
Taskfox -- Firefox Interface Video - samueladam
http://vimeo.com/4062903
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neilk
These ideas are interesting but why is it limited to a drop-down from the
taskbar? You could make the entire window pane work like that.

The last example, where the user is browsing search results, is just a
recapitulation of the entire browser concept inside a taskbar dropdown, with
more animation and tear-off results. The animation and tear-off results are an
interesting idea, so why not apply them to the whole browser window?

But the main idea here is that different verbs work in the taskbar now. We can
imagine that the address bar has always had the implicit verb "go to"; now
we'll do other things, like "translate".

Of course the next step is to make the translation provider configurable, and
maybe you even get to choose certain providers, just like Mycroft (the search
box on Mozilla browsers). But for configurability, you can't beat HTML. If you
think of HTML as "interface configuration downloaded instantly" it becomes the
ultimate end of all customization efforts.

So maybe what this is proposing is an interface that _isn't_ configurable,
that's deliberately constrained. Just like Mycroft forces all the search
engines to work in the same way, at least in how the service is _requested_ ,
but then afterwards it's all HTML pages. I think Aza would prefer to keep
control over how the service makes a request and how it presents results, but
the easier & simpler way might be to just make Mycroft-like services, where we
are just requesting HTML from somewhere, but in a way that's more convenient
for a specific task. That also gives service providers an economic model, if
they can include ads or other upselling in the results. We can't assume it's
always going to be Google's largesse.

~~~
greyhat
This is fairly easily done already with many sites, if they accept an HTTP GET
argument, using bookmark keywords... you can set up a bookmark to say,
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s> and then visit "w Firefox" to go to the
Firefox Wikipedia page...

I'm not sure its useful for anything beyond search or direct navigation
though...

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dschobel
Looks very similar to what the OS X people have had in the form of Quicksilver
and the Windows people in Launchy but moved into the browser.

Color me underwhelmed.

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javert
For people interested in controlling Firefox super efficiently from the
keyboard, check out Vimperator.

<http://vimperator.org>

It's a FF extension that gives FF a Vim-like interface. I very highly
recommend it.

