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Feedback Sought for Proposed Mobile Firefox UIs

Posted by Soulskill on from the firefox-to-go dept.

jangel writes to give us a look at the prototype UIs for Mobile Firefox, which is currently under development. Mozilla project lead Doug Turner has asked for opinions on the design. Quoting: "Comments on the Wiki provide an idea of the choices the developers still have to make. For example, should the chevron at the right of the toolbar open a history page listing the most recently viewed pages, or -- as on desktop Firefox -- merely a list of most frequently typed URLs? And should "full screen" mode hide everything except the page being browsed, or retain the lowermost toolbar? Turner writes that while the user interfaces shown are merely starting points, 'going from the pretty pictures that Photoshop can produce to something that is functional is easy with the Mozilla platform. Building functional prototypes ... using only Javascript, XML, CSS, and images is really awesome.'"

28 comments

  1. What is a touscreen? by MichaelSmith · · Score: 0

    Is it like having a nintendo DS with two screens?

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    1. Re:What is a touscreen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Your Nintendo DS only has one screen?

  2. Flexibility... by Bert64 · · Score: 1

    I think that, especially with the ease of developing the interface discussed in the article, the frontend should be customisable and ship with a different default depending on the target device.
    Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devices, from blackberry devices with a full qwerty keyboard, to devices like the iphone where virtually all interaction is through the touch screen. A one size fits all approach isn't really suitable for the embedded space.

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    1. Re:Flexibility... by Osty · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devices, from blackberry devices with a full qwerty keyboard, to devices like the iphone where virtually all interaction is through the touch screen. A one size fits all approach isn't really suitable for the embedded space.

      On the other hand, allowing for multiple interfaces dramatically increases your test matrix. There are some de facto standards in the world of mobile computing (screen sizes, soft buttons, numerical keypads, etc) and if you can work out the minimal number of interfaces you need to support for those you'll be in a much better place. Display-wise, most phone displays are either quarter-VGA (320x240 or 240x320) or full-VGA (640x480 or 480x640), with only a few oddballs to deal with (the iPhone is 480x320, Palm OS-based devices are generally 320x320, and the Blackberry Pearl is a strange 240x260). For the interface, non-touch models typically have two "soft" buttons and at least a numeric keypad (qwerty keypads still include numeric functions), so you can rely on those as common-denominator. Touch models generally use a stylus except for the iPhone, though if you design your interface right you might allow for some finger-based navigation (while the address bar and navigation buttons could be big enough to allow for finger access, you'll still need a stylus for page-internal items like hyperlinks if the phone is not able to accurately resolve a finger press like the iPhone).

      The way I see it, they're probably going to need three interfaces:

      1. Non-touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Standard, Symbian, Blackberry, and Linux devices. Designing for quarter-VGA would be sufficient, as quarter-VGA can easily scale to full VGA.
      2. Touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Professional devices (are there any Symbian, Blackberry, or Linux devices with touch screens?). The touch interface could probably just copy the non-touch interface, though it would be nice to have a targetted interface for touch interactions.
      3. Touch 480x320 for iPhone, due to the awkward resolution (neither quarter-VGA or VGA) and the extra functionality available through the iPhone touch interface (multi-touch, gestures, etc)
      All interfaces would need to work in both landscape and portrait mode, for devices that can switch (iPhone, HTC Tilt, etc). Considering that the interface will almost certainly just be XUL in any case, I'm sure you'll still have enough leeway to hack it yourself as you feel appropriate. At that point you're modifying at your own risk and your personal changes don't have to fit into the official test matrices.
    2. Re:Flexibility... by caramelcarrot · · Score: 1

      Flexibility is still no excuse for not making sure it's actually good and usable in the first place

    3. Re:Flexibility... by kamatsu · · Score: 1

      All Symbian UIQ devices have touch-screens, though I think this version of Firefox is only intended for WM5 and WM6.

    4. Re:Flexibility... by 0xdeadbeef · · Score: 1

      What is this bizarre obsession with screen pixel dimensions? Non-scalable interfaces are so 2002, and the misuse of "VGA" makes baby Jeebus cry.

      BTW, non-Treo Palm devices are also 480x320, and have been for years. Nokia devices come in all manner of screen sizes. Several current BlackBerry models do 320x240, and there are several full "VGA" Windows Mobile devices. There is also the increasingly common 800x480, such as on the Nokia N800. And don't forget Android, which will probably run on anything.

