Alex Faaborg

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 [...]

Last week I attended CHI 2007 in San Jose. For those not familiar with CHI, it’s a yearly conference where people studying human computer interaction come to present their latest work. CHI is a big conference: 4 days, 3 time slots per day, and ~16 different sessions per time slot.
As usual, a wide [...]

Earlier this week I spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo about Mozilla Labs’ interest in microformats. The talk covered:
1) What are microformats?
2) Why does Mozilla care about microformats?
3) What does a microformat-aware Web browser look like?
4) Why should Web sites expose their content using microformats?
Download the slides (PDF, 54.8 MB)
View on slideshare
Mike Beltzner’s talk [...]

For any Mozilla contributers in the Bay Area:
On Friday 3/9 to Sunday 3/11 Mozilla will be participating in an Open Source Usability Sprint. The event will be located at Google and will run from 9am-5pm each day.
For people working on Firefox at the usability sprint, our goal will be to re-imagine the Web browser, [...]

Yes?
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the way Firefox interacts with the user when it needs to ask a question, or provide a piece of information. These interactions involve topics like:
-RSS detection
-Password manager messages
-Download manager messages
-Installing updates
-Installing extensions
-Pop-up blocking
-Phishing protection
-A range of other features that are still in the design stage (microformat detection, [...]

Previously
Part 0: Introduction to Microformats
Part 1: Structured Data Chaos
Part 2: The Fundamental Types
Part 3: Introducing Operator
Part 4: The User Interface of Microformat Detection
Now that I’ve posted about what microformats are, why the browser should natively detect them, which microformats should be detected, and Mozilla Labs has introduced Operator, it’s time to take a look at [...]

Taking a quick break from posting about microformats, I would like to describe some ideas I had recently about the user interface of Firefox’s history.
In Firefox, as well as many other Web browsers, recent history (view “By Last Visited” ) is displayed in a flat list of page titles. From an implementation perspective, this [...]