Following my previous post about the future of Firefox, (you can find it here) I made this mockup/sketch, hope to be clear enough.
It’s the same mockup Pascal Finette covered in his blog (here) and which I’ve submitted to Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Summer 09 (where you can find my presentation video as well)
So,let’s start from the beginning:
browsers have many limits.
For example, the main limit, it’s that they just…browse a page. In my opinion a browser should be both a tool to browse the web AND a sort of “library” where the user can store informations about the content he liked most. Think of iTunes: you can listen to your favourite music but you can manage your albums as well. That’s the same concept,applied to web pages. First,I began to think of alternative solutions for bookmarks management , but then I realized that this way of sorting things should be extended to all the browsing experience.
Full-res image HERE.
Workspaces came in my mind. Bypassing the need of hundred open tabs (the need,not the chance) a workspace can allow us to sort our browsing experience into ”actions”,just like in real life. I mean, everyone of us goes to ”Work”, see his “Friends” and does “Stuff”. Why can’t we apply this to web? Wouldn’t it be simplier to manage and easier to understand? I say yes. A workspace is,basically, a group of similar pages related by their content: in my case, “Work” contains eBay, Paypal, UPS and Imageshack while “Stuff” contains Wordpress,Google and Digg. A click,and you change your workspace; click on the workspace badge and a pop-up window shows you how many open sites you have in there.
Simple and well-organized.
Workspaces,anyway, don’t exclude “classic navigation”: for that,you have tabs. Vertical tabs,for a better organization and with hierarchical system for a great grouping. I repeat this is just my first sketch, surely I’ll post more if you think it’s worth.
#1
That's what David Lee said 1 year ago:
Nice concept! This is a very good followup to your first article. I’m personally not fan of workspaces because none of them have worked well for me. But that may be more of an implementation problem than a conceptual problem.
I’m a big fan of single site browsers, they really makes sense for stuff that historically have been desktop apps (mail, calendar, etc). But you’re brought a good point that this model may not make sense for the UPS site or paypal.
Seems like we need three different type of organization systems: (1) First class apps for websites that are like real apps, (2) a non-bookmark way to organize the websites used to quickly lookup stuff, and (3) then a third mechanism for dealing with websites that are mostly for reading.
What do you think? Are there another other common use cases for the web that might need another organization system? And how does that hook in best with the OS’s user interface model?
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#2
That's what Ticci said 1 year ago:
@ David Lee:
Thank you, first of all.
Well, in regards to site specific browsers (see Prism or Fluid.app) I think they really work only in some cases: for example, I’ve got Google Analytics and this blog dashboard on Fluid.app, and it’s way too useful. Basically, they’ve become native apps.
So, as you say, these are “Websites like real apps” or “websites that we use everyday,everytime and we can put into a single app”.
Then, we have less-visited sites (blogs,for example) and “casual sites” (sites you’ve just discovered).
My mockup solves all of these 3 problems:
-Workspaces: you can create “groups” of sites you usually visit together (eBay/Paypal/UPS) and create spaces to better organize your web habits;
- Tabs: casual navigation;
- Webapps: organization and single web-apps;
You can also see it this way:
Workspaces WebApps Tabs
| | |
| | CASUAL
| |
ORGANIZATION
|
|
|
SINGLE APPS
As you can see, my mockup’s three main features can handle all the 3 problems I mentioned before (everyday sites, less visited, casual) mixing them through “Organization” and then sub-dividing them again giving us the option “webapps”.
Then, we could talk about bookmarks sorting, but I think I’ll write another article about it, with another mockup.
What do you think?
[Reply]
#3
That's what Ticci said 1 year ago:
sorry, this is the right graph:
http://i43.tinypic.com/17qur9.jpg
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