Webware

Sometimes it's the little things that count.

The most prominent feature of Firefox 3.6 is Personas, which let you reskin the browser with thousands of different looks. But my single favorite change is a subtler change to the open-source browser's user interface.

CNET News Poll

Tab behavior in Firefox 3.6
New tabs now appear immediately to the right of the active tab, not at the far end of the list of tabs. What do you think?

Problem solved!
A step backward
Why do I need this?
Nice start. What's next?

View results

Specifically, when you open a link in a new tab, it appears immediately to the right of the active tab. Before, the new tabs would appear to the far right of the strip of tabs.

Yup, that's it. For those of us who spend hours a day in a browser, though, the new tab behavior helps group related tasks together. I constantly shuffle among dozens of tabs, and the new approach automatically brings some organization to my cluttered life.

However, I know it's not everybody's favorite browser behavior. So along with explaining why I like it, I'll also take some potshots and share instructions on how to get the old way back.

Why it's better
The more things I do with a browser--and the number has increased steadily for years now--the more important it becomes to be able to find different tasks amid the chaos. Microsoft and Apple understand this, as evidenced by the new taskbar features in Windows 7 and dock expose in Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. Those features make it easier to pluck out the one window you need from among the many you may have open.

There's a pattern to how I spawn the dozens of tabs I use as a day progresses. On a variety of pages--Gmail, Google Reader, Yahoo Finance, somebody's blog post--I'll encounter a host of links to other pages. I'll middle-click my mouse button to open interesting pages as background tabs, then use Ctrl-Tab to switch to the new pages when I'm ready. I repeat this pattern many times a day.

With the old behavior, each tab appeared to the far right of the tab strip. That's fine when getting started, but when I've moved halfway across the list and want to open another batch, I want the new ones--call them children--to open next to their parent tab. When I go away and come back, or when I lose place juggling tasks, it's easier to find my bearings again.

It's like being in a library. When you're in the European history section, you don't want to find books on rewiring your house and on vegetarian cooking.

As a longtime Firefox user, I didn't realize tab positioning could be better. When I started using Google's Chrome, which introduced the new tab behavior to me, the scales were lifted from my eyes. I immediately could get to the next tab with a quick press of Ctrl-Tab on the keyboard rather than have to use the mouse to click over to the far end of the list. I use both browsers daily, but until the Firefox 3.6 beta arrived, the new-tab position had become a sore point for me when in Firefox.

The change is actually a big deal in a couple ways. First, even seemingly minor changes in software can be disruptive. Old habits die hard, and computer users wrestling with constant change can get angry when more is foisted upon them.

Second, though, browsers are assuming an ever greater role in what people do in their personal and professional lives, and keeping one's bearings is commensurately important. That's especially true for those people for whom a gaggle of browser tabs represents a collection of chores going on in parallel.

How the competition handles it
Tabs are now universal among browsers, but new-tab behavior isn't. Firefox and Chrome handle it the way I like best, but how do others tackle the issue?

First, let's look at Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft showed it understands some of the challenges of tab management in its latest version of its browser by coloring child tabs the same hue as their parents, but I have a gripe with how it works. Specifically, although child tabs get the same color as their parents for easy grouping and arrive to the right, grandchild tabs are the same color as child tabs. Similarly, grandchild tabs appear to the far right of the whole group of child tabs.

In my mind, I consider grandchild tabs a separate group from the child tabs. But with IE, grandchildren get the same color and position treatment as children. The only way to get a new color is to start a fresh empty tab There's no easy way to give grandchildren a new color without causing some confusion, though--should the child be the same color as the original parent or change color to be grouped with the grandchildren?

Next is Opera, which gives users a choice. By default, it opens new tabs to the far right, which I don't like, but in the Advanced|Tabs section of the preferences dialog box, you can check "Open new tab next to active." Huzzah!

There's a subtle change here I don't care for, though. Tabs always appear immediately to the right of the active tab. I'd rather have all one tab's children appear in sequence to the right. For example, if a parent tab is in position 1, then the first child would be in position 2, the second in position 3, and the third in position 4. Opening three child tabs in Opera leaves the parent in position 1, the third child in position 2, the second child in position 3, and the first child in position 4.

