Alex Faaborg has done several Firefox mockups in the past that we have covered (bookmarking, notifications, and history). He often highlights features that would make the browser more usable, and I occasionally feel myself longing for what he posts. This time around he posted some ideas of what it might look like to bring the keyboard to life.
The ideas that he came up with combine the power of the keyboard with the pleasure of a user interface. For starters there is the tab-switching mechanism (Ctrl+Tab) which currently has no sort of interface whatsoever. A mockup of what could be implemented is posted above, with a filter box to quickly find the page that you’re looking for. A similar interface would also be used for flipping through your browser’s website history.
The other thing that he designed is awesome…a quick way to search sites as well as your bookmarks. The mockup is pictured to the right, and as Alex pointed out there are currently a lot of inefficiencies in searching through your bookmarks. This design hopes to conquer those problems.
So are we going to be seeing this in Firefox 3? Nope, these mockups were made just to demonstrate the power of a command line interface when it is tied with an user interface. Here’s what Alex says about the future of this idea:
Please note that these are all only conceptual mockups, and we currently have no official plans to implement these features for Firefox 3 (although, we may at some point release a prototype extension through Mozilla Labs).
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Just because the command line predated the graphical user interface doesn’t mean interfaces based on windows, icons, menus and pointers are always superior to interfaces based around using the keyboard for input.
It’s both fun and exciting to see such mockups come out of the Mozilla labs, although many of them seem to be more for show and tell. What really matters is how well they are able to implement these cool features if they ever get to that point.
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Tags: Firefox, Software, Browser, Firefox 3, Mozilla
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That’s the problem. They get all these really cool ideas then never implement them
It’s the same with that unified notifications concept you showed.
That’s what I was starting to think. I think this Alex guy just started with Mozilla either late last year or early this year, so I guess we need to give him some time before we can draw conclusions.
I would love more “find-as-you-type” stuff in Firefox! Goodness knows I hate bouncing from keyboard to mouse. I grew up in the age of DOS and UNIX when everything was command-line based… remember [en.wikipedia.org](web_browser), that good old text-based web browser? Even now I get a laugh out of people trying to navigate a Windoze-based computer without a mouse. (I remember an arts student in university coming in to the computer lab and plunking down at the computer I had just been using, and saying “How am I supposed to use this computer? There’s no mouse”.)
Maybe Mozilla needs a Google shot-in-the-arm for motivation and implementation. It would be great to have a more efficient way of searching Bookmarks too. Come on guys! What’s the use of producing a clay car model if you’re just gonna squish it?
As kiltboy said, I think it would be cool to see more Find-As-You-Type. In fact, I would like to see Mozilla just integrate everything into the find as you type bar that, so that I can quickly switch between finding bookmarks or searching the page that I’m currently on.