To help the redesign of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla just released a heatmap | Hacker News Reader

To help the redesign of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla just released a heatmap

heatmap.mozillalabs.com

45 pointsbigstorm59 comments

Looking at this reminds me of the "Booksmarks Toolbar". Is there anyone that doesn't remove it? Why is so much screen space wasted for little reason?

I would be completely lost without my Bookmarks Toolbar at the top. Sometimes I wish it could be two rows.

Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.

I'm agreeing with Cory on this one: the bookmarks bar should be made obsolete, or at least be hidden by default. Browsers, especially FF, but including Safari and Chrome, allow you to easily search bookmarks from the location bar by title of the page or URL. Aside from that, Chrome offers you the top pages tab page + if the bookmarks bar is hidden, it displays the Bookmarks bar as part of the new tabs page.

I'd love to see the statistics for this, but if most people, like me, only click items on the bookmarks bar upon opening a new tab, then, indeed, there is no sense in keeping it up in the toolbar by default.

Only showing the bookmarks bar after opening a new tab is much less efficient for my case: I have a number of bookmarks that I want to open in tabs, but it's a varying subset of the toolbar set.

To do it I now I just command-click all the bookmarks I want opened, and they open in background tabs. To do it with a hidden bookmarks bar I'd need to open a new tab first, then click.

Perhaps I'm weird (I've been accused of that before :-D), but I organize bookmarks into folders on the bookmarks toolbar (the folder is some topic which groups the links together for me according to some connection between them that is logical to me). For most bookmarks, two clicks and I'm in (even for those URLs I only use once every month or two). Even with the location bar searching on every keystroke, I still think I'd lose efficiency if the bookmarks bar went away. Plus the location-bar-based search doesn't help me if I know what general 'topic' a link fits into, but I can't remember anything about the site name or URL. Location bar auto-searching is nice, but I don't think it solves every bookmark-searching scenario.

I agree, if I don't have a visual reference in front of me I forget some of the many sites that are important for me to get to. You can get three rows of books marks up top: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-... I like this with a theme that minimizes the icons and text of the bookmarks. It hardly wastes any space this way.

Its called speed dial... Opera has had it for years then Chrome and Safari copied it.

Speed dial is less useful when it doesn't consider context.

Care to expand? I do not completely follow how it would help. possibly a use case?

Sure. I use multiple browsers each day for various reasons. It's hard enough keeping bookmarks synced. Top site pages are also largely useless in that they only keep the most visited pages. I have numerous work pages I visit often that get placed at the top. Numerous news pages, numerous blogs. In each case, I'd rather have some form of context.

For example, I don't need the dial telling me about HN, Reddit, ArsTech, and other tech news sites individually. At the very least, I'd like to just select news sites, and have the browser deal with it intelligently.

The dial is useful, don't get me wrong. But it's far shy of a replacement for bookmarks.

I realize I also might be the exception to the rule. =)

Multirow toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/

No need for it to waste space - just drag it up next to the File/Edit/Etc menu. I use the toolbar in place of the bookmarks menu itself, since I get to organize it exactly how I want it, and with quicker access/better categorization.

The bookmarks toolbar is my place for quickly dragging in stuff I might want to revisit later. For those times when the site doesn’t have a RSS feed or just isn’t interesting enough to subscribe to. Maybe some article I definitely want to read but just don’t have the time to read right now.

I don’t have to worry about deleting things (old stuff just gracefully disappears to the right but is still searchable and in approximate chronological order – my bar has 201 bookmarks at the moment) and some custom ordering is possible (if something is super important I will just not put any stuff to the left of it which means it will stay where it is and not disappear).

Sure, bookmarks are searchable through the address bar but that means the approximate chronological structure gets lost. The bookmarks bar has also a reminder function. Whatever I put there I can forget because I won’t have to search for it. It will just be there. A quick glance whenever I open a window is enough to know whether there is something I absolutely wanted to check out again.

The bookmarks bar is tremendously helpful for me and I couldn’t live without it.

I find that if there's something I'll want to read later in the day, I just leave it open in a tab, and if it's something that I'll want to read some other day, I just star it, and it will appear in the "recently bookmarked" menu. The idea of using the bookmarks bar as a shelf is kind of interesting, but I think I'd still rather have the screen space.

