Firefox/Projects/About:newtab
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Overview
Drivers: Dan Mills (thunder), Aza Razkin (aza), Edward Lee (Mardak)
Get involved: by hopping onto #labs on irc.mozilla.org or clicking on Discussion and leaving your comments
- Description
- Instead of a blank page, the new tab page should present useful task-centric navigation options based on the user's history.
Goals / Use Cases
- be perceptibly as fast as about:blank to load
- allow user to re-open previously closed tabs
- offer navigation targets that are likely to be of use to the user
- do not break the user's mental "flow" or otherwise interrupt a user task
Non Goals
- act as a content aggregator for "new" material
Download
- Install the latest Firefox 3.1 beta (required)
- Install the latest about:tab extension
History
We've been iterating frequently to find a good balance for the new tab page. Below are an outline of a couple of the major decisions and why we made them.
- No Thumbnails. This is the largest departure from the original mockups and other browsers. After trying a number of different layouts we reached a couple realizations:
- Thumbnails are a high-noise, low-information-density medium. Few people have a strong association between a site and it's zoomed-out view. The association to name and fav-icon is much stronger.
- In small-scale tests, the upper-left corner of a site was much easier to identify a site by than the full site. That's because the upper-left is where the site's logo normally resides.
- Safari's implementation shows a number of the pitfalls.