Design Changes Revealed: Firefox 4.0

The release of Firefox 4.0 may still be nearly 6 month away, but the excitement for the new version is already growing. One of the designers behind the browser has shared on his blog updated mock-ups of the new design.

1) App Button One of the more challenging, not to mention contentious, aspects of the Firefox UI update has been how to handle the MenuBar. On our first pass we were informed by how Safari and Chrome had handled this problem by paring down all menu items into two separate Page and Tools buttons. This approach has a few advantages but also some disadvantages. The new proposed approach to this problem is an App Button which is similar to the single menu approach taken by Windows 7 native applications (Paint, WordPad) and by MS Office.

The UX team feels this approach has several advantages over the previous idea:

•It is less complex
•Takes up less space

•Instead of two potentially conflicting locations for menu items, there is now only one unified location

•Can be placed in the upper left analogous to the Menubar paradigm it is replacing
•Similar to the far more ubiquitous Office 2008/2010 + Windows 7 application menu
•Reduces clutter on the Navigation Toolbar

•It also creates a more flexible and rich canvas for perhaps doing some decidedly non-menu-esque things

Appearance and Placement

One of the benefits of the App Button is that it is similar to the way Microsoft is treating its native apps and Office. Another benefit is that the placement is closer to where the Menubar would be and therefore it is more familiar.

One idea that we have already explored with the Pages and Tools buttons is to use text on the button instead of an icon. This is also reminiscent of the Menubar’s textual display and removes any ambiguity involved with icons. This approach is also explored in the most recent Office 2010 beta with the tab simply being labeled “File”. We discussed naming our App Button simply “Firefox” because it contains all the actions that apply to Firefox.

Attaching the button to the top of the window further implies that this menu affects Firefox as a whole.

Status of the Titlebar

In all the mockups up to this point the Titlebar has been removed and the space reallocated for portions of the tabs. Enough room was left for traditional window dragging. The rational behind this change was to further shrink vertical space and to address the redundancy of having the page title in the Titlebar and the tab.

In the original approach you would lose approximately the width of one tab (or less!) due to the window widgets. This was before talk of placing an App Button or an Identity button in this area. As it stands now you would be losing much more. It seems the vertical space tradeoff doesn’t stack up quite as well when losing so much horizontal tab space.

It would be better to leave the Titlebar, giving full access to it and not losing any tab space. It also won’t be frustrating for someone wanting to drag the window.

State of the Menu

What will this single menu look like? Something like the sketch I posted previously but not exactly. Ideas on this are welcome. Thoughts about what should and should no go into this menu can be based on work already done for menu cleanup.

2) Refining Toolbar Button Appearance:

Some initial work has gone into making the toolbar buttons more visible on light backgrounds and more crisp and dimensional (pressable).

This is work I am constantly reevaluating since they appear on variable backgrounds.

3) Location Bar:

Created some very early visuals for reevaluating site identity. Also the location bar is now properly recessed instead of floating.

4) Retain Separate Search Bar:

With the LocationBar containing an increasing amount of functionality it may be best to retain a clear distinction between the two fields.

5) Bookmarks Widget:

On a default profile or existing profile that hasn’t modified the Bookmarks Toolbar it will be hidden by default and the Bookmarks Widget placed in the Navigation Toolbar.

If the Bookmarks Toolbar is shown the Bookmarks Widget will appear there instead.

Current version available at:

www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Real Hard disk Capacity

Hard disk drive capacity is that manufacturers assume that kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), gigabyte (GB) and terabyte (TB) are different things from what they really are, making you to have a hard disk drive with less capacity than advertised. This problem is known by several names, like “rounding”, “formatted capacity vs. unformatted capacity”, etc. Some people even wrongly assume that the operating system is the villain behind the vanishing of space, but the truth of the matter is that the hard drive manufacturers are the one to blame, as they announce their products with a capacity higher than the real drive capacity.

Unit	Symbol	Base 2	Base 10
Kilo	K	2^10	10^3
Mega	M	2^20	10^6
Giga	G	2^30	10^9
Tera	T	2^40	10^12
Peta	P	2^50	10^15
Exa	E	2^60	10^18

For example, hard disk drive manufacturers assume that 1 GB equals to 1 billion (10^9) bytes, while in fact 1 GB equals to 1,073,741,824 (2^30) bytes.
Let’s take a real example, Seagate/Maxtor/Samsung hard disk drive with “250 GB”. It is announced as being a 250 GB hard disk drive, having 488,397,168 sectors. With this number of sectors we can easily find out that the capacity of this hard disk drive is of 250,059,350,016 bytes, or 232.88 GB and not 250 GB. So here is why your 250 GB hard drive is only formatted with 232 GB: it IS a 232 GB hard drive!

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Who invented "CTRL+ALT+DEL”?

Have you ever thought of the person who invited "CTRL+ALT+DEL" key combination?

"David Bradley" -- He is the one who spent 1 minute and 23 seconds in writing the source code that rescues the world's PC users for decades.

This extraordinary IBM employee retired after a prolong service of 29 years. His formula forces obstinate computer to restart when they no longer follow other commands. By 1980, Bradley was one of 12 people working to create the debut. The engineers knew they had to design a simple way to restart the computer when it fails to respond the user -- Bradley wrote the code to make it work.

Bradley says, "I did a lot of other things than Ctrl+Alt+Delete, but I'm famous for that one." His fame and success is achieved each time a PC user fails. He commented this relationship with Bill Gates by saying "I may have invented it, but Bill Gates made it famous by applying my formula.. When ever any Microsoft's Windows operating system made by him CRASHES, thus I win whenever he loses"!

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Google search gets eyes and ears!

Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone.


On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

"It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query."

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the "nascent nature of computer vision" and with the service's present shortcomings. "Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories," he said.

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone.

"It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era," Gundotra said, with "devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further."

Offering one real-world example of the service in action, Gundotra said that when a guest came by for dinner, he snapped a photo of a wine bottle she gave him to assess its merits. The result--"hints of apricot and hibiscus blossom"--went far beyond his expertise, but that didn't stop him from sharing the opinion over dinner.

He also demonstrated Google Goggles to take a photo of the

Itsukushima Shrine in Japan, a landmark tourists may recognize even if they can't read Japanese. The uploaded photo returned a description of the shrine on his mobile phone.

Although the service can recognize faces, since faces are among the billions of images in the database, it doesn't right now, Gundotra said.

"For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition," Gundotra said.

"We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place."

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