Feedback Sought for Proposed Mobile Firefox UIs

jangel writes to give us a look at the prototype UIs for Mobile Firefox, which is currently under development. Mozilla project lead Doug Turner has asked for opinions on the design. Quoting: "Comments on the Wiki provide an idea of the choices the developers still have to make. For example, should the chevron at the right of the toolbar open a history page listing the most recently viewed pages, or -- as on desktop Firefox -- merely a list of most frequently typed URLs? And should "full screen" mode hide everything except the page being browsed, or retain the lowermost toolbar? Turner writes that while the user interfaces shown are merely starting points, 'going from the pretty pictures that Photoshop can produce to something that is functional is easy with the Mozilla platform. Building functional prototypes ... using only Javascript, XML, CSS, and images is really awesome.'"

What is a touscreen?

Is it like having a nintendo DS with two screens?

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Your Nintendo DS only has one screen?

Flexibility...

I think that, especially with the ease of developing the interface discussed in the article, the frontend should be customisable and ship with a different default depending on the target device.
Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devi

Re:Flexibility...

Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devices, from blackberry devices with a full qwerty keyboard, to devices like the iphone where virtually all interaction is through the touch screen. A one size fits all approach isn't really suitable for the embedded space.

On the other hand, allowing for multiple interfaces dramatically increases your test matrix. There are some de facto standards in the world of mobile computing (screen sizes, soft buttons, numerical keypads, etc) and if you can work out the minimal number of interfaces you need to support for those you'll be in a much better place. Display-wise, most phone displays are either quarter-VGA (320x240 or 240x320) or full-VGA (640x480 or 480x640), with only a few oddballs to deal with (the iPhone is 480x320, Palm OS-based devices are generally 320x320, and the Blackberry Pearl is a strange 240x260). For the interface, non-touch models typically have two "soft" buttons and at least a numeric keypad (qwerty keypads still include numeric functions), so you can rely on those as common-denominator. Touch models generally use a stylus except for the iPhone, though if you design your interface right you might allow for some finger-based navigation (while the address bar and navigation buttons could be big enough to allow for finger access, you'll still need a stylus for page-internal items like hyperlinks if the phone is not able to accurately resolve a finger press like the iPhone).

The way I see it, they're probably going to need three interfaces:

1. Non-touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Standard, Symbian, Blackberry, and Linux devices. Designing for quarter-VGA would be sufficient, as quarter-VGA can easily scale to full VGA.
2. Touch quarter-VGA for Windows Mobile 6 Professional devices (are there any Symbian, Blackberry, or Linux devices with touch screens?). The touch interface could probably just copy the non-touch interface, though it would be nice to have a targetted interface for touch interactions.
3. Touch 480x320 for iPhone, due to the awkward resolution (neither quarter-VGA or VGA) and the extra functionality available through the iPhone touch interface (multi-touch, gestures, etc)

All interfaces would need to work in both landscape and portrait mode, for devices that can switch (iPhone, HTC Tilt, etc). Considering that the interface will almost certainly just be XUL in any case, I'm sure you'll still have enough leeway to hack it yourself as you feel appropriate. At that point you're modifying at your own risk and your personal changes don't have to fit into the official test matrices.

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All Symbian UIQ devices have touch-screens, though I think this version of Firefox is only intended for WM5 and WM6.

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What is this bizarre obsession with screen pixel dimensions? Non-scalable interfaces are so 2002, and the misuse of "VGA" makes baby Jeebus cry.

BTW, non-Treo Palm devices are also 480x320, and have been for years. Nokia devices come in all manner of screen

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What is this bizarre obsession with screen pixel dimensions? Non-scalable interfaces are so 2002, and the misuse of "VGA" makes baby Jeebus cry.

In the mobile market, the only scalable interface is the iPhone (by virtue of being OS X, and thus using Displa

Re:

Flexibility is still no excuse for not making sure it's actually good and usable in the first place

Full Screen

Full screen should definitely hide everything. That's the way every other mobile browser works. The bottom toolbar is only useful for telling you what the bottom 2 or 3 softkeys are used for, once you've used the browser a couple of times, it's just using up valuable screen real estate.

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you mean the status bar?
i think safari style fission would do well.
i know nothing about UI design but i recon you can get a fairly good UI from:

fission
dynamic toolbear (unused buttons disappear, address bar expands to almost full width when selected, searc

Re:

I agree with your basic premises: when you don't have enough screen, every tiny increment more is, relatively speaking, a bigger plus; also it is best to avoid "non-standard" behavior unless there is an iron-clad reason to do something in a quirky way. Bu

Address-bar dropdown list

should the chevron at the right of the toolbar open a history page listing the most recently viewed pages, or -- as on desktop Firefox -- merely a list of most frequently typed URLs?

Apparently he means the chevron which in the desktop version is at the right of the address field. It's unfortunate that this dropdown list keeps track only of typed urls. It would be much better if it kept track of the urls that were most recently invoked by typing or by using the dropdown list, most recent first. When you often use the dropdown list for a certain url, you want that url at the top of the list, you don't want it wandering down lower and lower in spite of your frequent usage.

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This is a whole different ballpark.

Congratulations, you are correct. They're not doing a direct port FF1.0 to WM. While Minimo was nowhere near the best mobile browser I've used, it worked well enough, and my phone never complained about running out of memory while using it.

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While it's not a direct port of FF1.0, it is still using the same core and it is still going to incorporate tabbed browsing. I -love- tabbed browsing on my desktop, but I'm dubious about how practical it would be on a hand held device. From my experience w

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Both Minimo and Opera Mobile have native tabbed browsing, and addons can be installed to give IE Mobile tabs. Tabs work even better on a mobile device than a desktop to me, especially if you're stuck on an EDGE connection. If you're reading a page and wan

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Ever tried an N95?

Regardless...

... of what design is picked, I hope it is well thought out and applied, because I for one am greatly looking forward to the possibility of using Firefox on my Motorola Q. I simply cannot stand mobile IE.

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Have you tried Opera Mobile?
It's working wonderfully on my Pocket PC and it certainly beats the crap out of Pocket IE, even with all the plugins added.

Unfortunatelly it's not free, but you can use the unrestricted trial for a long time before you decide if

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Wow, actually, I haven't even heard of Opera mobile. I'll definitely give it a shot, thanks!

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Opera Mobile functions well enough, but I too am waiting for OM9. It handles pages very similarly to IE Mobile, but does a better job of rendering them for the phone. Opera removed the "Opera Mobile Version 9 coming soon!" from their page, and since it w

Full Featured Firefox?

I'm hoping it will have all the popular features we've come to know and protect, like the tons of memory leaks and piles of security holes.

That's what we've come to expect from Firefox, and we won't settle for anything less just because it's on a mobile de

Chevron?

This is a chevron: >>

This is an arrow: >

GET IT RIGHT.

Might be decent for the eeePC

Especially with a touchscreen version coming out soon, it would be pretty nice to have an alternative to the current fullscreen implementation in firefox (though the MiniFox theme does help out quite a bit at the moment)

memory

Maybe some of the memory optimizations will creep its way into the main codebase.