Last, there's Safari. It does it the old way I loathe with no option to change. Too bad.

Why it's not enough
Most browser makers are excited about the fact that their software is subsuming more and more computing tasks that previously ran on computer operating systems. But as browsers inherit this central importance, they also inherit some of the hassles.

The new tab positioning behavior in Firefox is a step in the right direction, but there's more that needs to be done. Moving from one tab to a related adjacent one, whether through a keyboard command or mouse clicking, is a minor change. But things get harder when you need to switch from one group of tabs to the next.

There's work under way here. Opera is perhaps the leader with the ability to show thumbnails as you use Ctrl-Tab to cycle your list of open tabs.

Firefox has been noodling with the approach too. It tried then dropped tab thumbnail previews earlier, but the technology is still present. Using the about:config system for tweaking the browser (more on this later), you can change the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" setting to "true."

But for reasons that aren't clear to me, I don't find this effective either in Firefox or Opera. Perhaps I haven't used it enough, or the thumbnails are too small to be immediately recognizable, or they're just hard to see against the noisy background. There's a good reason that Apple dims the background most of the way to black when using Expose.

Windows itself is helping, too. The new taskbar in Windows 7 can show individual tabs, once browsers support the feature. It's in Internet Explorer 8, and it's in the new Firefox 3.6 beta.

Add-ons such as Firefox Showcase can further tweak Firefox. (Indeed, for a wealth of options, check Mashable's handy Firefox tab management guide.)

More interesting to me, though, is work under way to expand Firefox's "awesome bar" abilities. Today, typing in it opens Web pages and retrieves ones you've already visited or bookmarked. In the future, it could be able to move you to another open tab, too. I'm a keyboard guy, so particularly appreciate this idea.

You can get a taste of the idea now. If you've enabled the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" option, hitting Ctrl-Shift-Tab will not only show you thumbnail previews, but will put a cursor in a search box.

Typing the letters of the Web page name will winnow down the thumbnails. For example, typing "netap" will cull my open tabs so only Net Applications and NetApp show. If you have a bunch of similar tabs all open, this might not help much, of course.

However, the feature only works with the tabs of one browser window, so if you can't use it to search among other browser instances.

How to get the old way back
Perhaps I've convinced you that the new approach is better. But perhaps not--in which case I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments so people will hear more than my opinion.

For those who don't like the new tab positions, you can revert to the old method.

First type "about:config" in the Firefox address bar. You'll get a warning that you're tinkering with Firefox's innards and you should be careful, but this isn't brain surgery, so don't be frightened. Click the "I'll be careful, I promise" button, and you'll see a big list of all the browser settings that can be tweaked.

Next, in the text box labeled "Filter:", type "tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent"; you should see just one entry below. In the column marked "Value," double-click on the word "true" to change it to "false." You're done.

But I'd encourage you to at least give the new way a try. If you don't like it, you can always change back.

Facebook members will start to see a new look for their home page "news feeds" on Friday, with the design now featuring a toggle view between a main view, featuring the top stories from their friends list based on their Facebooking habits, and a "live feed" featuring real-time updates from their whole network.

"When the user wakes up in the morning, you go to Facebook and you see (the) news feed," product manager Peter Deng told CNET News. "You see the stuff that you missed, the best of the previous day, to basically catch you up on what your friends have been up to."

This is sort of bringing Facebook's design back to an earlier version. This spring, likely inspired by the hype surrounding Twitter's "stream," Facebook converted its home page news feed into a feed of live updates and relegated "highlights" to a small column on the right side of the page. Plenty of members absolutely hated it, even though Facebook execs have since said that the redesign didn't result in a drop in traffic or usage.

Deng said that the design released Friday, which will be rolling out to the social network's massive user base over the course of the day starting at 10 a.m. PDT, was put together by "responding to a lot of feedback along the way."

