The central idea of the dialogs has been to simplify the navigation. Most dialogs and actions are accessed through the main menu which is mapped to the right softkey.  Dougt suggested combining bookmarks, history and the address bar into one unified places dialog.  I like that idea and I hope to get to it in the next week or so.

The feature I find the most intriguing is the scrolling and zooming with the virtual cursor. Currently, it works like this (or at least its supposed to):

• A virtual cursor indicates where the browser’s current focus is.  It also allows navigation of complex UI items such as drop down menus and roll overs.
• Short clicks of directional pad map into Dougt’s spatial navigation, bringing the focus to the nearest selectable element as indicated by the virtual cursor.
• Long presses of the directional pad begin smooth scrolling. Instead of jumping from link to link, the cursor moves in one direction at a steady speed.
• After a set amount of time, the page begins to zoom out. This is implemented with Firefox 3’s full page zoom feature. An intended side effect of zooming out as we scroll is that the scroll is accelerated.  It also allows the user to look ahead as they scroll at these higher speeds, similar to how a driver fixes their eyes further down the road at 65 mph than they do at 35 mph.
• The OK/Select key maps to the left click of a mouse. A key down event triggers a mouse down, a key up event triggers a mouse up event and a key press event triggers a mouse click event.
• The Left softkey maps to the right mouse button in the same way, providing access to context menus (not implemented yet).
• One item to be added to the standard context menu is begin selection. This will have the same effect of pressing an holding the mouse button.  The browser will highlight the text and other elements as the user moves the mouse until another OK/Select or left soft key press is detected.  The effect will be to allow users to select and copy text.

It should also be noted that the assumptions in the first paragraph is considered a bare minimum for functionality. We’d also like to do something useful (an hopefully intuitive) with any other controls that are available. The obvious ones are numbering menu items, using a click wheel or volume control to scroll and mapping clear, send and end call into things like back, forward and stop.

Some non intuitive ideas include mapping the number keypad onto spacial location of the screen. So for instance if there if a user wanted to go to the bottom right hand corner of the screen they could press the ‘#’ key.  Alternatively we could use those keys for fast scrolling (holding the 9 key would fast scroll down and to the right).  We could also map the number keys into the bookmark system (long pressing one navigates to google.com, 2 brings you to your blog site etc.).

But this brings up another point.  How do we determine what the “right” mix of default settings is?  And even more importantly, how do we let users customize these settings with a minimum of pain?

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But, this leeds to one of my biggest pet peeves of browsing the internet; searching though 149 tabs (really, that was the count when I checked ten minutes ago) trying to find the one I want.  I’ve complained about it a lot, mostly to my roommate who I doubt was listening.

The good news is I finally decided to get off my duff (or on it if you want to take things literally) and do something about it. Its a simple extension that adds a search box to the “All tabs” drop down in firefox.  That’s the drop down that lists all the tabs you have open when you click the little down arrow on the extreme right of your tab bar.  This is my first foray into the world of extension making, so use with caution….

 http://people.mozilla.org/~blassey/tabsearch.xpi

As a side note, I began thinking about how we manage tabs in Firefox while I was doing this.  It seems to me that there is a lot more we can do here.  First off, wouldn’t it be great to get some sense of the history of a tab when looking at the all tabs drop down?  I know I’ve frequently lost track of a tab I was keeping open to look at an API because I had clicked on a link and the title had changed.  Just a thought….

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