For Firefox 4, we’re thinking of replacing the home button with a home tab. It would be a mini-tab, not taking up any more space than the current home button; it would still be “click to go home”, but “home” would be a special page that is always open in a tab.
If the contents of that special page are useful, this could be a great feature. Because the home tab is part of the browser, like an extension, it would be able to do things that a normal web page can’t, like use statistics about your browsing habits to show you useful things. On the other hand, if the contents of the home tab aren’t useful, then it’s a pointless feature.
Given that… what would you put on the home tab?
That’s the question asked by the latest Mozilla Labs Design Challenge, which is open right now. If you have some ideas, go check it out!
January 28, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Years ago I made my own HTML+CSS home page that has links to pages I visit every day organized into categories.
The pages in each category that I (think that I) visit most are the only ones visible by default, but if I hover the category, others appear.
I’d love to have something like this built-in + automated.
Let’s say you present to me my most-visited pages in a home tab. I can select some of them to be category headers (via tags), make sure that some never disappear even if I don’t visit them a lot (and make sure some never appear even if I do visit them a lot).
January 28, 2010 at 9:32 pm
I almost hate to say it, but: Widgets. Forged with HTML5/CSS/JS, they could be interesting residents there.
January 28, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Not much, really. In current Firefox, I never see whatever is set as the home page (I think it’s blank, actually), since it’s set to remember and reopen whatever I was working on previously.
So personally, I don’t think a Home Tab would be all that useful… maybe if it showed frequently accessed pages like Chrome does, but I already have toolbar bookmarks for most of those…
January 28, 2010 at 10:49 pm
I would rather not see a Home Tab as I want the tab bar to be empty until I put something there. I start Fx with a blank page now.
Leave the Home Page Button alone.
January 28, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Would it be a completely separate page or something that pops up like Ubiquity? I can think of several ubiquity commands/widgets that would be handy if it can be called as reference without really leaving the page that I’m on. Kind of like using the preview pane of Ubiquity
For example, if I’m reading something and need to look something up in wikipedia or crunch some numbers, it’d be handy to not have to start a new tab dedicated to it.
Or, if I need to quickly jump to one of my “standard tabs” (Gmail, LJ friends page, etc), and I don’t want to spend the time hunting for it amongst all of my tabs, it’d be handy to click the home button and then pick where to go. If that tab’s already open, it’d jump to that tab. If it’s not open, then firefox would open it for me.
January 28, 2010 at 11:16 pm
If something were to be added to the tab bar I would much prefer the ability to pin websites to the tab bar so that they’re always there (as a favicon, perhaps).
Something like the Windows 7 task bar in its “never coalesce” mode.
January 28, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Building-in minitabs would be great; having a facebook tab and a gmail tab that are only the icons without having to add three extensions to do it would be useful
January 28, 2010 at 11:25 pm
It would have to be about:me or something. I always have gmail in my first position which is why I like the idea of app tabs. I never use my home button. I think it would be a great waste of space to put it there unless you could make your home an app tab for something like gmail.
That being said, I think there could be interesting uses for it if it is a home tab and not a home button opening up a new tab.
January 28, 2010 at 11:50 pm
I would probably want my current home page there, which is http://www.google.co.uk/.
January 28, 2010 at 11:55 pm
Hey everybody: If you’ve got a good idea, don’t leave it here in a comment on my blog — enter it into the Design Challenge that I linked to!
http://mozillalabs.com/conceptseries/2009/12/22/firefox-4-design-challenge/
January 29, 2010 at 12:05 am
You know, I’ve never actually clicked that “Home” button. I suppose I should remove it to save space.
January 29, 2010 at 12:56 am
I use home button by doing middle click on it to open new tab, sometimes.
Having quick access to tools I use most such as address lookup on a map, recent addresses I looked for would be nice though
January 29, 2010 at 2:36 am
I tried out the NewTab extension (the functional equivalent of Opera’s Speed Dial and Safari’s Top Sites and Chromes whatever), but it was too slow. Opening new tabs made Firefox perform like molasses.
I have for a long time kept my home page blank, mostly for speed reasons. Opening a new window or new tab and having it fill in a duplicate of the page I was on, or open a connection to a news site, always seemed to miss the point. I was opening a new tab to go somewhere specific, almost all the time it wasn’t whatever my homepage was set to. So the homepage was set to nothing thereafter.
Now, I do find myself readjusting the size of my browser a lot. I like it to be around 900px wide so that I can have some screen real estate on either side of the browser window. So I made a bookmarklet of javascript which resets the browser window’s width to 900px. I set my homepage to that bookmarklet, and now I no longer have to manually re-size my browser window after expanding it for whatever reason (e.g. watching an HD video or reading a non-fluid designed website intended for a maximized window).
So that’s what I would (and do) use my home button for: resetting my browser window’s state to my preferred dimensions.