Birthday and event alerts are now more prominent, and the news feed also contains stories that stopped appearing when Facebook launched the stream-inspired home page: relationship status news, photos added and tagged, and the like. Brands' fan pages will be worked in there, too, but Deng said Facebook does not allow them to pay for higher placement or prominence. User controls will stay the same: you can opt to see fewer updates from a given person or fan page.

The upcoming redesign was leaked earlier this week via a document distributed to advertisers. But Deng said that the company has "made a few user interface tweaks since then."

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Some new fruits of Mozilla's effort to speed Firefox development are about to arrive.

Mozilla plans to release the first beta version of 3.6 this weekend or early next week. But what exactly is coming in the new version and its successors?

Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of product development, and John Lilly, Mozilla's chief executive, detailed some of the browser's future in an interview at the corporation's headquarters here. And the company has an aggressive schedule, with three releases due within about a year.

The present version of Firefox was to have been called 3.1, but with significant new features, it became Firefox 3.5--and arrived later than 3.1 had been planned. Version 3.6 is slated for release in final form this year, with 3.7 in the first half of next year and 4.0 about a year from now, Lilly said.

"We're trying to shrink these development cycles down," Shaver said.

Getting personal
One of the big changes with 3.6 is building in the Personas add-on that lets people customize the appearance of the browser. It's about as cosmetic as a change can be, but reskinning software often is popular among users who want to personalize their computers.

Under the covers but more noticeable is prioritized networking that gives the active tab the lion's share of network capacity to speed its loading. The goal is to speed up multipage restarts of the browser.

Tabs behavior will get a significant change that could throw some people off. New tabs generally will appear immediately to the right of the active tab when opened from a link, rather than at the far right of the tab strip.

Finally, Firefox 3.6 will support Open Web Font, a font format that supports compression and metadata to let the origins of a typeface be tracked down.

Support for new Windows 7 interface features, though, mostly will have to wait. "Aero Peek has landed in 3.6, but Jump Lists and download status in the Windows 7 task bar will have to wait for 3.7," according to this week's update. Aero Peek lets people see miniature versions of applications from the Windows task bar; Jump Lists spring up from applications on the task bar to let people take quick actions such as opening a recently used document or Web page.

Firefox 3.7
For 3.7, the big change will be under the covers: plug-ins such as Flash will be moved to computing processes that are separate from the main browser operation, protecting the latter from problems with the former.

"We've seen more crashing since 3.5 came out, especially in last month or so," Lilly said, pointing to problems from Web-based malware attacks and from issues with Flash. The new design also should help split Firefox up into separate tasks that can take better advantage of all the computing threads offered by multicore processors.

Also coming in 3.7 will be new graphical animation work using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), two Web standards. And pushing the direction in which Chrome and Safari have been so aggressive, there will be new JavaScript work.

With version 3.0, Mozilla introduced Firefox's "awesomebar," officially but infrequently called the Smart Location Bar, which can be used not only to type addresses but also to retrieve the URLs of previously visited sites. With 3.7, expect an upgrade that lets people switch among active tabs by typing in the bar.

Firefox 3.7 also will mark the arrival of some significant changes to the user interface, though final details remain under discussion. Among the likely changes: a combined stop and reload button, a home tab instead of a home button, and the ability to run with the menu bar hidden.

One superficial change Mozilla hopes will make Firefox look less "dated" is work to make the browser fit in better with Windows Vista and Windows 7. There will be some corresponding changes to Firefox's Mac OS X interface, too.

Firefox 4.0
Bigger changes come with version 4.0. There each browser tab will get its own process. "In Firefox 4 we'll have a more fully multiprocess architecture for stability and increasingly to take advantage of multiple cores," Lilly said.

Another big change will be with add-ons. One of Firefox's biggest assets is the rich array of these customization options--but a corresponding frustration is how those add-ons often break with each update to the browser.

Firefox 4 will introduce a new add-on framework under development today called Jetpack that, like Chrome's, uses Web-based technologies for add-on construction. Today's Firefox uses a foundation called XUL.

Among the other perks besides compatibility, as Mozilla sees it, Jetpack extensions are easier to write and share, and they can be updated as the browser runs without a restart. Still, it will mean a big discontinuity for programmers.

