page on the site. I cannot find the functions that are in the examples above. The screen sample under the caption “”current design” I cannot see.
I really like the concept. Any suggestions on getting this to work in Tab Mix Plus? Such as what to type in the user location for opening a new tab? Thanks. I appreciate the work.
Jason
I really like this design: http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3361919588/sizes/l/
Though I would prefer recently closed tabs in the top left vs. recent search terms. Though the best would be the possibly to customize it to some degree. Maybe we could choose between having recent tabs or recent searches in that corner.
Would it be possible to have an option to put some toolbars on the the “new tab” instead of having the top/header thing ,of the browser takeup more space .
Perhaps there could be a button to show/hide them