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.