"We want for developers to want to get onto Jetpack and the Jetpack application programming interface," Shaver said, and the current plan is to drop the older add-on technology with Firefox 4.

Finally, there will be more changes to the browser's appearance. Some have called it a Chrome copy--features include a merged location bar and search bar, removing the status bar across the bottom, and adding an option to put the tabs at the very top of the browser, all features introduced with Chrome. Lilly, though, bridles at the Chrome-copy idea.

"We're trying to get as much window space as possible for content," he said. "I don't think it's a move toward Chrome. We're trying to give space to the content."

Multitouch interfaces are all the rage, for good reason, and a Mozilla programmer has been working to enable the technology for Web applications in the Firefox browser.

Firefox today can be controlled with multitouch gestures--a three-finger sweep up and down to go to the top or bottom of a Web page, for example, or two-finger pinch gestures to zoom out. But Felipe Gomes, a Brazilian computer science student who just finished a stint as a Mozilla intern, has demonstrated how Web-based applications, not just Firefox, can use multitouch.

His demonstration shows multitouch controls to shrink and enlarge icons, paint, select a region of a photo, and play Pong.

Multitouch interfaces, for example on the iPhone and Hewlett-Packard TouchSmart PCs, let the computer interpret the contact and motion of multiple fingers on the screen. And Apple MacBooks are equipped with multitouch trackpads.

One issue for multitouch, though, is standardizing the meaning of various gestures. Firefox and Safari on a Mac both move forward and backward in browsing history with three-finger sweeps right and left, respectively, but Safari doesn't follow Mozilla's example of three-finger sweeps up and down.

This issue gets even more complicated if Web applications get multitouch interfaces. What touch actions are controlling Firefox or the Web application? Or, for that matter, the operating system? The same two-finger gesture that draws a selection box to crop a photo in a Web app could also be a Firefox multitouch command to zoom in or out on the Web page.

Before we get to the conflicts and issues of interface standardization, though, we need more computers and applications that can take advantage of multitouch. Even I, who has yet to find a rival for keyboard controls when it comes to speed for most operations, am a fan of multitouch. So I look forward to seeing its potential realized even if that means a bit of chaos in the meantime.

I am possibly the only one among my co-workers who hasn't moved to Office 2007. I just can't stand the ribbon toolbar, which makes working with documents require a lot of mouse clicking. The traditional menus have been working just fine and I prefer being able to move around with keyboard shortcuts.

It's sad that together with Windows 7, Microsoft is forcing this new user interface on all of us. Applications that come with the new operating system, such as Write or Paint, are also using the ribbon toolbar instead of menus.

And it seems Sun is doing the same thing with its popular OpenOffice.org suite, which offers free alternatives to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

According to a blog from Frank Loehman, a developer of OpenOffice.org, Sun is working on creating a new user interface for the open-source office suite. And from the screenshot, the new UI seems very much like the ribbons found in Office 2007.

However, fortunately, the menu bar is still there. Hopefully this means the suite will still offer the menu UI in addition to the ribbon bar.

According to Loehman, the new UI is still in the testing phase and the content of the toolbars and the group labeling are subject to change. Sun is looking for user feedback on the new UI and my feedback is this: just get rid of the ribbon or offer people the option to pick between the two of them.

I'd personally like to offer browser makers my gratitude for realizing that my screen isn't big enough.

I'm one of those people who wants every bit of display real estate I can get. The more I can see of the document I'm writing, the in-box I'm scanning, and the photo I'm editing, the happier and more productive I am.

The maximize button is my friend. Toolbars are my enemies.

So I'm happy to report that browser makers are paying new attention to the issue. It's important to me for reading Web sites, but it's really important to me for the new generation of Web applications. A row of pixels saved once in the browser is returned again with each Web-based application.

Mozilla's ultimate goal is to make the user interface step into the background as much as possible--indeed, the mobile-phone version of Firefox now under development has no visible user interface until it's needed. "Every time a user has to think about how to do something, instead of what we want to do, we as software creators have failed," said Aza Raskin, Mozilla's leader of user interface work.