I’m not so sure, actually, what should be the default. It’s not a easy question. I know many people who don’t use the bookmarks bar and for them it’s definitely a waste of space. It might just be a sensible to default to not display it. Those who need it and use it might also be those who (like me) know how to show and hide it.

Re: Tabs. I like the bookmarks bar because it is a lot more persistent. After a long day with a lot of open tabs it is very easy for me to accidentally close a tab I actually wanted to read or even needed to read during my regular tab cleanups. That’s why really important stuff gets promoted to the bookmarks bar.

You might love Instapaper's "Read Later" bookmarklet: http://www.instapaper.com/extras

I tried it, doesn’t work for me. Too complex, too many steps, too much work. I need a simple, accessible way to save bookmarks, not a sophisticated but somewhat complicated one.

That’s not to say Instapaper is a bad idea, it’s just not the right thing for me. (It’s also that I’m using only one laptop and hardly ever any other computer. I can afford to save bookmarks locally but I can see how that might be a problem for others.)

You are of course entitled to your opinion but I'm curious what is too much work about it: with the bookmarklet set up, simply click a "Read Later" bookmark to save any page you are currently viewing, and when you want to go back and view some of the pages you've saved for later, simply click your Instapaper bookmark.

The bookmarks bar is always visible, I have to click at least twice if I want to access Instapaper (three times, actually, if I hide the bookmarks bar which is the point of this whole discussion).

That’s not a big difference but sometimes that’s enough. (There is also a ever so slight delay when loading a webpage. Native UI is just faster.)

These days when so many people have widescreen laptops, I wonder why things like the bookmarks toolbar don't default to docking to the left or right side. I can't afford to give up space at the top or bottom of my screen, but my left and right sides have room.

I think it is because it is harder to fit text on a vertical bar. It has to be rather wide to fit a couple of words horizontally, and even then the text will often get cut off. The text could be rotated to read vertically, but that is hard to read.

One reason is perhaps it's much simpler to have only horizontal bars. With horizontal and vertical bars, an interface tends to look really messy — just look at Opera.

The side bar is really only used by a "super" user. Also you can move the tabs and everything to the left, having no bars on the top if you so chose to.

Bookmark toolbars are a thing of the past; Bookmarklet toolbars aren't. :)

I hide my toolbar in Opera by defeault, but I enable it when I want to use Readability or Instapaper.

Edit: Didn't see c1sc0's reply.

Um, I like my Bookmarklets, ok? I'd be lost without the delicious bookmarklet.

Do "back button" clicks only mean the physical (err. how else do you say this?) clicking off the button or does hitting the back button on my mouse trigger this?

I use back a TON, but I can't remember the last time I clicked a back button.

Probably not, since what they're looking for is the usefulness of the individual pieces of the UI itself.

My default back behavior is right-click, click Back (since I use many different machines where I can't change a mouse button). This has just become a default gesture for me.

I took the back button of a long time ago. All I have is refresh and the url bar. I use my mouse buttons along with the mouse gestures addon to navigate back and forward.

I tried taking the back button off, but it turns out I really need it: not to click, but as a status indicator. Because I use tabs, the back button shows me at a glance whether or not I'm in the middle of a stack, or if I opened a link from a new tab, etc.

I use it to go back multiple pages at a time via the drop down list.

It looks like Chrome was on the right track by ditching the "Search" field off to the right.

There really is no point to it. You can search from the url bar itself. The only reason to use it is if you want to search a different search engine. In which case they should copy opera and do key letter searching. Where you can type b search term and search bing. w search term and search wiki etc.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you said, but you can currently do this in Chrome.

Options -> Manage (searches) -> double click an existing search or add a new one -> set Keyword to a single letter.

I think he wants that functionality in FF.

Firefox also has keyword search (i.e. type in "wp something" and go to the wikipedia page for "something") - you just have to define a keyword for an existing bookmark, and then place %s in the URL where you'd like the search term to appear.

For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/%s

I believe the default installation comes with a handful of these Bookmark "Shortcuts".

In Firefox you can also right-click on a form field and choose "Add a keyword for this search..."

