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. Having looked at a couple folk's screens they often and two or more sites which look almost identical (multiple WordPress logins), sites hidden because of failed logins, and sites indistinguishable because they all approach white.