Mobile Firefox Design Wants to ‘Get Out of Your Way’
Mozilla continues to refine the user interface for its coming mobile version of Firefox and developer Doug Turner has posted a second round of mockups for the touch screen interface based on feedback received from the first designs.
The new design is considerably different from the first, with a revamped interface that’s working hard to optimize the limited screen real estate of portable devices.
Instead of the permanent toolbar at the top of the page as in the original design (and that of Mobile Safari), the latest idea is to simply display a translucent Firefox icon overlaying the bottom-right corner of the page and a similar back button in the lower-left corner.
Clicking the Firefox icon would then bring up the address bar, bookmark button, tab-switcher and other navigation elements. Any extra buttons and toolbars, like those added through extensions, would be stacked on top of the location bar.
Turner says that the design goals in the latest itineration of Mobile Firefox are to get out of the user’s way, “after all, why would you want to look at our UI, when you really want to be looking at the web.”
We think it looks like a reasonable design and solves one of the frequent annoyances of many mobile browsers — having to scroll back to the top of the page to get to the address bar.
Keep in mind that this preview, like the earlier one, is largely intended to gather community feedback, and that the final release of Firefox mobile may well be very different. The final version Firefox mobile is expect to arrive sometime in late 2008.
If you have feedback, ideas or suggestions for Mobile Firefox you can let the developers know through the Mozilla wiki or by posting a comment on Turner’s blog.
[via Mozilla Links]
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