Egotism

Fennec 1.1 – Portrait Browsing

Madhava — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:25:02 +0000

Firefox 1.1 on Maemo lets you browse with your phone in a portrait orientation as well as landscape.

The browser will switch orientations automatically as you reposition the phone, as you would expect. Some browser screens are the same, only taller; others change their layout slightly to better fit the screen on which they find themselves, such as the tools screens.

If you’d like to lock the screen orientation – say you’re lying down but want to read in portrait:

you can use the standard Maemo screen orientation lock key-combination to do so: Ctrl-Shift-O.

Fennec 1.1 – Form Autocomplete

Madhava — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:23:36 +0000

Firefox tries everywhere it can to minimize the amount you have to type; this is especially true on mobile devices, where typing is usually so much harder than on a full-scale keyboard. In Firefox 1.1 on mobile devices like the N900, we’ve added a finger-friendly version of something you’re used to on the desktop: form field autocompletion. Using an algorithm similar to the one that powers the awesome bar, Firefox will suggest entries appropriate for the form field you’re based on what you’ve entered before. For forms you use a lot – checking into a flight, entering your address – a single tap can replace a lot of messing around with a keyboard.

One twist that makes this even more helpful is that the Weave Browser Sync add-on will now synchronize form autocomplete data, with the result that Firefox on your mobile can help you complete forms that you’ve only ever worked with on your desktop computer before. With sync, you don’t need to wear-in Firefox on your mobile – it can provide as much help as Firefox on your desktop system already does.

Fennec 1.1 – n900 zoom buttons

Madhava — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:35:03 +0000

One of the most requested features after we released Firefox on Maemo (Fennec) 1.0 was for a way to “free-form” zoom. Fennec already supported what I call a “structured zoom” – that is, double-tapping that zooms to fit the part of page structure (a column of text, an image) that you’re tapping on. That method doesn’t help you in every circumstance, though, and that’s where a free-form or arbitrary zoom mechanism is useful.
Devices that support multitouch almost all now use the pinch-to-zoom gesture for this, and that’s what Fennec will do on such devices as well. The Nokia N900, though, is single touch only, so for version 1.1, Fennec makes use of the device’s rocker button to allow free-form zooming in and out:
in landscape

and in portrait

Two interesting things!

The zoom rate isn’t constant as you zoom in and out. If it were, the change in zoom level would seem tiny when you’re zoomed all the way out, but huge when you’re very zoomed in.
The rocker button adjusts itself for whether you’re holding the phone in landscape or portrait to maintain natural increase/decrease mappings with up/down and left/right (for LTR languages, anyway). See the photos above for an illustration.

Ideally, you won’t notice either of these things in day-to-day use; it should just feel like it works the way you’d expect.

Smart Tap in mobile Firefox 1.1

Madhava — Thu, 13 May 2010 10:50:12 +0000

Mark Finkle, Vivien Nicolas, Felipe Gomes, and I have put together a blog post about Smart Tap, the technique we’re using in mobile Firefox 1.1 to make tapping on small links, fields, and buttons much easier.
From a user’s perspective, tapping on small targets should just work out the way you intended more of the time. Behind the scenes, there’s a lot more going on to make it feel this way: a larger and up-shifted invisible tap region around the point of touch-contact; favoring higher z-ordered elements; and favoring visited links over unvisited ones, to name a few. Read the full post for the whole story, and let us know how you find it working when you try out 1.1.

Fennec 1.1 – Save as PDF

Madhava — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:12:18 +0000

People print or save webpages for a couple of good reasons.
Sometimes it’s because you need to have a permanent record of something you’ve done: a receipt after making a purchase, or a confirmation that you’ve filed your taxes or booked a rental car.
Other times, you want to be certain that a copy of a page that will be accessible when you’re offline. This might be a boarding pass, a set of directions, or the simplest case: an article to read.
On current mobile devices it’s rarely straightforward to print, and dealing with a saved folder of saved HTML, CSS, and images isn’t really what’s called for in the scenarios I’ve described. It also doesn’t make much sense on devices that, for good reason, try to de-emphasize file systems.
Fennec 1.1 tries to fill this void with a Save As PDF option in the new site menu:

On the N900, selecting “Save As PDF” will bring up a save dialog:

The saved PDF will show up in the Fennec download manager, so that you don’t have to go hunting for it in the file system:

Tapping “Open” will bring it up in the device’s PDF reader:

Fennec 1.1 – Start Page

Madhava — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:10:36 +0000

When you launch mobile Firefox (Fennec) 1.1, you’ll see that it has a new start page. In portrait, it looks like this:

Through the start page, the browser’s providing a couple of things that are of interest particularly when you start up:

It shows the tabs that you had open the last time you were using the
browser, letting you open any or all of them again. This makes quitting (and restarting) the browser a much less consequence-filled undertaking. It’s like a lightweight version of session restore on the desktop.
The start page also provides quick access to the tabs you have or just had open on your other computers, like the one on your desk. This is useful when you first open your browser in the case where you leave your desk and now, on the road, need to pick up where you left off.

