14 DAY TRIAL // During a design presentation, Mozilla revealed its ambitious goal of putting a browser on the iPad. Not Firefox, since it can't have Gecko in the APp Store, but a brand new browser, the first since Firefox. But it also revealed a couple of other things it's working on.
Mozilla has the inventor of the browser search box working for it, coming from Opera, in the team that is doing advanced usability research.
One of the things it's been working on is improving the search box, by removing it completely. Firefox is the last browser to have a search box in the UI, Chrome never had one and all other major browsers are dropping it.
Firefox will do the same, but Mozilla is thinking about going further than the other browsers have by giving users choice.
The problem with the search box is that the vast majority of people just use it with one search engine, the one they have on by default, generally Google.
Mozilla found that only about 17 percent of users ever clicked on the drop-down search engine selection menu in the search box. Of those 17 percent, only about half actually chose a different search engine, ever.
Even the ones that do use the feature for more search engines are annoyed by the functionality. The reality is that people do use one search engine all the time and a few others on occasion, for specialized searches.
But if they switch to one of these rarely used search engines, it will remain selected until they change back to their main one, so they'll more often than not do a search on an engine they didn't want to.
Mozilla figured out how to get rid of the problem entirely by switching things around. Now, with the search box, people first refine (i.e. the choose the engine they want) and then search. With Search Tabs, a new concept Mozilla is working on, it's the other way around.
Users first search, in the unified address bar, and then pick the search engine they want to use via a panel on the left. The result, Mozilla found in testing, is that people start using more search engines more often simply because it's more obvious to them that there are options and they're only one click away.
It seems like a minor change, but it has a huge effect in practice. People will use more search engines that can only be a good thing for the search market. It also enables smaller competitors to get a lot more attention and a lot more searches, if they convince users to add them it their search panel.
For now, the feature is experimental, but it's almost guaranteed that it will end up in Firefox, sooner rather than later. What's more, Mozilla boasts that, a rare thing recently, this will be Firefox taking the lead by adding something that other browsers don't have and, even better, won't implement. This is not something you're going to see in Chrome or IE any time soon.