The New Study

Today, we will introduce a new study that aims to learn more on how people uses menu items while browsing. Here is what Alex Faaborg, the principal designer for Firefox thinks about this study:

“Ever since Mosaic 1.0 Web browsers have had a menu bar.

However, this menu bar has always illogically followed the design of a standard desktop publishing application, containing top level commands like File and Edit, even though these commands are not always directly applicable to the primary functionality of a Web browser,which is generally not limited to document creation and editing. To streamline the Firefox user interface, and to match the overall interactive design of Windows 7, the Firefox UX team is exploring collapsing the menu bar into a single “application button” when Firefox is running on modern versions of Windows.

This change will help simplify Firefox, both visually and interactively, and will also leverage external consistency with other applications that the user regularly uses alongside Firefox. However, we currently haven’t decided on the exact contents of the menu that the application button will display to the user. ”

Join the study

The goal for this study is to answer these three questions:
* Which menu items are the most commonly used?
* Which menu items are the least commonly used?
* How long do users spend exploring the menu bar contents before selecting each particular menu item? (collecting this data now will aid us in later determining if the new design makes users more efficient and effective)

We are planning to roll out this study on the first week of February, and it will last about 5 days. For everyone who is interested in this study, you will be able to see your own usage data visualized on your computer, before you submit the data. We WON’T record any personal information, such as history items. Instead, we will only count the interactions with fixed standard menu items that used across different platforms. You can also choose not to submit the data at the end or leave the study if you are not comfortable with it.

So buckle up, join us in the new study from Test Pilot!

For more detail about this study, please read the full study introduction!

We are nearing the release of Jetpack 0.8, which will feature both the Toolbar and Places APIs. Jetpack 0.8 is a particularly important release because it marks the last release based on the experimental prototype we started with last year. As we wrote about last week, we have concurrently been working on a new production-quality iteration of Jetpack, with a revamped architecture that takes inspiration from all of the feedback about the prototype.

In the coming week we will be publishing more information about the new architecture, but currently, we need your feedback on our draft roadmap: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/Reboot_Roadmap. We are looking at roughly a four month time-frame for completion of this feature roadmap. During this four month span, there are three major releases scheduled. Each will add targeted, essential features and APIs to the rebooted platform. The first of these three releases will be live about 6 weeks from today.

As we near this transition, expect an increase in communication from the team. It’s an exciting time for Jetpack!

- Daniel Buchner, on behalf of the Jetpack team.

So, Why does this matter?

People are using the internet to collaborate more than ever before. Collaboration on the internet has been evolving at a rapid pace, and the applications and technology that will drive the next wave of internet collaboration will require even greater technical complexity and more significant computing resources than is currently available through the browser environment today. While text documents, videos, music, and image-base forms of collaboration are now common place, there are many needs require a level of compute performace beyond the web platform as it exists today, such as:

• consumption of high-quality digital video or music streams,
• complex image or speech recognition,
• manipulation and processing large pictures of nature or space,
• processing large sets of tabular data locally in the browser,
• complex animations with DOM elements (via DirectX or OpenGL),
• exploring 3D worlds, such as SecondLife or an OpenSim Grid,
• real-time audio and video editing,
• having an integrated development environment that runs entirely in the browser

There are endless examples of such complex uses of the internet platform that are just not feasible with the status quo web platform. Developers have tried to overcome such barriers in the past with client-side enhancements like ActiveX, Netscape Plugins, Java Applets, but each in its own way was flawed and failed to gain mass adoption. It is possible that the Native Client project will change all this, but standardization of such initiatives across the browser landscape is a lengthy endeavor. For the near future the tools that the developer uses to provide a rich user experience remain JavaScript and ActionScript, plug-ins, such as the ones previously mentioned, are significantly limited by the architectural mismatch of performance requirements they place on the CPU.

Read more…

Featured speakers:
1. We’re very excited to host several Seedcamp companies at our Jan 26 meetup. From the Seedcamp website: “Seedcamp is a programme created to jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe by connecting next generation developers and entrepreneurs with over 400 mentors from a top-tier network of company builders.”

We hope to have companies such as Brainient, Codility, Kwaga, Platogo, and many many more giving us lightning talk style presentations.

2. Jay Sullivan, VP Mobile at Mozilla will talk about our Mobile strategy and show off some cool demos, including our upcoming version of Firefox for mobile devices.

3. In addition, we will also have a round of updates on various Mozilla projects from Labs, Addons and more.

If you are planning on attending, be sure to RSVP on the Meetup page. We hope you’ll join us for food, fun and lots of good discussions.

Head over to the Personas Gallery and personalize the look of your Firefox.

Weave Sync is almost ready for 1.0 based on the feedback from our beta releases, and people are excited to get their personal Firefox experience on their laptop, desktop and mobile devices. We’ve addressed a few issues of rough edges that some users noticed and made a few changes to improve the overall experience.

