6 ms·

To help the redesign of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla just released a heatmap

45 points by bigstorm 16y ago

TorKlingberg 16y ago
Looking at this reminds me of the "Booksmarks Toolbar". Is there anyone that doesn't remove it? Why is so much screen space wasted for little reason?
- dpcan 16y ago
  I would be completely lost without my Bookmarks Toolbar at the top. Sometimes I wish it could be two rows. Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.
  - CoryMathews 16y ago
    Its called speed dial... Opera has had it for years then Chrome and Safari copied it.
    - jasonlotito 16y ago
      Speed dial is less useful when it doesn't consider context.
      - CoryMathews 16y ago
        Care to expand? I do not completely follow how it would help. possibly a use case?
        jasonlotito 16y ago
        Sure. I use multiple browsers each day for various reasons. It's hard enough keeping bookmarks synced. Top site pages are also largely useless in that they only keep the most visited pages. I have numerous work pages I visit often that get placed at the top. Numerous news pages, numerous blogs. In each case, I'd rather have some form of context. For example, I don't need the dial telling me about HN, Reddit, ArsTech, and other tech news sites individually. At the very least, I'd like to just select news sites, and have the browser deal with it intelligently. The dial is useful, don't get me wrong. But it's far shy of a replacement for bookmarks. I realize I also might be the exception to the rule. =)
  - mitjak 16y ago
    I'm agreeing with Cory on this one: the bookmarks bar should be made obsolete, or at least be hidden by default. Browsers, especially FF, but including Safari and Chrome, allow you to easily search bookmarks from the location bar by title of the page or URL. Aside from that, Chrome offers you the top pages tab page + if the bookmarks bar is hidden, it displays the Bookmarks bar as part of the new tabs page. I'd love to see the statistics for this, but if most people, like me, only click items on the bookmarks bar upon opening a new tab, then, indeed, there is no sense in keeping it up in the toolbar by default.
    - bonaldi 16y ago
      Only showing the bookmarks bar after opening a new tab is much less efficient for my case: I have a number of bookmarks that I want to open in tabs, but it's a varying subset of the toolbar set. To do it I now I just command-click all the bookmarks I want opened, and they open in background tabs. To do it with a hidden bookmarks bar I'd need to open a new tab first, then click.
    - nocman 16y ago
      Perhaps I'm weird (I've been accused of that before :-D), but I organize bookmarks into folders on the bookmarks toolbar (the folder is some topic which groups the links together for me according to some connection between them that is logical to me). For most bookmarks, two clicks and I'm in (even for those URLs I only use once every month or two). Even with the location bar searching on every keystroke, I still think I'd lose efficiency if the bookmarks bar went away. Plus the location-bar-based search doesn't help me if I know what general 'topic' a link fits into, but I can't remember anything about the site name or URL. Location bar auto-searching is nice, but I don't think it solves every bookmark-searching scenario.
  - oziumjinx 16y ago
    Multirow toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/
  - capedape 16y ago
    I agree, if I don't have a visual reference in front of me I forget some of the many sites that are important for me to get to. You can get three rows of books marks up top: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-row-bookmarks-toolbar-to-firefox/ http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-... I like this with a theme that minimizes the icons and text of the bookmarks. It hardly wastes any space this way.
- caryme 16y ago
  These days when so many people have widescreen laptops, I wonder why things like the bookmarks toolbar don't default to docking to the left or right side. I can't afford to give up space at the top or bottom of my screen, but my left and right sides have room.
  - TorKlingberg 16y ago
    I think it is because it is harder to fit text on a vertical bar. It has to be rather wide to fit a couple of words horizontally, and even then the text will often get cut off. The text could be rotated to read vertically, but that is hard to read.
  - saint-loup 16y ago
    One reason is perhaps it's much simpler to have only horizontal bars. With horizontal and vertical bars, an interface tends to look really messy — just look at Opera.
    - CoryMathews 16y ago
