

Product Design at Mozilla - mbrubeck
https://air.mozilla.org/product-design-at-mozilla/

======
amartya916
Congratulations to the Product design team at Mozilla. I loved what they've
done with 'Junior', the browser on the iPad. For people who want to dive into
the video for the demo, go to approx. 31mins.; otherwise, here's a summary of
the stand out features:

a. Full screen browsing. No URL/address bar eating up screen real-estate.

b. Two translucent buttons on the sides, very close to where one would grip
the iPad (easy access with the thumbs). These two buttons are the "<" (back)
and "+". "+" allows you to access other fullscreen sites currently active in
the browser and add new ones.

c. Party trick, drag on the buttons (again possible comfortably with the
thumbs) mentioned above to expose "forward", "print" etc. Beautifully done,
looks slick.

------
Samuel_Michon
Great, a new browser for the iPad. Not so great: encoding the video demo in a
format that doesn't work in Safari on the iPad.

~~~
kaolinite
They provided it in an open format, it's not their fault if Safari doesn't
support it.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I bet this is a very effective way for them to reach their target audience,
not at all a huge waste of time and money. Next, they should release some
whitepapers about their new iOS browser in ODF format and a podcast in Ogg
Vorbis, that will really get the word out there.

------
gemlog
"What are we doing to make sure that the ones working to disrupt Mozilla’s
products is Mozilla itself"

Stop. Just stop it. All my users are sick of re-learning an app they've been
using for years already. Every time they face relearning the FF interface
means it's just that much easier to try something else -- and they do. Huge
exodus to chrome(ium).

------
btipling
That is interesting, but Mozilla needs to focus on making its browser consume
less memory and CPU when idle. These are the things that are killing its
marketshare and leading users to switch to alternatives. Every time I see
initiatives like the password account manager, iOS apps that use web view, a
browser based editor and what not I just scratch my head because Firefox
marketshare is plummeting and the old refrain "just wait until the next
version" was tired since 3.0. Instead the general response is to get defensive
and list new features. Yeah and are those new features stopping the user
drain? Nope. Firefox is a sluggish memory sucking heap of software that drains
resources even when it isn't being used.

I love and cherish Firefox as a product and a brand, because you have achieved
a lot in your past. But now you are failing and it is depressing to see this
happen.

~~~
asadotzler
Firefox 13, when not overwhelmed by add-ons is the memory champion right now.
Seriously, check it out. Download Firefox 13, create a new profile clean from
crapware, load up a couple dozen tabs and surf around for a day. Do the same
in IE and Chrome. Firefox wins. Firefox 15, just around the corner, has world-
beating memory usage and it uses less RAM than any other browser, even when
you've got "leaky extensions" installed because we've prevented extensions
from causing Firefox leaks.

~~~
btipling
I always run the latest Firefox and the only extensions I have are Xmarks,
1password, Firebug and Webdeveloper.

~~~
Erunno
Firebug is most likely the culprit [1]. Firefox 15 will have a general fix for
the kind of memory leaks such as the one caused by Firebug (affectionately
called "Hueyfix" after its inventor Kyle Huey by some) [2].

[1] <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669730> [2]
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695480>

------
tferris
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Sorry guys, I won't believe that you will define the future of browsers in any
way—significant innovations in this space have always been presented by other
parties the last years.

~~~
Erunno
This is probably why so many features from Mozilla end up in other browsers:

-Notification bar in pretty much all browsers.

-Doorhanger panels

-Download pane which Safari managed to release first (unfortunately a common pattern)

-HTML5 video which Mozilla implemented first

-Do not track

-AwesomeBar which now all other browsers emulate with different degrees of success.

-Firebug which set the standard for web development tools.

And so on, and so on. The other browsers also contribute great innovations to
the browser space and this is a great situation for the end user, but I don't
really like how Mozilla is kept getting downplayed.

~~~
doublec
"-HTML5 video which Mozilla implemented first"

I worked on the Mozilla HTML video implementation. Opera came up with the
original proposal and presented a first experimental implementation. We
started implementing this to be compatible.

Apple then presented their much more complicated proposal which was integrated
with the Opera one and became HTML 5 video, along with feedback from other
implementers, including Mozilla.

So it's a bit more complicated than "Mozilla implemented first".

~~~
Erunno
Mea culpa, I didn't want to steal the thunder from the great guys at Opera.
From my end user perspective I only remember Opera supporting the <video> tag
in a version which was released almost a year after Firefox 3.5 [1].

[1] <http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-html5-video/>

