October 02, 2009 by
Jason
Firefox 4.0 is the flavor of Mozilla’s web browser that is expected to come to the market sometimes in the second half of next year, while delivering to users a series of visual changes that will start to appear as soon as Firefox 3.7 is pushed out. We already had a glimpse at how the 3.7 version of Firefox might look like, and at the visual improvements it might bring to Windows-based computers, and we should also have a look at how 4.0 should continue the improvements.
According to Mozilla Wiki, the UI of Firefox 4.0 is mainly expected to deliver refinements to the changes that are to come with 3.7, and should include some major additions and changes. Among them, we can count the possibility that the LocationBar and SearchBar are to be merged, the Stop/Refresh/Go are to become One Button, a Tab-on-Top Option could appear, as well as App Tabs, the Home Tab functionality is to be enhanced, the Bookmarks Bar hidden and the Status Bar removed.
Here’s what Mozilla says when it comes to the merging of the LocationBar and SearchBar: “The AwesomeBar already has a lot of search functionality, even though it is currently only local. These fields have a convergent function: finding things. Merging these and including something like Taskfox will put search in a unified location with added utility. It will also reduce toolbar complexity/clutter by merging functionality.” Read More»
Posted in Firefox | 1 Comment »
The Firefox Superbar is about to be kicked to the next level with the integration of Ubiquity. Right now all that is available from Mozilla is the Taskfox Prototype, an illustration of what Ubiquity blended into Firefox’s fabric would look like to the end user. Of course, you can watch the video embedded at the bottom of this article in order to get a perspective over Taskfox for Mozilla’s open-source browser. Taskfox is essentially a feature Mozilla plans for Firefox, and which was inspired by the ubiquity experiment.
“The main thing we haven’t prototyped is the interaction of the awesome bar results and the Taskfox commands. We know that this is a major remaining question so we’ll be prototyping that soon. We’ve more or less ignored that interaction for this prototype,” revealed Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs. “Being able to navigate results with the keyboard is lacking in Ubiquity proper. We’ve tried to solve that in TaskFox.”
But fact is that the video doesn’t actually do Taskfox justice. In this context, Mozilla has made available a demo of the feature, put together with HTML, Javascript, and jQuery. The Firefox Taskfox demo can be accessed via this link, and obviously users will need Firefox in order for it to work. Typing slowly is advised in order to get the best experience possible. Raskin applauded the success of Ubiquity (over one million downloads), an experiment from Mozilla Labs which inspired Taskfox (see the second video embedded below). Read More»
Posted in Firefox | No Comments »
Loading ...
