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Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#51

Post by vacri »

I felt my hackles rising throughout the video, then I realised I'm not the target audience - I'd loathe most of these ideas to make it into a general-purpose browser (though I can't see FF's separate search box surviving much longer, sadly).

Still, 'no settings'? How do you do 'no settings' and also do "with your permission, we'll search your email"? Ultimately I don't really understand the difference between a "no settings" browser, and a browser where you just don't bother to change the settings.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#52

Post by insky »

fletchowns wrote: post #10
owlish wrote: post #6

Disappointed that there isn't any innovation wrt tabs; they aren't mentioned at all. I understand Lightspeed aims to be minimalistic, but many of these defaults are just illogical. Default click-to-play at the moment already ruins many audio sites where the flash applet is hidden, and turns others into a game of Where's Waldo. Completely dropping extensions is antithetical to the central idea as well. Ideally, the br…

He does mention tabs @ 4:18. The click to play behavior doesn't have to be on the actual applet, it could be a popup just under the top bar or something. Use some imagination. Dropping extensions is not antiethical. The people this browser is targeted for don't care about extensions. I don't see any of the "inconsistencies to the central idea" you are talking about.

I'd be very happy with all animation/audio being click to play. I'd like to nominate a video player to play videos. Currently I can't play Youtube videos in Firefox, so I have to open Chrome for the task. I'd prefer to just switch to an app that played video, and did that one thing well, with controls that I'm comfortable and familiar with. Rather than a g'zillion bad implementations.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#53

Post by insky »

kibibu wrote: post #8
owlish wrote: post #6

Disappointed that there isn't any innovation wrt tabs; they aren't mentioned at all. I understand Lightspeed aims to be minimalistic, but many of these defaults are just illogical. Default click-to-play at the moment already ruins many audio sites where the flash applet is hidden, and turns others into a game of Where's Waldo. Completely dropping extensions is antithetical to the central idea as well. Ideally, the br…

Tabs are accessed through the URL popup overlay. I agree that it's difficult to imagine browsing without them, but I manage well enough on phones without them.

On an Android tablet I have, tab switching under Chrome can be done with a thumb gesture. Tab switching under Opera for me is a fiddle and an annoyance. And that's on a larger device than a phone.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#54

Post by veidr »

bane wrote: post #9

At first I thought "oh no, another distraction for Mozilla", but then I sat through the presentation and thought there was some really cool ideas (amazebar!). In fact, I think it can be simplified and paired down even more. Even better, some of the assumptions here even make the software portable (as in doesn't really need to be installed and could just run off a usb drive/out of my dropbox). Automatically being in a…

I seldom use bookmarks for browsing/reading things, but they are very useful for opening groups of related pages at once (since modern browsers can open a folder of bookmarks in one operation).

E.g., I select Bookmarks → Banking → Open in Tabs and a tab opens for each of my bank accounts and credit card accounts. (Especially handy because such sites tend to be slow.)

Autocomplete is a very useful UI for going to a single site, and I personally never use bookmarks for that, but I often use them to open collections of pages together at once.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#55

Post by wodenokoto »

cypher543 wrote: post #16

> Auto-updates are always on I really hope this isn't going to become a standard thing. There are still plenty of people like me who are stuck with something like satellite internet, which forces us to micromanage our data usage. I can't afford to just have things auto-updating whenever they want.

Take a look at the introduction again and ask yourself if you are a busy bee or an evergreen user.

I think he made a good use case for this browser, why is could work as a standalone product and why it can't stand alone in the market.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#56

Post by insky »

The problem I have with Firefox is that it just doesn't really innovate. We've had some small UI changes. But there's legacy cruft still in there that isn't addressed.

Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them either. In some ways I think they should be at the heart of the browser.

I think a lot of people use tabs because bookmark management is so crap.

The only bit I resonated with was the similar sites suggestions. But you'd need a setting to setup suggestion services. There's a privacy concern with that.

Other helper features:

Pagination buttons were built into Opera driven off the rel=prev and rel=next, link elements. Navigation could further be ripped out the page window into a browser control. Searching sites and pages could be friendlier. Better form helpers needed. A good feed reader would be good. Tools to help read web content more simply (readability style) would be nice. Plus I like personalising the look and feel of my web browser ever so slightly, and even Firefox doesn't do that particularly well (it ignores some of my desktop theming).

So I think Firefox should really be thinking how to answer the question: 'How can we make it easier for users to consume web content?'. This has to go beyond the rendering engine. So actually a fatter featureful browser I think would be better - but with some very intuitive and simple controls.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#58

Post by cpeterso »

insky wrote: post #50
gioele wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tabs are important to almost all web users these days Tabs would be a useless feature, if the window manager did a better job at what they should do. In a "tabbing" wm like the one BeOS has you are much better served by one-page-one-window application. With a bit of cooperation from the window manager you can get rid of tabs. I did it few years ago and my browsing behavior and habits have changed for the better.

Exactly, this is window managment territory. I think that tabs came about with Opera because they were essentially cheap windows, and as window management has been so dire on most mainstream OSs, tabs were really welcome. But at the end of the day, I think tabs like ephemeral/temporary bookmarks - and it's the bookmark part of the browser that sucks.

> I think tabs like ephemeral/temporary bookmarks - and it's the bookmark part of the browser that sucks.

For Lightspeed's target audience, merging the UI for tabs and bookmarks might make sense. The user's mental model for both is "that website I was looking at earlier", where earlier might be a long time ago (a bookmark) or recently (a tab).

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#59

Post by cpeterso »

gatehouse wrote: post #20

Having an intelligent non https submission warning could be good... You could go so far as to flat out refuse to send a cc number in the clear. The degree of dependence on the search engine is troubling, would be interesting to see how much could be handled by a local mini index without involving a 3rd party. Also think browser history could be a lot more useful if it were organized better. For example, maybe groupin…

Here is a Firefox bug about highlighting or warning about insecure password fields:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748193

And a bug for Chromium (that also mentions credit card number fields):

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399416

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#60

Post by cpeterso »

krisgenre wrote: post #37
fletchowns wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does mention tabs @ 4:18. The click to play behavior doesn't have to be on the actual applet, it could be a popup just under the top bar or something. Use some imagination. Dropping extensions is not antiethical. The people this browser is targeted for don't care about extensions. I don't see any of the "inconsistencies to the central idea" you are talking about.

In my experience with non technical people, they are always interested in that one addon that helps them download YouTube videos.

The browser could just bundle the functionality from popular add-ons like download YouTube videos. On Firefox's add-ons website, six of the top 20 add-ons are video downloaders! :)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us...

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