RSSMozilla experiments more with 'New Tab' in Firefox 3.1
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published March 24, 2009, 11:16 AM
The engineer behind the ambitious Ubiquity project, Mozilla Labs' Aza Raskin, is already on record as not being too keen on the completely blank "New Tab" feature in current production editions of Firefox 3.0.
"Right now, when you open a new tab, you get a blank screen," Raskin wrote on his laboratory's blog last August. "While clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be. While it's good to not intimidate with an explosion of information, we can get a much more streamlined workflow -- thereby saving huge amounts of aggregate time-- by showing something. The question is, 'What?'"
Yesterday, Raskin posted his first public effort at coming up with a genuine answer, but one which satisfies his personal desire for sensibility. Today, IE8 answers the question with another question -- specifically, a huge heading that reads, "What do you want to do next?" that looks like a '90s ad for Microsoft -- and Chrome tackles the issue with a gallery of thumbnails. But Raskin's team is envisioning a kind of eight-way speed dial: a cluster of eight circles bearing icons from most visited Web sites so far, with a name that only Aza Raskin could have conceived, the cognitive shield.
"No matter where we put the links to your most visited sites (and their latest news), it always seemed to be a distraction, based upon our own perception and the feedback from thousands of testers," Raskin wrote yesterday. "Given that the bulk of those testers are multi-tasking-adept early adopters, we'd expect that feedback to be even stronger from more mainstream users. Our original thought was to place the links along the bottom of the page -- outside your foveal vision. In practice, the peripheral vision proved too strong, and the links still drew your eye and interrupted your cognitive flow."
So his strategy is to come up with a system that doesn't interrupt your train of thought unless that train appears to stop long enough to give it an opening to squeeze in. The theory is that users may not want to be inundated with a long list of frequented Web sites unless it can be certain that the user wants to see that list in the first place. The New Tab functionality can draw that assumption if the user is moving the mouse down toward the right, where such a list would appear. Then and only then would that list fade in. Otherwise, the screen shows this otherwise unobtrusive speed dialer with eight icons and no text.
Mozilla Labs is distributing an experimental About:Tab plug-in, designed specifically for the latest betas of Firefox 3.1. In Betanews tests this morning, we were eventually able to get the new plug-in to work as advertised, but only after significant wrestling with the controls; this was also the case with our initial tests of Ubiquity, although we eventually were able to make progress. From time to time, the list fades in and the cluster fades out whether we move the mouse or not, which doesn't appear to correspond to Raskin's description.
An asterisk in the lower left corner turns on and off the New Tab functionality; and by "off," I mean that the fresh tab returns to its native blankness (except for the asterisk). I'm not all too sure that's actually helpful; there's never a time in my memory when my cognition requires such a shield that I would want my tab to be blank. If I want blankness, I'll turn the computer off.
Also in our initial tests, the grey-on-grey speed dialer -- which Raskin described as a "personal watermark" -- is not only very hard to read, but impossible to operate. Whenever I move the mouse pointer towards it, it fades out and becomes the list that Raskin said the cluster was put there to shield me from. If the tab I'm looking for isn't on the list, I can click on a (+) button which enables me to type something instead. But if what I'm typing doesn't appear on the list someplace (which I should know, since I'm looking at it), then not only do I not see the item I'm typing on the list, but I don't see what I'm typing in the field. Consider this "direct feedback."
Of course, if what I was looking for wasn't on this list anyway, the question becomes, why wouldn't I type what I'm looking for in Firefox's address bar in the first place? And if I really wanted to shield myself from too much cognition, suppose the functionality were to exist where I could simply have typed what I wanted, clicked on a button, and created a new tab containing that resource...rather than creating a semi-empty resource that I must then populate with something?
Well...actually, it does. With Firefox 3.0 right now -- not even with the beta -- I can bypass the blank New Tab entirely, type what I want into the address bar, and press Alt-Enter rather than Enter to generate a populated new tab.
One feature I do like, and which may grow legs at some point, is a predictive one that checks whether the system clipboard contains a URL. If it does, then when I create a new (blank) tab, the task that produces a page with that URL appears at the top of a task list headed, "You Might Want To..." Now, I might also have wanted to paste that in the address bar and press Alt-Enter, though in fairness, that process may not always be obvious to every user. Still, we can assume that if the URL got to the clipboard in the first place, that this wasn't an accident; the user at least had enough wherewithal to select it from someplace and probably press Ctrl-C.
So some people see what can be and ask, "What?" Unfortunately, others among us can still see what already is, and ask, "Why?"
I don't know what Raskin has been smoking but it isn't making him any smarter. As someone with 27 years background using cognitive neuroscience in design of workflow and apps, his ideas seem pretty rude-eh-mentary and way off the mark (dare we say "trippy" ?). Better he should read up on Simon, Ericsson, Langley, Carpenter and Just, Anderson, Winograd, Reder and others in that gang and get a clue about cognition and software design. I don't even know him and I'm on the other side of the planet and I am embarrassed for him from here.