But it's not simple to redesign the browsers. Users can be confused when interfaces change, some controls are essential, and hiding them can cause problems.

"The challenge to reducing UI (user interface) is in recognition versus recall. People generally use what they see," Raskin said. "How can we provide one-click access to everything possible on the Web without also cluttering the screen? That's a question we are still answering."

Microsoft's case is illuminating. Its Internet Explorer 7 hid the menu bar, though it could be revealed by pressing the Alt key, but IE 8 shows menus by default. (It can be hidden again by default if people choose, and I do.)

Reclaiming real estate
There's been some work in this area for years. For example, hitting the F11 key in Windows puts Firefox into a full-screen mode, hiding title, menu, address, and tab bars. And Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 hid the menu bar, though it could be revealed by pressing the Alt key; IE 8 shows menus by default again, though it can be hidden again by default if people choose, and I do.

But now the pixel reclamation effort is taking off in earnest. The big statement came in September 2008, when Google revealed its Chrome browser--ironically named because it aims to move the user interface elements, called chrome, as much into the background as possible.

Chrome wiped out the title bar altogether and arrayed its browser tabs in the newly freed space. It also wiped out the menu strip and tucked the options into two drop-down menu buttons to the right of the address bar. Information that would show in a status bar, such as the actual URL of a Web address you're hovering your mouse over, appear in a temporary box that appears on the lower left. When you search a Web page, another small window appears in the upper right. (Chrome looks somewhat different on Mac OS X, which always uses a menu bar at the top of the screen that's detached from the browser Window itself.)

Missing at launch was a full-screen mode, but Google rapidly filled in that gap. This max-screen ethos is one reason that Chrome, at present at least, is my default browser.

Another change came with Safari 4 from Apple. Like Chrome, it added the two-button menu icons toward the upper right. Unlike Chrome, it sports a traditional menu bar as well, though with the Windows version it can be hidden to free up some real estate.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Apple backed off from another change between the Safari 4 beta and final version. Initially, the browser sported tabs in the title bar, like Chrome, but Apple later moved them into the more conservative position immediately above the Web page.

The next move comes from Mozilla, which leads development of the Firefox browser.

With the dash to release Firefox 3.5 now over, developer attention again focuses on the future. Last week, mock-ups of Firefox 3.7 arrived to trigger discussions of what the final interface should look like. On display were two Chrome-like characteristics: the two menu icons and the missing menu bar.

Shortly afterward came the Firefox 4.0 mock-ups, moving the tabs to the title bar in one option that's even more Chrome-esque.

One of the big assets Firefox has is its extensions system, which can be used to customize the browser. One I like is autoHideStatusbar, which reclaims the status bar real estate except when I need it in order to see where a link on a Web site leads. I also use Tree Style Tab to move tabs off to the left; I typically need vertical space more than horizontal.

In the same vein, those who were enamored of the Firefox 3.7 mock-up look can try it themselves in the real world with a three-step change LifeHacker put together.

The Web app era
How all these changes will shake out isn't clear yet. But what is clear is that influential developers believe thin frames are better than thickets of icons, menus, bars, and boxes.

The Web application trend is one reason this trend is important.

Consider for a moment Microsoft Word. Especially when the newer version's ribbon of icons is active, it requires a fair amount of area to house its controls.

Now consider Google Docs, which must add its word-processing user interface elements with those already present for the browser itself. Those using the application must bear a double burden. It's like going back to the era of 800x600-pixel displays.

Now factor in the Web application future--Picnik for photo editing, Zoho for office productivity, Bespin for programming, even Microsoft Office soon. These applications are increasing in number, sophistication, and importance, even if they aren't replacing desktop applications as soon as Google Chrome OS developers might hope.

A little bit of screen real estate saved in the browser is multiplied many times over across this range of applications. And of course, conventional Web browsing can benefit, too, offering the possibility of more information and less scrolling to get to it.

It takes real work to pare back a user interface without impairing software's utility. But until the day arrives when my screen is displayed on an entire office wall or directly on my retina, I'll hoard every pixel that browser developers can give me.

Mozilla has released mockups that show how Firefox 4.0 conceivably might look, and two words spring to my mind: Google Chrome.