January 29, 2010 at 6:56 am
I like both the Apple iPad UI and Office 2010 backstage (remake Tools-Options), or a daskboard style mix like Zone Software which might be kinda fun. Access download manager as a pane in a cool new view. Access stats, access weave settings, themes, like the Extention manager UI, but not as modal dialog, but part of the backstage which you can break up all the functionality in Firefox in new and custom views or ways to to display them, via lists, icons, previews.. and custom settings.
So each pane could be different styles.. or a base UI to get into things that are paned.
We could have icons or buttons to get into various things like settings, download manager list, add ons, troubleshooting tools, themes, bookmarks manager, or show a list of most recent or frenquent custom tasks we could run in firefox. Like turn the list of customization toolbar icons into items usable to display on my custom home page. Have a go to home or home icon for my home URL promply displayed. Have a custom top 5 or 10 list of top tabs or bookmarks to open. or show the bookmarks toolbar as a my favorite(bookmark)s list on the hometab. Be able to list the Extensions, or Access themes.
We could remove most of the current dialogs and move toward an Apple 1 thing displayed at a time, but simple and touchscreen friendly.
Not like maemo but more professional.
January 29, 2010 at 7:10 am
Make that Zune Software UI modal would be cool to implement in Firefox, I don’t mean foxi turn, but we could RSS reader previews lists, my favorite website (auto previews) (refresh every so many minutes)
Or have top RSS feed headlines.
I mean we could do top 5 favorite websites, videos, RSS feed headlines.
Kinda like Viigo app for Blackberry. Top 5 videos. Almost just create custom widgets that can be used to view custom content views for my top sites pane.
There are so many endless ways of merging user info with Firefox settings into a custom UI that is quick access for 1 stop shopping for almost everything in Firefox. Even access things like clear history, start PB mode with a click of a button, but it doesn’t have to be a re-hash of a Menu system with a flyout sub menu.. but more panel driven with even panel could be a different type of UI and for different type of information, either with custom views or with new remakes of all the UI. I really wish I had time mock and wireframe, because what I see in my head is quite awesome. Just take all the mockup panes out there and bolt them together into a user friendly and touch enabled UI model. I just don’t want a remake portal like Yahoo as my home tab, I’m thinking a bit more app driven without the ability for custom bolt in panes from extension developers.
January 29, 2010 at 8:05 am
Since the awesomebar was introduced, I never use the homebutton anymore, ok maybe only to open a blank page, but you can also do it with CTRL+t.
Maybe if Raindrop comes in it will be my homepage or a one with widgets as orchard says.
January 29, 2010 at 8:14 am
If you do it, and if there is a pref to disable it, I’ll disable it immediately. In other words: I hate it. My home button opens 12 tabs exactly and I don’t want to see in my browser “permanent” tabs I did open myself. My choice, my freedom, my browser, remember?
January 29, 2010 at 2:25 pm
This sounds a lot like the earlier idea of putting stats and links to frequently used sites onto new tabs – which never came to much in the end.
I think the Home button is an anachronism whose time has passed, but I’m not sure a Home Tab makes things any better.
Why not remove the concept of a “Home Page”, replacing it instead with a list of “Start-up Pages” which load at browser start, and can be re-loaded any time from a menu entry. It should be an ordered list that gets loaded in a staggered order – currently having too many tabs set as your “Home Page” collection can swamp the browser and network, so that some don’t load properly and the UI becomes unresponsive.
To accompany this, I would go back to the idea of putting the proposed Home Tab functionality onto the New Tab operation instead.
This would mean that people who want to start the browser with about:blank can do so. People who want to start with a specific page – or a dozen pages – can do so. And they can load them trivially later on, if they need to. The stats, shortcuts and other handy links all end up in a new blank tab, where they’re most likely to be useful. The home button would effecitvely become a “Load Start-up Pages” button which could optionally be put on the toolbar (but wouldn’t be there by default).
January 30, 2010 at 5:22 pm
“what would you put on the home tab?”
Erm… my home page?! Either that, or a massive button that goes to the home page.
January 30, 2010 at 8:44 pm
This would be one of the greater places to have an extension providing functionality and allowing such extension to be uninstalled if unwanted, along with the current ‘home’ button.
January 30, 2010 at 11:30 pm
I wouldn’t want to have anything else than my current home page, which has a categorized (and partly time-adjusted with scripting) list of frequently visited or important links, and an iframe with my web calendar for the next few days.
February 1, 2010 at 7:05 pm
A built in Tiddlywiki?
February 2, 2010 at 5:56 pm
My home page is about:blank because it does not cause error when I have closed the internet connection. I do not use the home button except to blank a tab !
February 3, 2010 at 9:05 am
I like the idea of a home tab. I would indeed like it to display my most visited sites, with the ability to fix some there and reorganize them.
Having a space there to see the latest entries on subscribed feeds would be nice to.
February 6, 2010 at 11:06 pm
A customizable bar that allow you to choose websites and show updated content from the website or email client or social network in a small pane and links to the site, skins and other customizable features, a news/video/rss feed, a search engine that opens results in a new tab, a chat/im box, a music streaming service integration and a box that recommends websites based on browsing history.