Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 184 posts

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#61

Post by olegp »

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…

Agree that Amazebar looks way too cluttered.

We are working on something similar at StartHQ (https://starthq.com) and keeping the search results page simple and uncluttered has been a challenge.

We ended up including more images and less text for certain types of results like contacts, for example. Check out the screenshot below if you don't have time sign up:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zbyrhvzf3f4fmsm/visual-search.png

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#62

Post by Flimm »

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.

If you're connected to the Internet you have to update your browser all the time just to stay minimally secure.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#63

Post by yiyus »

olegp wrote: post #61
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…

Agree that Amazebar looks way too cluttered. We are working on something similar at StartHQ ( https://starthq.com ) and keeping the search results page simple and uncluttered has been a challenge. We ended up including more images and less text for certain types of results like contacts, for example. Check out the screenshot below if you don't have time sign up: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zbyrhvzf3f4fmsm/visual-search…

I don't really see the advantage of displaying images. In your screenshot, we see five typical examples: the black head, the poster in the wall, the unknown face, the baby, and the picture with too many effects. How are these pictures better than printing five names?

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#64

Post by olegp »

yiyus wrote: post #63
olegp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that Amazebar looks way too cluttered. We are working on something similar at StartHQ ( https://starthq.com ) and keeping the search results page simple and uncluttered has been a challenge. We ended up including more images and less text for certain types of results like contacts, for example. Check out the screenshot below if you don't have time sign up: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zbyrhvzf3f4fmsm/visual-search…

I don't really see the advantage of displaying images. In your screenshot, we see five typical examples: the black head, the poster in the wall, the unknown face, the baby, and the picture with too many effects. How are these pictures better than printing five names?

You're right, one still needs to include the name on top of the image - that's something I'm working on atm.

We did have just text before and images stick out better, making it much easier and faster to determine which is the right result to click. Text is also quite easy to scan in one direction (top to bottom for search results), but having to scan horizontally as well is difficult. With images it's much easier, letting us include more results in the same space.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#65

Post by lucb1e »

insky wrote: post #56

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…

> 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.

And here I was thinking every browser should have such powerful tools instead of optimized-for-grandma windows.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#66

Post by krisgenre »

cpeterso wrote: post #60
krisgenre wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's the catch. I believe YouTube's terms and conditions don't allow you to download videos ( not sure ). If FF bundles such an addon, they could get into trouble ( again not sure, jus speculating ).

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#67

Post by fournm »

krisgenre wrote: post #35
nemothekid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the default in Chrome, and I believe its the default in IE as well. It has its upsides as well, you generally only need to target the latest stable version of Chrome.

Its been a while since I used Windows but doesn't IE update through "Windows updates"? Is it on by default?

It does now--older versions did not.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#68

Post by lucb1e »

Something about the "there are no settings to adjust" makes me want to fork Firefox and only apply security updates from the version before this new UI gets out of beta.

And tabs a click away? That's a nightmare.

Mixing what I type with search results, history and suggestions? Hello Chrome lookalike. I thought the separate search bar and awesomebar was one of the killer features for Firefox. Once that's gone, odds are I'll be switching browser.

Like with Firefox 4, it seems they are trying to redesign the browser like Chrome and doing it badly. Last time they did that I switched to Chrome for a few years before going back to open source (Firefox). Here we go again.

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#69

Post by golemotron »

greglo wrote: post #22

I like the idea, although really this is very similar to Chrome (and other browsers) where you just never open the settings tab. Except for the search bar, this is just one of today's browsers with tweaked defaults. I really don't see the disadvantage, minus the small developer overhead, of having all the choices they have made here configurable.

I wonder.. is it built on Chrome under the hood?

Re: Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment

#70

Post by riquito »

insky wrote: post #56

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…

> 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.

But they are at the heart of the browser. The Awesome Bar use words and tags of your bookmarks to propose you the right url after typing some character in the url bar. In the standard usage you do not need to open the bookmark manager (which is ugly, you're right) to use the bookmarks. It's automatic. You need to open the bookmark manager only if you want to know what you looked at at a certain date or do some housekeeping.

Post reply on HN