    5. Re:Flexibility... by Osty · · Score: 1

      What is this bizarre obsession with screen pixel dimensions? Non-scalable interfaces are so 2002, and the misuse of "VGA" makes baby Jeebus cry.

      In the mobile market, the only scalable interface is the iPhone (by virtue of being OS X, and thus using DisplayPDF for everything). Everything else is bitmap-based, and thus it's very important to keep track of all of the different pixel dimensions in order to have a useful, useable, good-looking interface. Does it suck? Sure, it'd be great if everything used a vector-based, scalable UI that was resolution-independent, but that's not life as we know it today.

  3. Full Screen by jrumney · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Full screen should definitely hide everything. That's the way every other mobile browser works. The bottom toolbar is only useful for telling you what the bottom 2 or 3 softkeys are used for, once you've used the browser a couple of times, it's just using up valuable screen real estate.

    1. Re:Full Screen by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 1

      you mean the status bar?
      i think safari style fission would do well.
      i know nothing about UI design but i recon you can get a fairly good UI from:

      fission
      dynamic toolbear (unused buttons disappear, address bar expands to almost full width when selected, search bar gets about 1/2)
      auto hidding tabbar
      button to flash up softkey functions would be useful too
      mouseless browsing (for non touch screen)**
      mouse gestures (for touch screen)*

      mousegestures would need to be modified to turn into hand writing recognistion on when your in a text box.
      mouseless browsing would need to be modified so it can use only keys 1-9 but i dont think thats too hard

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    2. Re:Full Screen by hey! · · Score: 1

      I agree with your basic premises: when you don't have enough screen, every tiny increment more is, relatively speaking, a bigger plus; also it is best to avoid "non-standard" behavior unless there is an iron-clad reason to do something in a quirky way. But sometimes there are strong reasons to consider doing things differently, particularly when a standard behavior comes from a completely different kind of device. What is convenient, or even possible on a desktop isn't necessarily convenient or possible on a PDA or phone.

      I've done a lot of PDA software in recent years, but I'm less familiar with phones. Still, I think designing for a PDA is at least a better starting point for doing phones than desktop design is. It seems to me that on a PDA, the most convenient thing for a user to do is to tap some place on the screen, preferably on a largish target. Over time as a PDA app designer, you start by avoiding text entry (which is obvious), but the next thing you find yourself doing is replacing short sequences of taps on persnickety little widgets with longer sequences of taps on nice fat widgets.

      If I was designing a browser for a PDA, the first thing that would draw my attention is that the biggest, fattest thing to tap on is nearly always going to be the inactive area of the document displayed. One possible solution would be tapping in that area to exit full screen, dragging in it to scroll the document. Unfortunately this won't work, if you are going to make a standards compliant browser, because the entire document, even the whitespace, might have mouse events associated with it. There is no visual clue as to which things have a mouse event; an entire paragraph, or even an entire frame might have an onMouseUp handler.

      Therefore on a PDA at least you'd need some kind of widget from which you can do operations like pan or exit full screen mode in full screen mode. It might be nice to be able to undock it from its default location, let it float, then dock it any any edge of the screen. You could use hardware buttons for scrolling and exiting modes, but you have to be aware that these buttons and their semantics are not standardized between PDA manufacturers, although PalmOS at least has a menu button (that most users don't seem to be aware of).

      I've thought a bit about how to port what I do to phones. Designing for phones, while presenting its own difficulties, has some built in advantages. For one thing, there is only one possible starting point for any procedural conundrum the user has: clearly he's got to push one of the phone's buttons. And if he's got so far as launching your application, he's got to be familiar with at least some basic navigational conventions.

      It seems feasible me on phones, at least, to completely hide everything but content in full screen mode. All the buttons should act as they normally do, except that buttons that mean CANCEL or EXIT or OK should return to normal mode, as should any button that has no function. This would make any guess the user makes for exiting full screen mode safe.