Check out the Weave blog for release candidate details.

– Edward Lee, on behalf of the Weave team

WHAT IS PROJECT JETPACK?

Project Jetpack is: A library and Firefox API that provides a gradual upgrade path to better extensions. Right now, you write a Firefox extension; in the future you’ll be able to write an extension using Jetpack. If Jetpack doesn’t provide the flexibility or feature you need, you’ll be able to contribute it in true Mozilla fashion.

WILL JETPACK REPLACE XUL BASED ADD-ONS ENTIRELY?

Jetpack tries to make everything about Add-ons easier, from how they’re developed to how they’re installed and managed. If Jetpack becomes just as functional and powerful as the existing system, then we’ll talk about whether migrating all extensions to the new platform makes sense. It’s far too early to have that discussion in earnest now, and to be clear, no decision has been made about deprecating the existing system.

WHY DO WE NEED JETPACK?

Project Jetpack is an evolutionary step building on our original platform to create a stable, developer-friendly extension platform that introduces mainstream web developers to the world of browser extensions. Improved security, independence from browser versions, and no-restart installations have long been on the wish lists of add-on developers everywhere. As add-ons have exploded in popularity, so has the need to make these wishes reality With tens of thousands of add-ons that touch every part of the Firefox code-base, we feel the best way to accomplish these goals is a development framework like Jetpack.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CURRENT ADD-ON DEVELOPERS?

It means that eventually add-on developers will have the option to use quicker and simpler APIs to build rich customizations for Firefox. It is the goal of the Jetpack team to create an extension platform that is as rich, capable and robust as the existing one, as well as to provide faster paths for common actions like adding buttons, toolbars, sidebars, overlays, web content-specific customizations and connection to binary components. Project Jetpack has to develop further before this full platform is available, but we’re moving quickly towards that target.

Developers should adopt Jetpack because they want to — not because they have to — and we’re months away from the point where Jetpack serves as a viable alternative for writing Firefox extensions.

GET INVOLVED

Jetpack is moving fast. Informed by developer feedback, we’re in the midst of the writing the third iteration of Jetpack. While there are some details here (see Jetpack Enhancement Proposal (JEP) 29 and JEP 31), we’ll be working on a set of more easily digestible blog posts and documentation in the coming days.

The formative period for Jetpack is in the future, not in the past. We hope you’ll work with us to continue to make Firefox a platform than enables choice in the experience of Firefox users and developers worldwide.

If you have more than a passing interest in the future of add-ons, consider this a rousing call to action to get involved. Learn more at:

• Discuss Jetpack
• Grab the source code
• Propose a new API

Nick Nguyen, Aza Raskin, Atul Varma, and Daniel Buchner on behalf of the Jetpack team

With over 50 entrants to the 50-line challenge, there were more than enough good jetpacks to choose from. Jetpack developers continue to forge ahead in creating new and different jetpacks. It was difficult deciding between all the entries, but here were our top three:

• Makoto Terada’s JetpackFeatureInstaller – http://teramako.github.com/JetpackScripts/jetpack-feature-installer.html – Special kudos to this developer-focused jetpack!
• Davide Ficano’s JetColorTab – http://dafizilla.sourceforge.net/jetpack/jetcolortab
• Aurélien Manca’s JetTabs – http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/119

While all three Jetpack authors mentioned above will be receiving some cool swag, only one developer can be the winner. This time, Davide’s jetpack mojo pushed him ahead of the pack for the win! Davide will receive a slick ASUS Eee PC netbook for his effort.

In other Jetpack news…

Alexander Miltsev of Moscow, our last contest winner, recently wrote up a case study on his experiences in off-loading the processing of large data sets to the GPU, we will be publishing it here shortly. Stay tuned in the coming days for for Atul Varma (the Jetpack platform’s mad scientist) to reveal some exciting Jetpack platform developments we’ve been baking for the last couple of months.

- Daniel Buchner on behalf of the Jetpack team

Jetpack 0.7 is mainly a stability release with a new API thrown in: a unified first-run experience. Notable improvements include: debugging your Jetpack-enabled add-on can once again be done with Firebug; status bar widgets now look better; and the settings feature has a number of tweaks and fixes. With these bug fixes and improvements we hope to see even more innovative Jetpacks in addition to the hundreds already written.

First Run

When users install a jetpack authors can now specify a greeting page tailored to their jetpack. For example, as an author you can guide the user on how to use your jetpack, link to the jetpack’s homepage, or otherwise provide a wealth of rich information. The page can be defined as either HTML or a remote URL.

var manifest = {
  firstRunPage: "http://example.com/myJetpack"
};

Get the details on the Jetpack blog ⟫

Just in time for the winter holidays, Mozilla Labs is back with a new Design Challenge. Participate in the Winter ‘09 Design Challenge and help the wider Firefox UX team determine the future design direction of Firefox’s new Home Tab feature.

Read the full article here.