14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla has been running a competition asking the community to come up with ideas on how the new Firefox 4 home tab should look like and function. Quite a number of submissions came in, but, after two rounds of voting, Mozilla is ready to announce the winner of the "People's Choice Award."
"After two rounds of voting and nearly 3,000 votes, you have decided and bestowed the People’s Choice Award in the Home Tab Design Challenge to Yatrik Solanki," Mozilla announced. "Yatrik describes his concept as 'Identities, a website launcher, browsing sessions, and a task-oriented ultrasmart search box define my concept. And it’s cool!'," the announcement also read.
The winning design centers on four main elements geared towards giving the user a place to start, but not necessarily where to consume the information too. There's a universal search box with added functionality, inspired by Ubiquity, an Identities section, a quick launch area and, finally, a sessions section.
It's nothing revolutionary at face value, most submissions centered around some sort of favorites or most used websites launched after the concept was popularized by Opera and, later, by Google. However, there are a few subtle details that probably helped it stand out and get the best votes from the users. For example, when adding a new site to the launcher, Firefox will detect if the site has an account associated with it, Facebook for example, and asks the user to log in at that point.
This account could also be added to the 'Identity' section, which aims to aggregate all your different accounts online to make them easier to manage. The sessions feature is also interesting, as it enables the user to start their browsing with a predefined set of websites opened at once depending on the task at hand, for example reading the news versus getting some work done.
Of course, winning the challenge doesn't guarantee that your design, or even parts of it, will get implemented when Firefox 4 ships. And there is still the matter of Mozilla's own appointed jury picking their favorite designs or ideas. Still, when Firefox 4 does arrive, there's a pretty good chance that the Home Tab will have at least some of the features or concepts from this winning design.