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  4. Address-bar dropdown list by QuickFox · · Score: 2, Insightful

    should the chevron at the right of the toolbar open a history page listing the most recently viewed pages, or -- as on desktop Firefox -- merely a list of most frequently typed URLs? Apparently he means the chevron which in the desktop version is at the right of the address field. It's unfortunate that this dropdown list keeps track only of typed urls. It would be much better if it kept track of the urls that were most recently invoked by typing or by using the dropdown list, most recent first. When you often use the dropdown list for a certain url, you want that url at the top of the list, you don't want it wandering down lower and lower in spite of your frequent usage.
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  5. memory? by CheShACat · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Firefox mobile? They must be really confident of having sorted out the memory usage to be trying to convince me its a good idea to run it on my Blackberry... Don't get me wrong, I'm usually the first to pipe up in defence of Firefox when people whine about memory issues, but that's talking about a few MiB out of a few Gigz. This is a whole different ballpark..

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    1. Re:memory? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nokia internet tablets (128MB) run gecko just fine.

    2. Re:memory? by toleraen · · Score: 2, Informative

      This is a whole different ballpark. Congratulations, you are correct. They're not doing a direct port FF1.0 to WM. While Minimo was nowhere near the best mobile browser I've used, it worked well enough, and my phone never complained about running out of memory while using it.
    3. Re:memory? by Dancindan84 · · Score: 1

      While it's not a direct port of FF1.0, it is still using the same core and it is still going to incorporate tabbed browsing. I -love- tabbed browsing on my desktop, but I'm dubious about how practical it would be on a hand held device. From my experience with FF2.0 on my desktop, tabbed browsing is at the root (or at least a major part) of a lot of the memory issues.

      --
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    4. Re:memory? by toleraen · · Score: 1

      Both Minimo and Opera Mobile have native tabbed browsing, and addons can be installed to give IE Mobile tabs. Tabs work even better on a mobile device than a desktop to me, especially if you're stuck on an EDGE connection. If you're reading a page and want to view the next, just open it in a new tab and let it stream in while you're finishing on the first page. Yes, you can run into memory issues if you're running several tabs with pictures enabled, but that's not a really a software fault.

    5. Re:memory? by DanJ_UK · · Score: 1

      Ever tried an N95?

      --
      - Dan
  6. Regardless... by Oxy+the+moron · · Score: 1

    ... of what design is picked, I hope it is well thought out and applied, because I for one am greatly looking forward to the possibility of using Firefox on my Motorola Q. I simply cannot stand mobile IE.

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    1. Re:Regardless... by Zebedeu · · Score: 1

      Have you tried Opera Mobile?
      It's working wonderfully on my Pocket PC and it certainly beats the crap out of Pocket IE, even with all the plugins added.

      Unfortunatelly it's not free, but you can use the unrestricted trial for a long time before you decide if you like it or not.

    2. Re:Regardless... by Oxy+the+moron · · Score: 1

      Wow, actually, I haven't even heard of Opera mobile. I'll definitely give it a shot, thanks!

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      Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.

    3. Re:Regardless... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How much better is Opera Mobile than Opera Mini?

      I installed Opera Mini on my phone; I planned on switching to Opera Mobile when OM 9 comes out.

    4. Re:Regardless... by toleraen · · Score: 1

      Opera Mobile functions well enough, but I too am waiting for OM9. It handles pages very similarly to IE Mobile, but does a better job of rendering them for the phone. Opera removed the "Opera Mobile Version 9 coming soon!" from their page, and since it was announced about a year ago I have a bad feeling of it got shelved. For normal browsing Opera Mini just works so much better. Opera Mini doesn't secure the connection from your phone to their servers though, so anything involving a login I usually use Opera Mobile for. It does have a 30 day free trial with it, so it's worth a try.

  7. Chevron? by The+MAZZTer · · Score: 1

    This is a chevron: >>

    This is an arrow: >

    GET IT RIGHT.

  8. Might be decent for the eeePC by PrescriptionWarning · · Score: 1

    Especially with a touchscreen version coming out soon, it would be pretty nice to have an alternative to the current fullscreen implementation in firefox (though the MiniFox theme does help out quite a bit at the moment)

  9. memory by mattwarden · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe some of the memory optimizations will creep its way into the main codebase.

  10. Full Featured Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm hoping it will have all the popular features we've come to know and protect, like the tons of memory leaks and piles of security holes.

    That's what we've come to expect from Firefox, and we won't settle for anything less just because it's on a mobile device.