Alex Faaborg

Now that Prism has launched, a lot of people have been suggesting features and various directions Mozilla Labs could potentially take the experiment in the future. Here is a collection of ideas that people have recently suggested, and some things I’ve been thinking about in the back of my head. Please feel free [...]

Today Mozilla Labs is announcing a new experiment called Prism. Over the last few months I’ve had a chance to contribute to many of the initial user facing design aspects of Prism, and this is one of the most exciting labs projects I’ve had a chance to work on so far at Mozilla. [...]

As we get closer to moving Firefox 3 from the alpha stage to the beta stage, testers of Minefield (our nightly builds), and people who follow the user experience team’s mockups on bugzilla and forums like dev.apps.firefox are starting to see some glimpses of what Firefox 3 may look like. Since I haven’t posted [...]

While pondering the overall user experience of the internet, I find myself often thinking about how in this new era of podcasting, the experience frankly isn’t all about email clients and Web browsers any more. If you look at content and delivery, Firefox and Miro are for the most part opposites:

The main point of [...]

WIMPy and the Terminal

The history of user interfaces can be very briefly summarized into two distinct eras: the command line, followed by the graphical user interface. Interactions on the command line are very fast, but the set of possible commands is not discoverable. GUIs are essentially the opposite, on both issues. Interactions [...]

Happy iPhone day everyone (iPhonemas?, iPhonukkah?). Steve Jobs is casting the release of the iPhone as a revolutionary event. On days like this it’s hard not to think back to previous revolutionary technologies, especially the ones that could have changed everything. One revolutionary technology in particular, also from Apple, and also on [...]

Time to break out your favorite prototyping tool or image editing software, Aza Raskin of Humanized is running a design challenge for dealing with tab overflow in Firefox:
Not only does the winner get a Humanized Puzzler t-shirt, but also the very real chance of their solution getting integrated into Firefox! Post your answers as blog [...]

Is it possible to prove that one user interface is quantitatively better than another user interface? Is interaction design all about personal opinion? How does one tell what is good interface, and what is a bad interface? If two people disagree on a design, how do you tell who is right?
These are [...]

I’m getting married! Earlier today I proposed to my girlfriend Anna Vitebsky, pictured here at the Attack of the Squirrels party for the launch of Firefox 2:

I first met Anna at our undergraduate orientation. We were each asked to say our name and a word that started with the same first letter that [...]

Firefox 3 is going to provide a wide range of improvements to performance, stability, and security, and it’s also going to present several new user facing features. Here is a quick recap of design work that’s been going on in the Mozilla community over the past few weeks for Firefox 3, along with information [...]