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|take me to a blank page, PLEASE! I usually want to go to something totally unrelated to the page I'm currently looking at. I can start to type in a name or use my bookmarks.
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|It would indeed be nice to specify the site where the page first opens too, be a search tool, static site or service...
But I would be ecstatic if they would simply FINALLY address the "inability to find a printer" issue that is affecting so many XP, Vista, etc., users. And no, a new profile or reinstall of Firefox and/or the printer drivers does NOT fix it...
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|"'Right now, when you open a new tab, you get a blank screen,' Raskin wrote on his laboratory's blog last August. 'While clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be.'"
Unless, of course, you want the "instant-on" capacity opening a new tab with no content gives you. In which case it has EXACTLY a 100% probability of getting you where you want to be.
But, of course, us stupid end-users couldn't possibly have a use for quick and simple. We need genius coders to tell us what we "really" want. Thank you so much, Mama Coder! This is so much better a use of your time and resources than, say, fixing the constant freeze-ups in 3.0.7 and 3.0.8!
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|WHY. Yes, I agree with your column. Thank you. I'll keep my version until I look into the latest Firefox version. Thank you Betanews.
Goodold
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|Thing I dislike about browsers: difficult to get
to anything but home at start up: two sec. thru
my firewall, 0 to hitting 'stop' secs for the page.
Typing will be ignored or over written, often for
several seconds after clicking on stop.
Thing I like about new tabs in FF: -ctrl- t be
down arrow, -enter-.
BTW, if you have a three button mouse it is
easier to middle click than to alt click.
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|still got problems with the `Enter' key not working in the Address space from time to time.. I had to go back to 3.0.7 to get it working again...
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|I agree with the author, the "new tab" should never be necessary.
Alt-click on a link, you already go to a new tab.
Alt-enter on a new address in the address bar, you get a new tab.
I add some new features that would be really nice:
1) Alt-click on the submit button of a HTML form, it should submit the form in a new tab
2) Alt-click on the "Home" icon in the toolbar, open the home page in a new tab
3) In the right-click menu of the tabs, add "Duplicate tab" (i.e. open the same page in a new tab)
If we get this, we don't need a new tab button anymore.
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|OK, here's where I stand: THIS IS BLOAT.
All of the pages I visit most often are on my bookmarks toolbar, and middle-clicking opens them in a new tab. I don't need a new window to show frequently viewed pages, or any wheel thing. Just leave out little things like this - at best, someone will make an addon for it anyway, and at worse... someone might have to click twice.
FireFox needs to be trimmed down from things like this... it can be added on a per-user basis later as addons.
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|safari 4 people. safari 4 has THE best launch page and rss feed reading. It's the only one that actually shows me when there is something new in an rss feed with a numeric indicator and it's the only one with a prepopulated list of places i frequent with the ability to quickly move and pin things i want in higher positions. It also has the coolest history browser with coverflow (with search). On the launcher it shows when content on that page changes by a page curl with a blue star. It's attractive, intuitive, and they just plain get it. ITS ONE FAULT is that i can't see if there is a way to undo closing out one of the speed dial links and i dont natively know how to fill one with something i've aready removed. im guessing i drag the web address into one and that does it but it seems clunky and unintuitive if thats the case.
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|I like the extension "Speed Dial" since it gives me thumbnails of 9 websites I frequent when I click New Tab. I can then click on the thumbnail to go to that site. I can put whichever sites I want to show. If I want to visit other sites that is what bookmarks are for or I simply type part of the URL and the Awesomebar finds it.
I don't see how something like this needs to be included in FF.
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|"Unfortunately, others among us can still see what already is, and ask, "Why?""
Kinda how I felt about this article.
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|Google Toolbar for Firefox makes your new tab display recently visited/frequently sites as thumbnail images plus a list of other stuff next to it.
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|"(...) IE8 answers the question with another question -- specifically, a huge heading that reads, "What do you want to do next?" that looks like a '90s ad for Microsoft -- and Chrome tackles the issue with a gallery of thumbnails. But Raskin's team is envisioning a kind of eight-way speed dial: a cluster of eight circles (...)"
...talked about how 'every' browser does it without a mention to Opera, who invented it. Maybe it is just me...
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|Meh, same as Opera's speed dial, but more arty, which probably isn't necessary.
"I'm not all too sure that's actually helpful; there's never a time in my memory when my cognition requires such a shield that I would want my tab to be blank. If I want blankness, I'll turn the computer off."
If you want a blank tab to open that little bit faster, turn it off :)
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|Chrome is adding functionality? For me it's still IE4 on steroids. As for Firefox, nothing can beat it when it comes to functionality. Interface can be customized the best (Opera 9.6 for some reason cannot be customized as much anymore) and extensions truly turn it into a real browsing monster.
I just can't imagine browsing anymore without GMail Notifier, FireGestures, AdBlock and Xmarks/Foxmarks.
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|kind of adopted some aspects of IE7/8 in there, i like it, not sure about that dial though... that seems dumb
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