14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has published a set of mockups for Firefox's upcoming revamped UI, which provides a sneak peek into its new Activity Stream feature, a fresh New Tab Page UI, and a Social Sharing feature to enhance the already built-in Pocket integration.
Available via the Foundation's Invision channel, the mockups come accompanied by explanations that reveal how they're supposed to work.
Activity Stream (Timeline)
The much-awaited Activity Stream feature unifies the History, Bookmarks, Downloads, and Tabs interfaces to provide an overall overview of past viewed content.
While the feature seems highly useful on paper, Mozilla should take great care not to alienate some of its users, like Chrome did last year, when it had to bring back its old Bookmarks Manager after their "revamped" interface got everyone angry at the fact that they had no "list view."
Because Chrome was showing all past sites as big square blocks, users had to do a lot of scrolling just to view a small fraction of their bookmarks, something that many hated, and option to use extensions that altered this page, transforming it into its previous state.
From Mozilla's mockup, we don't see a list view, so let's hope that by the time the feature comes to Firefox, users that aren't interested in a flashy UI that shows them only "important" sites, will also be able to select to view their past history as a list.
Who knows, maybe this feature is hidden under the "Show Highlights" dropdown at the top of the mockup. Let's hope so.
New Tab Page
The new tab page will also get a facelift. Just by looking at the mockup, things aren't that different. The new tab page keeps the same look & feel, but the page is just a little bit more crowded than it is now.
In current versions, by default, Firefox shows a search field and a grid of tab panels called "Top Sites." In upcoming versions, Mozilla plans to add a few more things.
These new elements are derived from the Activity Stream feature, being a "Spotlight" section where the browser lists some of the most accessed pages in the past 48 hours, but also a "Top Activity" section. This latter displays a short summary of the "Activity Stream," but in a much smaller and compacted format.
Social Share
Firefox's Pocket integration was hated from the moment the Foundation introduced it, mainly because most people thought it did not fit in Mozilla's general philosophy.
While some users loved it, Mozilla has now understood that those users didn't actually love the Pocket service, but the fact that they had a super simple method of sharing or saving content.
"Our user research shows that people repeatedly share and return to content in the browser. We should embrace this by creating a flexible save and share toolbar," the Mozilla team explains. "It should allow the user to share and save to the most common services such as Facebook or Pocket."
While the Activity Stream may look like a questionable idea, the New Tab Page may be too cluttered for some people, the new, expanded Social Sharing controls seem quite useful.
Many people don't like to use social sharing buttons embedded on sites mainly because they provide minimal editing options, and sometimes prepend or append content you didn't want to share in the first place. For these people, having a social sharing utility built right into Firefox's native UI may be quite useful.
Additionally, switching between tabs just to share something on Twitter may get annoying after a while. If you're using plugins, then these may sometimes cause crashes, or you're trusting their developer with all your social media habits, hoping that he won't abuse this right. But some do abuse it, so the safest bet is to hope Mozilla gets this social sharing feature right.