      The side bar is really only used by a "super" user. Also you can move the tabs and everything to the left, having no bars on the top if you so chose to.
- Qz 16y ago
  No need for it to waste space - just drag it up next to the File/Edit/Etc menu. I use the toolbar in place of the bookmarks menu itself, since I get to organize it exactly how I want it, and with quicker access/better categorization.
- inferno0069 16y ago
  I wonder the same thing about the search box. I personally drag all the navigation buttons and address/awesome bar up into my menu bar and eliminate the other default toolbars. (File|Edit|...|back|forward|reload|stop|awesomebar|adblockplus)
- ugh 16y ago
  The bookmarks toolbar is my place for quickly dragging in stuff I might want to revisit later. For those times when the site doesn’t have a RSS feed or just isn’t interesting enough to subscribe to. Maybe some article I definitely want to read but just don’t have the time to read right now. I don’t have to worry about deleting things (old stuff just gracefully disappears to the right but is still searchable and in approximate chronological order – my bar has 201 bookmarks at the moment) and some custom ordering is possible (if something is super important I will just not put any stuff to the left of it which means it will stay where it is and not disappear). Sure, bookmarks are searchable through the address bar but that means the approximate chronological structure gets lost. The bookmarks bar has also a reminder function. Whatever I put there I can forget because I won’t have to search for it. It will just be there. A quick glance whenever I open a window is enough to know whether there is something I absolutely wanted to check out again. The bookmarks bar is tremendously helpful for me and I couldn’t live without it.
  - wtallis 16y ago
    I find that if there's something I'll want to read later in the day, I just leave it open in a tab, and if it's something that I'll want to read some other day, I just star it, and it will appear in the "recently bookmarked" menu. The idea of using the bookmarks bar as a shelf is kind of interesting, but I think I'd still rather have the screen space.
    - ugh 16y ago
      I’m not so sure, actually, what should be the default. It’s not a easy question. I know many people who don’t use the bookmarks bar and for them it’s definitely a waste of space. It might just be a sensible to default to not display it. Those who need it and use it might also be those who (like me) know how to show and hide it. Re: Tabs. I like the bookmarks bar because it is a lot more persistent. After a long day with a lot of open tabs it is very easy for me to accidentally close a tab I actually wanted to read or even needed to read during my regular tab cleanups. That’s why really important stuff gets promoted to the bookmarks bar.
  - brown9-2 16y ago
- c1sc0 16y ago
  Um, I like my Bookmarklets, ok? I'd be lost without the delicious bookmarklet.
- kmfrk 16y ago
  Bookmark toolbars are a thing of the past; Bookmarklet toolbars aren't. :) I hide my toolbar in Opera by defeault, but I enable it when I want to use Readability or Instapaper. Edit: Didn't see c1sc0's reply.
moxiemk1 16y ago
Looks like they can remove those copy and paste buttons from the default layout.
dpcan 16y ago
There are a few things this heat-map is not showing that are pretty important and may negatively affect their redesign decisions. 1) Add-Ons. If we have add-ons that make other areas of the browser clickable, and those areas are highly used by a high number of add-on users, then that too may need to be taken into consideration on the redesign. Example: a downloads bar at the bottom of the page, or maybe firebug. 2) Visuals that may or may not be turned on. For example, the X on each of the tabs. I close out tabs a lot, and that little X I have next to each tab is probably used more than any other button. 3) Custom settings. I guess this doesn't matter as much, but I, for example, have my settings in such a way that more tabs display across the top than the default install, so I never use that annoying down arrow on the right.
jeb 16y ago
Yikes, seems like few people use the RSS icon to subscribe. I'd better an "RSS Subscribe" link to my website.
- jra101 16y ago
  I wonder what % of users actually use RSS, might just be that it is a very low percentage of Firefox users so the button is not used very often.
- TorKlingberg 16y ago
  I suspect most people don't use RSS at all.
- jeff18 16y ago
  Chrome doesn't even have an RSS icon at all!
  - Pheter 16y ago
    It really frustrates me that it doesn't.
    - logic 16y ago
      Ask, and ye shall receive: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn... It's even a product of Google themselves.
