Firefox/Projects/Home Tab

Summary

This project covers the design and creation of a Firefox Home Tab, a small persistent tab placed at the far left of the tab strip that will serve as the user's home on the Web. The plan is for this interface to be locally hosted, customizable, and personalized to the needs of each individual user.

The second aspect of this project is allowing users to create "App Tabs," small persistent tabs placed to the right of the Home Tab that contain home pages or Web applications that the user very regularly interacts with. App tabs can not be accidentally closed, and they do get lost when viewing a large number of documents in separate tabs.

Current Status

Very early conceptual design work.

Next Steps

• Post first round of mockups for feedback

Related Bugs

• Tracking bug: bug 551849

Team

• Project Lead: faaborg
• everyone

Designs

Extremely early conceptual mockup

Notable aspects:

• no browser chrome
• entirely zero configuration by default (ambient news)
• mouse-based access to bookmarks and history
• ability to change the search engine (drop down to the right of it)
• (more frequently visited sites and the ability to customize with a persona below the fold)

Great thumbnail idea by Sean Martell

Goals/Use Cases

Designs will explore a range of ideas, including:

• Frequently visited sites with ambient news
• Leveraging the user's social graph for ambient social news
• Access to all available search engines
• Browse-based interface into bookmarks and history (ties into the Places UI project)
• Increasing the discoverability of personalization with personas
• Message snippets
• Fully localized season and holiday changes (could be lots of fun, also really lots of work, but worth exploring).

Non Goals

• Non goal 1: A streamlined and simplistic page. This page is going to provide a rich experience, with an expressive visual design and a range of features, it might even be a bit distracting (er, engaging). This is a fully recognition-based interface (the new tab page will likely remain fully recall-based).

• Non goal 2: The traditional home page portal slum of tabloid level celebrity news, sensationalistic titles, and pathetic attempts to leverage the screen real estate to promote unrelated products (instant messenger apps, iPods, etc.). This page will be 100% about the specific user and their fully personalized experience on the Web, it is not about the company that created the browser.