Last week, Mozilla showed some mockups for the nearer-term Firefox 3.7 that eliminated the browser's title bar, replacing it with two drop-down menu buttons on the right, just like Chrome has had since its September 2008 debut. The Firefox 4.0 mockups show two options, one similar to the 3.7 ideas, and the other taking another step in the Chrome direction.

Specifically, the second Firefox 4.0 mockup shows the browser tabs on top where once there was a window title bar. That's the same approach that Google picked with Chrome, a view of which you can see below.

Mozilla is looking for comment on the designs, which, the browser developer takes pains to note, are "for brainstorming/exploration" and aren't final.

... Read more

The official release of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is due this week. It's a significant milestone in the open-source browser's history. Putting pure features aside, let's take a look at some of the big design changes Mozilla has made over the years, beginning with version 0.8 when Mozilla renamed it from Firebird to Firefox.

For the sake of simplicity we're keeping it limited to just the Windows and Mac versions. And for certain features where there is little, if any, difference between the platforms--we're sticking to the Windows version.

The four things we're comparing are navigation, tabs, bookmarks, and the settings menu:

Navigation

Navigation has experienced subtle changes over the years, with the exception of version 3. This brought the increased size of the back button, and noticeable shrinking of the rest of the controls. Mozilla also made it easier to bookmark pages, by adding a star button right into the address bar, which users can click, avoiding having to use keyboard shortcuts or on-screen menus to save a page.

Note: To see the full-size versions of these images just click on them.

Tabs

Tabs are a very important part of Firefox. Version 3.5 adds a new plus button that users can click on to create a new tab. Previously this required a keyboard shortcut or selecting the option from a menu.

Version 3.5 is also getting "tab tearing," which lets users pull away tabs from one window to add to another, or break off into an entirely new window. Early versions of the browser wouldn't even let you... Read more

From what it looks like, the fresh, real-time streaming redesign of social aggregator FriendFeed is getting some accolades from already-avid users--but might not sway the masses.

Among existing FriendFeed loyalists, it doesn't look like there's much dissent about the redesign, which is currently available as a beta test. An "anti-FriendFeed beta version" group hasn't gotten much traction. But on Twitter, which some people see as a FriendFeed complement and others as a competitor, opinions were much more mixed.

"I have (Twitter client) TweetDeck to filter and organize noise. Why then would I still need FriendFeed?" inquired user @rbazinet.

"I'm not a fan of real-time scrolling sites like the new FriendFeed. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of history, but I find it distracting," said another user, @griner.

On the wrong side of history, quite possibly. Real-time streaming is the hot ticket in social networking these days, with "the stream" at the center of Facebook's controversial redesign.

And indeed, Facebook was first to the game. "Even after the redesign, I just don't find FriendFeed compelling. All of my 'friends' are on Facebook," said Twitter user @mikeee. Ever since it started introducing third-party information into its News Feed, Facebook has indeed been encroaching upon FriendFeed territory.

Twitter itself, meanwhile, doesn't live-stream your friends on its homepage, and third-party clients like Twhirl and Twitterrific tend to load incoming messages in groups rather than in real time because of Twitter's limits on how many times a third-party app can call up its servers. But if you run a query through Twitter Search, it'll keep hunting for the keywords and will alert you when new results have come in.

FriendFeed's redesign did get plenty of thumbs up. "Interesting to see FriendFeed focus on performance and UI (user interface) simplicity. They 'get it,'" said Twitter user @jimsimmons.

One thing we've seen with major social-networking overhauls--e.g. Facebook's last few redesigns--is that a swift backlash will often be met with eventual reception, whereas initial quiet can be deceptive if members start to gradually come across usability issues. This is still an optional beta, and often the particularly vociferous criticism doesn't come until after a new feature or design's public rollout.

From what it looks like so far, the reception to FriendFeed's redesign has been neither stellar nor terrible so far. But FriendFeed is a niche service right now; what it really needs to do is break out of Silicon Valley and start gaining quasi-mainstream appeal the way Twitter has. It's not clear that this redesign will be enough to accomplish that.