

Announcing the Firefox 4 Design Challenge – The Home Tab - abraham
http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2009/12/22/firefox-4-design-challenge/

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cmelbye
That mockup actually looks really nice. Why can't we have that same level of
aesthetics in the Mac version? The main reason I don't use Firefox on my Mac
is due to the really ugly user interface.

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tortilla
I currently use the GrApple Crisp theme from <http://www.takebacktheweb.org/>

Not perfect, but makes it a bit more pleasant.

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cscotta
Completely with you there. Safari was my primary browser (and has been for
about a year) until a friend mentioned that Firefox 3.6b5 had some major
retooling with respect to perceived performance (esp. in the address bar and
page compositing engine).

I'm really enjoying it so far, but had to switch to the GrApple Yummy theme at
the above link. The base Firelight treatment feels so bulbous with a lot of
wasted vertical space and unnecessary large rounded elements.

I love this UI concept series, though - the proposed Windows design is
gorgeous. I'm jealous of how beautiful Chrome and the new Firefox 4 concepts
look with Aero compared to their bulgy gray counterparts on OS X.

Never thought I'd say that :-/

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dmnd
Notice that the GMail tab is just an icon. I wonder if that's a replacement
for a bookmarks toolbar? Possibly, Mozilla is planning for the tabs &
bookmarks toolbars to be combined in the same way that the quicklaunch &
taskbar toolbars were in the transition from Vista to Windows 7.

Instead of an icon to create windows/tabs, the icon _is_ the window or tab
(just like the OS X dock). I really like this idea and hope it's true. I
always preferred the dock to the Windows taskbar, so the W7 taskbar was a
great feature IMO.

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tree_of_item
I take it you haven't seen Chrome's pinned tabs? They look precisely like
that.

The mockup looks like a Mozilla branded Chrome to be honest. Which is a good
thing.

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nuclear_eclipse
How do pinned tabs work in Chrome? ie, how do I access that functionality, and
how does it function?

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mhansen
Right click on a tab, and select "Pin tab". It collapses the tab to just a
favicon, and persists it across sessions.

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dmnd
What version of Chrome are you using? I don't have this option in 3.0.195.38,
which I assumed was the latest.

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nuclear_eclipse
I apparently have the feature on my Linux machine, but not on my Windows
install, and both are reportedly up to date...

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kentosi
I'm a little worried that the UI submissions might be very Vista/7 focused. As
it stands, this website shows a Vista/7 screenshot. Isn't one of the points of
the browser that it's multi-platform?

There are still core UI issues they face on a mac:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430745>

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jmatt
Looks like chrome to me! I had a double-take.

A home tab and improved awesome bar will put some competitive pressure on
Google. Those two features were the most innovative UI features to come out of
chrome. They changed my browser use habits. I wonder what this design
challenge will add to the mix. What does everyone want to see in the UI of
FF4?

EDIT: Added a sentence.

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Raphael
Submitted 6 days ago. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011280>

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walkon
Is there any reward besides reward besides personal satisfaction and a bit of
reputation? Perhaps a lifetime supply of Firefox?

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Oompa
What's the reward of contributing to open source at all? Some personal
satisfaction and perhaps a bit of reputation?

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walkon
It is just a bit more hyped up than typical open source contributions. Using
the "challenge" concept with public polling and "best in class honors" makes
it sound more like a contest. I think it is fine how they are doing it. I
don't expect a project like Mozilla to be handing out piles of cash for stuff
like this.

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zackattack
How about fixing the memory leaks before revamping the UI? the ui is fine.

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vilya
Different teams, different talents, maybe? Are you saying the user interface
people should just stop working until the developers have done their bit?

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bricestacey
This is a good point, but Firefox is essentially unusable in its current state
unless you're a masochist and enjoy poor performance so working on any
additional features is a poor decision.

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sid0
I use it everyday, so it clearly isn't "unusable" -- and no, I don't enjoy
poor performance. I don't see Firefox performing poorly at all.

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BearOfNH
I don't get the point behind having a "home page". Maybe if I owned an active
website or blog, I'd have reason to start there. Maybe.

The last thing I want is additional startup latency, so I set my home page to
about:blank. Am I missing something? Maybe this is fodder for Ask-HN.

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dnsworks
Maybe they could come up with a browser that isn't more broken than IE on
Windows XP, and say "the UI is good enough until we fix the more important
bugs"? I know, that's crazy talk.