      - CoryMathews 16y ago
        well 1/2 receive you still have to send it to something such as the forever slow google reader. Its not built into chrome like it should be.
        logic 16y ago
        It's not built in, but saying it "should be" is a strong statement, in my mind. A convenience item, certainly, but a requirement? RSS has a bit of a marketing problem to resolve before I'd say it absolutely must be there. (Also, you don't have to use Google Reader; it actually produces a reasonable in-browser rendering of an RSS feed, if you click the icon in the URL bar.)
cschep 16y ago
Do "back button" clicks only mean the physical (err. how else do you say this?) clicking off the button or does hitting the back button on my mouse trigger this? I use back a TON, but I can't remember the last time I clicked a back button.
- Hovertruck 16y ago
  Probably not, since what they're looking for is the usefulness of the individual pieces of the UI itself.
- thorax 16y ago
  My default back behavior is right-click, click Back (since I use many different machines where I can't change a mouse button). This has just become a default gesture for me.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  I took the back button of a long time ago. All I have is refresh and the url bar. I use my mouse buttons along with the mouse gestures addon to navigate back and forward.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    I tried taking the back button off, but it turns out I really need it: not to click, but as a status indicator. Because I use tabs, the back button shows me at a glance whether or not I'm in the middle of a stack, or if I opened a link from a new tab, etc.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- superkarn 16y ago
  I use it to go back multiple pages at a time via the drop down list.
weixiyen 16y ago
I think the right scroll bar is difficult to use in most browsers without a maximized window. There needs to be a better UI for vertical scrolling, for example grow the right bar as your mouse moves closer so there is more surface area to drag.
prosa 16y ago
More support for pg's point that your biggest enemy is the back button!
barrkel 16y ago
I wonder what the difference between "Vertical Scrollbar" and "Scroll Vertical Bar" is (on the OS-specific filter views).
bradgessler 16y ago
It looks like Chrome was on the right track by ditching the "Search" field off to the right.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  There really is no point to it. You can search from the url bar itself. The only reason to use it is if you want to search a different search engine. In which case they should copy opera and do key letter searching. Where you can type b search term and search bing. w search term and search wiki etc.
  - stan_rogers 16y ago
    Ooh, I hate that behaviour. I'd rather the address field just work with previously-typed URLs the way it used to. Or at least that it made some small effort to use previously-typed URLs once in a while. As a developer, it used to be easy to visit/revisit a handful of pages without having to create a bunch of bookmarks I'd only wind up deleting at the end of the day. Since the address bar became "awesome", bookmarking became necessary. (At least Chrome uses typed URLs in preference to either bookmarks or search. Now if they'd allow API access to things like disabling JavaScript and displaying background images...)
  - moskie 16y ago
    Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you said, but you can currently do this in Chrome. Options -> Manage (searches) -> double click an existing search or add a new one -> set Keyword to a single letter.
    - stanleydrew 16y ago
      I think he wants that functionality in FF.
      - CoryMathews 16y ago
        Although I did mean FF I didn't realize chrome had this yet. And they do it much clearer then Opera did. I really like the way that it auto changes to tell you that you are about to search yahoo, etc.
robryan 16y ago
I guess the horizontal scroll bar being much higher on linux means a lot of the linux users in the survey were using netbooks.
alsomike 16y ago
Some of the more interesting data is when beginner and advanced use of a feature is similar, but intermediate use is way different. Scroll vertical up is 16.7 and 14.4 for beginners and advanced users, but 54.9 for intermediate users. So beginners don't scroll up and advanced users use the page-up key? Reload is similar, beginners don't reload as much as intermediate users and advanced users use F5. Harder to explain is why location bar clicking goes down once users become intermediate, and then goes back up when they become advanced users.

