Meanwhile, in Firefox User-Experience

[reposted from Madhava’s Blog.]

It’s been a few months now since we merged the mobile and desktop Firefox user-experience teams into one supercharged all-platform Firefox design juggernaut (in the good sense). In that time, we’ve been hard at work digging into the next set of features and improvements, as well as pursuing one of our major goals for the year: getting Firefox to feel more like one product — more Firefoxy — across all our platforms, desktop to tablet to phone.

I presented an overview of what we’re working on at the Firefox Toronto Workweek last week. Here are the slides (and direct link, just in case). I had a fair bit to say about them, so I’ll be posting a video of the talk soon, but the mockups and wireframes in the slides are too awesome to wait. The team will be posting about each of these projects, individually, in more depth.

Ux overview fxworkweek_april2012

View more presentations from Madhava Enros

This presentation makes reference to the Kilimanjaro project, a set of short-term priorities around integrating the browser and ecosystem projects (identity, apps, marketplace) that Mozilla is working on right now. You can learn about it on the Kilimanjaro wiki page.

Many thanks to the team (see slide 2!) for all their hard work.

3 comments on “Meanwhile, in Firefox User-Experience”

  1. Epicanis wrote on

    Whenever I see a set of slideshow slides posted online, I wonder why, rather than posting a probably-less-clear video, one doesn’t just use popcorn.js to sync up an audio track from the presentation (or even a new audio track for the presentation recorded later) with the slide graphics themselves?

    Smaller download and clearer slides (and possibly nicer audio, if recorded afterwards) than just a video of a presentation or so I would imagine.

    (P.S. could someone tell this site’s coders that “+” IS a valid character in email addresses, dagnabbit!)

    1. Madhava wrote on

      Thanks for the comment. The answer to your question is mostly a “because I don’t know how!” but I should look into it — makes sense as an idea.

  2. Wolf Kirchmeir wrote on

    The aim for common look’n’feel across all platforms is good (I don’t like the apple-feel, but that’s just my taste).

    Problem is that Win/OS-X/Linux have different conventions for placement of menus, buttons, etc. Worse, they have different conventions for menu-item naming and placement (eg “Options” vs “Preferences”). FF will have to follow these, and that breaks the commonality. Only hope for the future: that touch screen interfaces will all behave the same way. Little sign of that so far, though, what with all the “patents” on gestures, etc.

    But the apparent loss of user control over the interface is bad. It’s bad enough already, and it looks like it will get worse.