14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 3.6 isn't even out the door and the Mozilla folks are already looking well ahead not only to 3.7 but to 4.0 as well. One area the team is focusing on in particular is the user interface which is starting to look a little long in the tooth compared to Google Chrome and even Internet Explorer. Luckily, things are beginning to move ahead and the upcoming releases are starting to look very interesting from a design point of view. And, since this is an open-source project after all, Mozilla is asking for your help with one particular problem, designing a new "Home tab."
"In the upcoming releases of Firefox, we’ll move the Home button to be a 'Home tab' instead. We will keep the existing functionality where you can display a web page of your choice — or disable it altogether — but since we’re moving this page to live in Firefox instead of on the web, there are some interesting opportunities," the announcement reads.
Traditionally, the home button would load the page the user has selected as his "home page." Firefox is currently using this to link to a custom Google search page though, on Linux for example, it may be a help page or anything else the distribution might decide. A couple of years back Opera, the perennial underdog in the browser market introduced a great new concept, the "Speed dial" which featured thumbnail views of the user's preferred web sites, replacing the homepage for most people, though a static page could still be used.
Google took it one step further with Chrome, by featuring thumbnails of the most visited pages, the bookmarks bar and your recent history. Firefox has been left out for now, but it's looking to not only catch up but actually skip a step and move ahead of the pack with some interesting new functionality.
Mozilla wants to take advantage of the fact that the new "Home tab" will be a local page with access to a lot more information than regular ones, like bookmarks, history etc. So, it's asking people to go wild with ideas, come up with innovative ways of making use of the new possibilities and submit them for the Winter ‘09 Design Challenge. In the end the new "Home tab" may end up just a Google Chrome rip off or it may be a chance for Firefox to take the lead again.
