New video demos radical Firefox Mobile

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 13 Jun 2008 at 08:34

A new video gives a first glimpse at Mozilla's radical plans for the mobile version of Firefox.

Like Apple's mobile version of Safari, Firefox Mobile concentrates on full web browsing. However, the manner in which users navigate the web is entirely different.

Firefox Mobile works on touch controls, with users scrolling around by dragging their finger across the screen, in a similar fashion to the iPhone browser.

However, none of the normal browser controls - back, forward, reload etc - are visible within the browser window. To locate these controls the user has to drag the page to the left, where the buttons are found in the margin to the side of the web page, and the URL bar fades into view. "By using horizontal panning to access the controls, we avoid the iPhone's problem of needing to go to the very top of the page to enter URLs," says Aza Raskin, the son of interface expert Jef Raskin, who was recently hired by Mozilla to work on the project.

Similarly, to zoom out of a page and return to the main menu screen, the user flicks the page to the right, as if they were ripping off a sheet of paper from a book.

"One of the cool things about this is that the gesture for zooming out to the home screen is simply throwing the page in any direction," says Raskin. "It's singularly therapeutic! It's also discoverable: in the panning process you discover the visual clues that there is more past the edge of the page.

"In informal user tests every user figured out the interaction without instructions or help," he writes in a blog post unveiling the Firefox Mobile concept.

Tabbed browsing

Like the desktop version of Firefox, the mobile browser allows you to open new web pages in different tabs. However, these aren't selected from a bar across the screen, but tiled on the browser's home screen. This means you can drag the different browser tabs into whatever configuration you choose - keeping webmail on the left-hand side of the screen and news sites on the right, for example.

"Creating a new tab is easy. You click on the big plus [sign], and the browser finds an open spot, puts the tab there, and zooms in on it," Raskin explains. "If you have a homepage, the new tab opens there. Even as the page zooms further out, the new tab buttons remains in the same logical spot."

And because, as Raskin explains, typing on a mobile phone screen is like trying to remove a contact lens with a ball of cotton wool, Firefox Mobile aims to minimise the amount of typing required.

"Placing the cursor in the URL immediately gives a set of results (a la the Awesome Bar [from Firefox 3]) that is generated from your history sorted by both frequency and recency," he says. "To do an immediate search on what you've typed, you can just tap a search provider at the bottom of the results."

You can see Raskin's video demonstration of the Firefox Mobile concept here.

Mozilla is due to launch the desktop version of Firefox 3 next Tuesday.