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Firefox Alpha 5 arrived last Friday bringing with it the first looks at Places, the new bookmark management system. But the Firefox team has a number of additional UI tweaks up their sleeve and some of them look quite slick.
Alex Faaborg who's one of the interface designers for Firefox 3 recently posted an overview and some screenshots of what the changes might look like (screenshots after the jump).
None of these are guaranteed to end up in Firefox 3, they're merely a glimpse of what *might* end up in the final version. Also, Faaborg cautions that the screenshots below may not be what the final versions actually look like, but they do provide a rough sketch of possible implementations.
The features Faaborg outlines include:
>* Places bookmark management system which includes support for:
* Web Page Tagging
* Smart Folders
* Saved searches
* Content Handling. Firefox currently has different dialog boxes for dealing with content depending on if it has a MIME type, is a protocol, is being delivered through RSS, or is an application being downloaded. The user will have a consistent UI for selecting the actions they would like associated with content, regardless of if the content is a file being download or is a microformat embedded in a Web page.
* Microformat Detection.
* Changes to the Location Bar. We are considering removing the favicon from the location bar, and changing the location bar so that everything except "Public Suffix + 2" is greyed out. This will prevent malicious sites from placing visual cues in the location bar (like using a lock as a favicon), and the change in text color will help users identify the web site domain.
* Private Browsing. Put Firefox into a temporary state where no information about the user's browsing session is stored locally
The two standout features in my opinion are the tagging capabilities in the bookmark manager and the microformats detection, but there's also a few nice little features that will smooth over certain aspects of the interface.
One of the things I really like in the screenshots below is the bookmark feedback window hanging off the URL bar, particularly the ability to delete the bookmark without opening the manager. Because CRTL-D (default keystroke for a new bookmark) is right next to CRTL-S and I'm a bit clumsy with the keyboard I frequently end up bookmarking things I meant to save.
It's not an earth shattering feature, but it's a great example of well-thought-out interface design (provided it actually works the way I'm assuming from the screenshot).
Another subtle, but potentially very useful feature is the highlighted primary site in the URL bar. So long as the whole URL bar is still easily selectable, the proposed feature would make it easier to actually see what site you're on.
Other proposed features that thus far don't have UI mockups include:
>* Offline Web applications
* Improvements to the password manager
* A graphical keyboard-based UI similar to Quicksilver and Enso for searching the Web, bookmarking and tagging pages, navigating recent history, and switching between tabs. Note: this feature isn't in the Firefox 3 PRD, and it will probably be released as an experimental extension through Mozilla Labs before it gets considered for inclusion into Firefox.
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