45 points by bigstorm 16y ago

Looking at this reminds me of the "Booksmarks Toolbar". Is there anyone that doesn't remove it? Why is so much screen space wasted for little reason?

dpcan 16y ago
I would be completely lost without my Bookmarks Toolbar at the top. Sometimes I wish it could be two rows. Every one of my top pages is there that I frequent. I also have my social bookmarking links in there for saving pages for later. I have my main folders there with my other Work/News/Research links in them for quick reference too.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  Its called speed dial... Opera has had it for years then Chrome and Safari copied it.
  - jasonlotito 16y ago
    Speed dial is less useful when it doesn't consider context.
    - CoryMathews 16y ago
      Care to expand? I do not completely follow how it would help. possibly a use case?
      - jasonlotito 16y ago
        Sure. I use multiple browsers each day for various reasons. It's hard enough keeping bookmarks synced. Top site pages are also largely useless in that they only keep the most visited pages. I have numerous work pages I visit often that get placed at the top. Numerous news pages, numerous blogs. In each case, I'd rather have some form of context. For example, I don't need the dial telling me about HN, Reddit, ArsTech, and other tech news sites individually. At the very least, I'd like to just select news sites, and have the browser deal with it intelligently. The dial is useful, don't get me wrong. But it's far shy of a replacement for bookmarks. I realize I also might be the exception to the rule. =)
- mitjak 16y ago
  I'm agreeing with Cory on this one: the bookmarks bar should be made obsolete, or at least be hidden by default. Browsers, especially FF, but including Safari and Chrome, allow you to easily search bookmarks from the location bar by title of the page or URL. Aside from that, Chrome offers you the top pages tab page + if the bookmarks bar is hidden, it displays the Bookmarks bar as part of the new tabs page. I'd love to see the statistics for this, but if most people, like me, only click items on the bookmarks bar upon opening a new tab, then, indeed, there is no sense in keeping it up in the toolbar by default.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    Only showing the bookmarks bar after opening a new tab is much less efficient for my case: I have a number of bookmarks that I want to open in tabs, but it's a varying subset of the toolbar set. To do it I now I just command-click all the bookmarks I want opened, and they open in background tabs. To do it with a hidden bookmarks bar I'd need to open a new tab first, then click.
  - nocman 16y ago
    Perhaps I'm weird (I've been accused of that before :-D), but I organize bookmarks into folders on the bookmarks toolbar (the folder is some topic which groups the links together for me according to some connection between them that is logical to me). For most bookmarks, two clicks and I'm in (even for those URLs I only use once every month or two). Even with the location bar searching on every keystroke, I still think I'd lose efficiency if the bookmarks bar went away. Plus the location-bar-based search doesn't help me if I know what general 'topic' a link fits into, but I can't remember anything about the site name or URL. Location bar auto-searching is nice, but I don't think it solves every bookmark-searching scenario.
- oziumjinx 16y ago
  Multirow toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/
- capedape 16y ago
  I agree, if I don't have a visual reference in front of me I forget some of the many sites that are important for me to get to. You can get three rows of books marks up top: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-row-bookmarks-toolbar-to-firefox/ http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13923/add-a-scrollable-multi-... I like this with a theme that minimizes the icons and text of the bookmarks. It hardly wastes any space this way.