We’re also taking advantage of having your attention for a second to show you a maximum of two recommended add-ons that you don’t yet have installed. Tapping on one will open the add-ons manager and let you install the one you’re interested in right there. While looking for add-ons is not necessarily a start-up task, add-ons are a huge part of what makes Firefox such a great fit for its users, so interjecting quickly to show people what’s new and worthwhile seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Here’s the page again, in landscape:

This page is a change from 1.0, in which the browser used to display the awesome screen immediately (Fennec’s display of frequently visited pages and bookmarks, as well as from where you search the web). We were finding, though, that people were finding it disorienting – people were launching the browser, and expecting to see something that looked like a browser. Going to the start page instead helps with that problem and also helps with some frequent just-opened use-cases. Oh, and if you already have a start page that works for you, you can switch to using that over in preferences:

We’re not done, of course. Heading towards version 2.0, I’d like to explore more of how we can use the start page to help people see what’s new on the parts of the web they care about since the last time they connected with their online lives. I’ve written about some of this here before, but it’s a topic I’ll be writing about more over the next few weeks.

Fennec 1.1 – the Site Menu

Madhava — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:01:52 +0000

The beta release of Firefox for Maemo (Fennec) 1.1 is nearly ready for testing, and with it come some new capabilities and changes to the user-interface (though maybe you’re already seen them in the nightlies). One of them that I’m really excited about is the new extended Site Menu.
On desktop Firefox, and in Fennec 1.0, tapping the site button (the one with the site’s icon on it, next to the URL or page title) brings up some site identity information — you can use it to get a sense of how much Firefox knows about who you’re talking to, site-wise. In the smaller mobile interface, we wanted this button to be of broader use: to be the place you go to get information about and manage your relationship with the site you’re on. So, when you tap on this button in mobile Firefox 1.1, you’ll see actions as well as the briefing on what’s known about the site.
Certain items, like the new 1.1 feature “Save as PDF,” are relevant to every page (you can use it to permanently store receipts, boarding passes, or any page you might print if you were at a desktop computer). We’re always trying to save space in Fennec, though, so other items will appear depending on the site and what decisions you’ve made about it.
For example, addons.mozilla.com provides a search engine that I can add to the Firefox search bar, and I have a saved password for the site, so menu-items to Add Search Engine and Forget Password are each present:

Another item that will sometimes appear is Clear Site Preferences:

On popuptest.com, I’ve told Firefox that I always want to block popups, but I can clear that site preference here. This works for a number of other site-specific preferences as well, including automatic location sharing, storing local data, and opting to never save a password.
Finally, add-ons are starting to hook into it as well (oh, and the menu reformats itself in portrait). Readability, by Fabrice Desre, is shown here.

Fennec Windows Mobile Alpha 4

Madhava — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:24:33 +0000

It’s out! Brad Lassey has an explanation of what’s new and a walkthrough video on his blog. There are further details and download links over in the release notes.

YouTube Enabler for mobile Firefox

Madhava — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:05:18 +0000

It’s great to be able to watch your favorite videos and other Flash content on a mobile phone, but it can affect the overall performance and interactivity of the browser, as well as network and battery consumption. We’re working on an add-on that will give you complete control by letting you enable plugins, like Flash, for only the sites you choose. In the meantime, we’ve built an add-on that enables video on YouTube, a site that serves content well-optimized for mobile, and is, well, pretty popular. Here’s how you get it installed – enjoy!
Step 1: Swipe over to the right sidebar and select Browser Tools (the gear button).

Step 2: Switch to the Add-ons Manager (the puzzle piece), and pan down to the Get Add-ons section

Step 3: Tap on the recommended add-on “YouTube Enabler”, press “Add to Firefox” button, and restart Firefox when prompted. (If you don’t see it there, just type “YouTube” into the Search Catalog field).

Step 4: Go to YouTube.com and play Flash videos!

But wait, there’s more!
You can make your YouTube experience even better by adding a YouTube search button to Firefox.
Step 1: Go to youtube.com, tap on Firefox’s site button, and tap the “Add Search” button.

Step 2: From now on, search for your favorite videos on YouTube directly from Firefox! Enter what you’re looking for and tap the YouTube Video Search button.

bookmarks(desktop + mobile)

Madhava — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:40:43 +0000

Thanks to some hard work from the Weave and Mobile teams, it’s getting to be much easier to make sense of and navigate through the bookmarks that you sync between Firefox on your computer and your mobile device. Many of us usually just use the awesomebar to get at all of our synced bookmarks, but this is very useful for those times when a browse strategy is better than a search one.

You’ll need a nightly build of Maemo Firefox and the most recent beta of Weave Sync to see much of this, for the moment, but now, when you open your bookmarks on your mobile, you’ll see this:

Your mobile bookmarks are still at the top level of the bookmarks list, so they’re close at hand, but your bookmarks from Firefox on your desktop system are in a folder at the top. When you pop it open, you get the following:

Which is the top level of your bookmarks hierarchy on the desktop. All your bookmarks, in whatever folders you’ve set up, are all in there!

There’s more, though. When you go over to Firefox on your desktop machine, your mobile bookmarks will show up in a new top-level bucket, as seen here:

Which means that you can do more complex bookmark management, if you need to, where you have a larger screen and better keyboard.

One interesting side-effect of this better organization that I’ve found — I use my bookmarks toolbar on desktop Firefox mostly just for bookmarklets. With Weave Sync and this organization, they’re pretty easy to find while mobile, and they work there too: