Firefox gbrowser onnewtab3/27/2023 ![]() ![]() Over time, we've made the text darker and left justified it for legibility. We originally showed RSS updates in light gray and right justified. This often removes a navigation step of going to a site, finding what's new, and clicking. It enables a low-cost way of getting ambient-information updates on your sites. In almost all versions we've automatically shown RSS feeds from the sites you visit often. All of our attempts at adding animation, while sexy, seemed to distract if activation could happen inadvertently.The current design is mostly grayscale, with favicons in color. The theory seemed to flag in practice: color is a main way of differentiating sites. Originally, we thought that a fully grayscale display (especially of thumbnails) would be beneficial in being polite. Although the implementation got in the way of the idea (the shield looked clickable, and people got frustrated as it vanished as they tried to use it), it highlighted an interesting point: the ambient news part of the new tab page is actually very useful. The cognitive shield hid the frequently accessed sites until you moved the mouse. The most active attempt at being polite was the ill-fated cognitive shield idea.Both felt weird, and people remarked on them. In particular, we tried the right side of the screen and the bottom of the screen. We've tried a number of ways to make the new tab page polite - to stay out of your way. The one thing thumbnails give is a visceral feeling.Having looked at a couple folk's screens they often and two or more sites which look almost identical (multiple WordPress logins), sites hidden because of failed logins, and sites indistinguishable because they all approach white. Safari's implementation shows a number of the pitfalls.That's because the upper-left is where the site's logo normally resides. In small-scale tests, the upper-left corner of a site was much easier to identify a site by than the full site.The association to name and fav-icon is much stronger. Few people have a strong association between a site and it's zoomed-out view. Thumbnails are a high-noise, low-information-density medium.After trying a number of different layouts we reached a couple realizations: This is the largest departure from the original mockups and other browsers. Below are an outline of a couple of the major decisions and why we made them. We've been iterating frequently to find a good balance for the new tab page. Install the latest Firefox 3.1 beta (required). ![]()
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