caryme 16y ago
These days when so many people have widescreen laptops, I wonder why things like the bookmarks toolbar don't default to docking to the left or right side. I can't afford to give up space at the top or bottom of my screen, but my left and right sides have room.
- TorKlingberg 16y ago
  I think it is because it is harder to fit text on a vertical bar. It has to be rather wide to fit a couple of words horizontally, and even then the text will often get cut off. The text could be rotated to read vertically, but that is hard to read.
- saint-loup 16y ago
  One reason is perhaps it's much simpler to have only horizontal bars. With horizontal and vertical bars, an interface tends to look really messy — just look at Opera.
  - CoryMathews 16y ago
    The side bar is really only used by a "super" user. Also you can move the tabs and everything to the left, having no bars on the top if you so chose to.
Qz 16y ago
No need for it to waste space - just drag it up next to the File/Edit/Etc menu. I use the toolbar in place of the bookmarks menu itself, since I get to organize it exactly how I want it, and with quicker access/better categorization.
inferno0069 16y ago
I wonder the same thing about the search box. I personally drag all the navigation buttons and address/awesome bar up into my menu bar and eliminate the other default toolbars. (File|Edit|...|back|forward|reload|stop|awesomebar|adblockplus)
ugh 16y ago
The bookmarks toolbar is my place for quickly dragging in stuff I might want to revisit later. For those times when the site doesn’t have a RSS feed or just isn’t interesting enough to subscribe to. Maybe some article I definitely want to read but just don’t have the time to read right now. I don’t have to worry about deleting things (old stuff just gracefully disappears to the right but is still searchable and in approximate chronological order – my bar has 201 bookmarks at the moment) and some custom ordering is possible (if something is super important I will just not put any stuff to the left of it which means it will stay where it is and not disappear). Sure, bookmarks are searchable through the address bar but that means the approximate chronological structure gets lost. The bookmarks bar has also a reminder function. Whatever I put there I can forget because I won’t have to search for it. It will just be there. A quick glance whenever I open a window is enough to know whether there is something I absolutely wanted to check out again. The bookmarks bar is tremendously helpful for me and I couldn’t live without it.
- wtallis 16y ago
  I find that if there's something I'll want to read later in the day, I just leave it open in a tab, and if it's something that I'll want to read some other day, I just star it, and it will appear in the "recently bookmarked" menu. The idea of using the bookmarks bar as a shelf is kind of interesting, but I think I'd still rather have the screen space.
  - ugh 16y ago
    I’m not so sure, actually, what should be the default. It’s not a easy question. I know many people who don’t use the bookmarks bar and for them it’s definitely a waste of space. It might just be a sensible to default to not display it. Those who need it and use it might also be those who (like me) know how to show and hide it. Re: Tabs. I like the bookmarks bar because it is a lot more persistent. After a long day with a lot of open tabs it is very easy for me to accidentally close a tab I actually wanted to read or even needed to read during my regular tab cleanups. That’s why really important stuff gets promoted to the bookmarks bar.
- brown9-2 16y ago
c1sc0 16y ago
Um, I like my Bookmarklets, ok? I'd be lost without the delicious bookmarklet.
kmfrk 16y ago
Bookmark toolbars are a thing of the past; Bookmarklet toolbars aren't. :) I hide my toolbar in Opera by defeault, but I enable it when I want to use Readability or Instapaper. Edit: Didn't see c1sc0's reply.

