Firefox/Projects/Places UI

Summary

The purpose of this project is to investigate changes to the places UI for 3.7 and 4.0, focusing on mixing search + browse operations, and leveraging the content area.

Current Status

Starting on mockups of various interfaces based on meetings and white board drawings during the work week.

Next Steps / Designs

Location Bar

• Mockup of navigating to folders and tags from the location bar
• Mockup of navigating to history ranges from the location bar
• Mockup of bread crumb tail navigation from bookmarked pages for 4

Content Area View

• Mockup of a standard content area display of information for 3.7 (textual)
• Mockup of a standard content are display of information for 4 (visual)
• Mockup of how the content area can compliment and interact with the bookmarks sidebar in 4
• Mockup of the book visualization for top level tasks on the bookmarks store

Home Tab: Browse Bookmarks and History

• Mockup of initial browse operations from the home tab (3.7)
• Mockup of visual and dynamic browse operations from the home tab (4.0)

Related Bugs

Places UI bugs (ideally we'll be able to create a protected page template that hosts bugzilla in an iFrame, but in the meantime please click through).

Team

• Project Lead: faaborg

Goals/Use Cases

• Support operations where the user is able to remember the general topic of information that they are looking for, but is unable to remember the specific information itself (search + browse).
• Lay initial paths in the interface for a much more dynamic and visual bookmarks and history experience in Firefox 4.
• Create an interface around bookmarks and history that is useful and novel, and unlike anything else currently on the market.

Non Goals

• Continue with a file system-ish interface that treats bookmarks as little 16x16 objects that you can manipulate in a two pane view in ways that are both tedious and clunky
• Continue with a sidebar being the primary UI for accessing an item out of history.