Although I did mean FF I didn't realize chrome had this yet. And they do it much clearer then Opera did. I really like the way that it auto changes to tell you that you are about to search yahoo, etc.

Ooh, I hate that behaviour. I'd rather the address field just work with previously-typed URLs the way it used to. Or at least that it made some small effort to use previously-typed URLs once in a while. As a developer, it used to be easy to visit/revisit a handful of pages without having to create a bunch of bookmarks I'd only wind up deleting at the end of the day. Since the address bar became "awesome", bookmarking became necessary. (At least Chrome uses typed URLs in preference to either bookmarks or search. Now if they'd allow API access to things like disabling JavaScript and displaying background images...)

There are a few things this heat-map is not showing that are pretty important and may negatively affect their redesign decisions.

1) Add-Ons. If we have add-ons that make other areas of the browser clickable, and those areas are highly used by a high number of add-on users, then that too may need to be taken into consideration on the redesign. Example: a downloads bar at the bottom of the page, or maybe firebug.

2) Visuals that may or may not be turned on. For example, the X on each of the tabs. I close out tabs a lot, and that little X I have next to each tab is probably used more than any other button.

3) Custom settings. I guess this doesn't matter as much, but I, for example, have my settings in such a way that more tabs display across the top than the default install, so I never use that annoying down arrow on the right.

Looks like they can remove those copy and paste buttons from the default layout.

I think the right scroll bar is difficult to use in most browsers without a maximized window. There needs to be a better UI for vertical scrolling, for example grow the right bar as your mouse moves closer so there is more surface area to drag.

Yikes, seems like few people use the RSS icon to subscribe. I'd better an "RSS Subscribe" link to my website.

I suspect most people don't use RSS at all.

I wonder what % of users actually use RSS, might just be that it is a very low percentage of Firefox users so the button is not used very often.

Chrome doesn't even have an RSS icon at all!

It really frustrates me that it doesn't.

Ask, and ye shall receive:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn...

It's even a product of Google themselves.

well 1/2 receive you still have to send it to something such as the forever slow google reader.

Its not built into chrome like it should be.

It's not built in, but saying it "should be" is a strong statement, in my mind.

A convenience item, certainly, but a requirement? RSS has a bit of a marketing problem to resolve before I'd say it absolutely must be there.

(Also, you don't have to use Google Reader; it actually produces a reasonable in-browser rendering of an RSS feed, if you click the icon in the URL bar.)

Strong disagree. Chrome is the only major browser that doesn't have native support for RSS. Even Internet Explorer does! Hell, it doesn't even understand RSS -- it simply shows the raw XML source.

Because of this, many blogs have links to their RSS/Atom feed with a fat "Subscribe" logo -- on Chrome, when you click that, you get a massive page of unparsed XML.

Whether a given grandma knows what RSS is or not is beside the point, it's lame of Google not to follow a defacto standard that many sites rely upon when there is no technical reason not to.

It seems weird the Chrome works so hard to integrate PDF / Flash / etc. so the users don't have to think about it and really push the envelope with their browser... yet they refuse to even honor RSS.

I do think it should be. But then again thats another reason i stick to opera. I don't want to load up another program to read my rss.

I also think it makes it a whole lot less technical when its built in to the browser. I could have no idea what an rss feed is but since opera tells me that I can subscribe, I subscribe and then it opens them to be read. I then remember the orange icon and know how it works on any site.

Thats a lot easier then taking the feed coping the url into a feed reader and having to open that every day to read my feeds.

I installed an extension so that it did :)

Most every non-technical user has no idea what rss is.

I guess the horizontal scroll bar being much higher on linux means a lot of the linux users in the survey were using netbooks.

I wonder what the difference between "Vertical Scrollbar" and "Scroll Vertical Bar" is (on the OS-specific filter views).

More support for pg's point that your biggest enemy is the back button!

Some of the more interesting data is when beginner and advanced use of a feature is similar, but intermediate use is way different. Scroll vertical up is 16.7 and 14.4 for beginners and advanced users, but 54.9 for intermediate users. So beginners don't scroll up and advanced users use the page-up key? Reload is similar, beginners don't reload as much as intermediate users and advanced users use F5.

Harder to explain is why location bar clicking goes down once users become intermediate, and then goes back up when they become advanced users.

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