Comments on: Firefox.next Mockup: Sidebar, Workspaces and Vertical Tabs

By: Roundup: The Ultimate Mac Browsers List of 2009

Roundup: The Ultimate Mac Browsers List of 2009 — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:43:08 +0000

[...] Very useful, but still too far from what I wrote about in my previuos article about a Workspaces feature in Firefox.next. [...]

By: Ticci

Ticci — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:02:45 +0000

sorry, this is the right graph:

http://i43.tinypic.com/17qur9.jpg

By: Ticci

Ticci — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:01:12 +0000

@ 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

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?

By: David Lee

David Lee — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:03:46 +0000

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?