moxiemk1 16y ago

Looks like they can remove those copy and paste buttons from the default layout.

dpcan 16y ago

There are a few things this heat-map is not showing that are pretty important and may negatively affect their redesign decisions. 1) Add-Ons. If we have add-ons that make other areas of the browser clickable, and those areas are highly used by a high number of add-on users, then that too may need to be taken into consideration on the redesign. Example: a downloads bar at the bottom of the page, or maybe firebug. 2) Visuals that may or may not be turned on. For example, the X on each of the tabs. I close out tabs a lot, and that little X I have next to each tab is probably used more than any other button. 3) Custom settings. I guess this doesn't matter as much, but I, for example, have my settings in such a way that more tabs display across the top than the default install, so I never use that annoying down arrow on the right.

jeb 16y ago

Yikes, seems like few people use the RSS icon to subscribe. I'd better an "RSS Subscribe" link to my website.

jra101 16y ago
I wonder what % of users actually use RSS, might just be that it is a very low percentage of Firefox users so the button is not used very often.
TorKlingberg 16y ago
I suspect most people don't use RSS at all.
jeff18 16y ago
Chrome doesn't even have an RSS icon at all!
- Pheter 16y ago
  It really frustrates me that it doesn't.
  - logic 16y ago
    Ask, and ye shall receive: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn... It's even a product of Google themselves.
    - CoryMathews 16y ago
      well 1/2 receive you still have to send it to something such as the forever slow google reader. Its not built into chrome like it should be.
      - logic 16y ago
        It's not built in, but saying it "should be" is a strong statement, in my mind. A convenience item, certainly, but a requirement? RSS has a bit of a marketing problem to resolve before I'd say it absolutely must be there. (Also, you don't have to use Google Reader; it actually produces a reasonable in-browser rendering of an RSS feed, if you click the icon in the URL bar.)

cschep 16y ago

Do "back button" clicks only mean the physical (err. how else do you say this?) clicking off the button or does hitting the back button on my mouse trigger this? I use back a TON, but I can't remember the last time I clicked a back button.

Hovertruck 16y ago
Probably not, since what they're looking for is the usefulness of the individual pieces of the UI itself.
thorax 16y ago
My default back behavior is right-click, click Back (since I use many different machines where I can't change a mouse button). This has just become a default gesture for me.
CoryMathews 16y ago
I took the back button of a long time ago. All I have is refresh and the url bar. I use my mouse buttons along with the mouse gestures addon to navigate back and forward.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  I tried taking the back button off, but it turns out I really need it: not to click, but as a status indicator. Because I use tabs, the back button shows me at a glance whether or not I'm in the middle of a stack, or if I opened a link from a new tab, etc.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
superkarn 16y ago
I use it to go back multiple pages at a time via the drop down list.

weixiyen 16y ago

I think the right scroll bar is difficult to use in most browsers without a maximized window. There needs to be a better UI for vertical scrolling, for example grow the right bar as your mouse moves closer so there is more surface area to drag.

prosa 16y ago

More support for pg's point that your biggest enemy is the back button!

barrkel 16y ago

I wonder what the difference between "Vertical Scrollbar" and "Scroll Vertical Bar" is (on the OS-specific filter views).

bradgessler 16y ago

It looks like Chrome was on the right track by ditching the "Search" field off to the right.

CoryMathews 16y ago
There really is no point to it. You can search from the url bar itself. The only reason to use it is if you want to search a different search engine. In which case they should copy opera and do key letter searching. Where you can type b search term and search bing. w search term and search wiki etc.
- stan_rogers 16y ago
  Ooh, I hate that behaviour. I'd rather the address field just work with previously-typed URLs the way it used to. Or at least that it made some small effort to use previously-typed URLs once in a while. As a developer, it used to be easy to visit/revisit a handful of pages without having to create a bunch of bookmarks I'd only wind up deleting at the end of the day. Since the address bar became "awesome", bookmarking became necessary. (At least Chrome uses typed URLs in preference to either bookmarks or search. Now if they'd allow API access to things like disabling JavaScript and displaying background images...)
- moskie 16y ago
  Maybe I'm misinterpreting what you said, but you can currently do this in Chrome. Options -> Manage (searches) -> double click an existing search or add a new one -> set Keyword to a single letter.
  - stanleydrew 16y ago
    I think he wants that functionality in FF.
    - CoryMathews 16y ago
      Although I did mean FF I didn't realize chrome had this yet. And they do it much clearer then Opera did. I really like the way that it auto changes to tell you that you are about to search yahoo, etc.

robryan 16y ago

I guess the horizontal scroll bar being much higher on linux means a lot of the linux users in the survey were using netbooks.

alsomike 16y ago

Some of the more interesting data is when beginner and advanced use of a feature is similar, but intermediate use is way different. Scroll vertical up is 16.7 and 14.4 for beginners and advanced users, but 54.9 for intermediate users. So beginners don't scroll up and advanced users use the page-up key? Reload is similar, beginners don't reload as much as intermediate users and advanced users use F5. Harder to explain is why location bar clicking goes down once users become intermediate, and then goes back up when they become advanced users.