May 252009
For the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer 2009, I’ve updated the mockup of my design for tabbing in the browser (works only in Firefox). I call the new version “AwesomeTabs” because it integrates tabs into the AwesomeBar. I discuss the virtues and issues of this new design in a video.
Some points I made about my thinking for the original design are still relevant.
BTW, please don’t infer anything about my coding skills from the mockup source. It’s a hack built on top of a hack built on top of a hack.
I really like what you are doing with this. What would be nice would be an option to make Firefox a fullscreen browser like Wei Zhou’s demo so that there was no window title bar or menu bar above the Awesome Bar. Then the very top thing on the screen would be this AwesomeTabBar thing.
This would then mean that you would have (to use Bruce Tognazzini’s terminology) a target for the mouse that was a “mile-high” – in the same way as the Mac menu bar. It wouldn’t matter how far you overshot the top of the screen as you pushed the mouse forward as the pointer would always be constrained to lie within this top region of the screen where this UI element was.
I like the idea of the preview and I would have thought that you could try desaturating the colour rather than blurring, as well as using a thicker font for the tab titles.
The Back/Forward buttons could also be removed so that the bar fit the entire width of the screen top. Gestures could be used to slide the page right to get at the last visited page. It may help to look at the iPhone in this regard.
Anyway, best of luck with this idea, as it is the best I have seen so far in this competition.