Future Firefox 4.0 Could Feature 'App Tabs'

Mozilla periodically refreshes its wiki page with what might called public brainstorming of future ideas. In its latest refresh, the popular browser's developers have posted a number of ideas that they're considering for Firefox 3.7 and Firefox 4.0 (above). In a nutshell: simplify, simplify, simplify.

"Firefox feels dated and behind on Windows," the developers have written. "Especially Vista and Windows 7. These issues include absence of Glass, anemic purple toolbar color on Vista, tall and bulky UI footprint, element overload, inconsistent toolbar icon usage/style, lack of a tactile look & feel and perhaps too great of a divergence between the look on XP and Vista/7."

Some of these changes have been discussed before: combining the "go/stop/refresh" buttons into a single element; using a neutral tone, and embracing the design motifs that Aero Glass and other Windows design elements allow.

But there are also a couple of other interesting design ideas: eliminating the menu bar, and killing off the "home button". The latter one is actually the most interesting . "The home button at present functions pretty much exactly like a bookmark," the wiki notes. "Yet it has its own dedicated place in the default set of toolbar buttons. It's not entirely useful and takes up prime real estate.

"For 3.7 we would like to create a "Home Tab". Moving the functionality of the home button to a persistent "mini-tab". This tab, for 3.7, would just take you to your homepage. Any links clicked on this page would spawn a new tab. This would serve as a good introduction to tabs for users not accustomed to them."

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing Mozilla's take on an "iGoogle" home page; it's an obvious conclusion. Oddly enough, the "Home Tab" seems to appear only on Mozilla's mockup for Mozilla 4.0, which appears at the top of the page. Here's an early design for Mozilla 3.7:



You can see the design team's direction. It's not set in stone, however: the design is "at the UX team proposal stage, to be approve[d] by drivers and subject for constructive community feedback".

You may not even notice the other change: hiding the menubar. Like Vista, the Mozilla team wonders whether you need to see "File Edit History..." all the time. But there's another change hiding there, too: the elimination of bookmarks, which normally might be accessed via the menu, hitting CTRL-B to bring up the sidebar, or other means. Mozilla may replace bookmarks with a "widget": "create a bookmarks "widget" that replicates the bookmark menu functionality and place that on the bookmarks toolbar," the developers suggest.

The revisions for Mozilla 4.0 are even more provisional, as the new browser would be farther out, naturally. But there's a nifty new concept on the drawing board.

You probably have a number of Web pages you refer to on a frequent basis throughout the day: Gmail, Twitter, maybe another Web service or two. If you're like me, you cue up a series of tabs and assign them to a specific grouping, or maybe a whole new window. Mozilla proposes that those Web services (call them apps) be pinned to a portion of the screen, so that users would be able to quickly access them.

Other changes are equally subtle. For example, at the top of your browser window at title probably announces the Web page. But the tab you're browsing in does too. Mozilla may eliminate the full title bar from the very top of the screen, letting the tabs serve that purpose. Honestly, I'm not sure that makes sense for someone who surfs with a dozen tabs or more, all open. Likewise, Mozilla proposes combining the search bar and address bar into a single field, which isn't so revolutionary.

Firefox won acclaim first for its security, and later for its ability to extend its functionality via plugins. We'll have to see if a simplified layout continues to help Mozilla cut into Internet Explorer's lead as the most popular browser.

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