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

https://heatmap.mozillalabs.com/mozmetrics/

by bigstorm • 16 years ago

45 59 16 years ago

heatmap.mozillalabs.com

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?

dpcan2• 16 years 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.

CoryMathews9• 16 years ago

Its called speed dial... Opera has had it for years then Chrome and Safari copied it.

mitjak• 16 years 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.

oziumjinx• 16 years ago

Multirow toolbar addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6937/

capedape• 16 years 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-... I like this with a theme that minimizes the icons and text of the bookmarks. It hardly wastes any space this way.

caryme• 16 years 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.

TorKlingberg3• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

Qz• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

ugh4• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

brown9-23• 16 years ago

You might love Instapaper's "Read Later" bookmarklet: http://www.instapaper.com/extras

c1sc0• 16 years ago

Um, I like my Bookmarklets, ok? I'd be lost without the delicious bookmarklet.

kmfrk• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

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

dpcan2• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

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

jra101• 16 years 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.

TorKlingberg3• 16 years ago

I suspect most people don't use RSS at all.

jeff182• 16 years ago

Chrome doesn't even have an RSS icon at all!

Pheter• 16 years ago

It really frustrates me that it doesn't.

CoryMathews9• 16 years ago

Most every non-technical user has no idea what rss is.

cschep• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

Probably not, since what they're looking for is the usefulness of the individual pieces of the UI itself.

thorax• 16 years 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.

CoryMathews9• 16 years 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.

marbletiles2• 16 years 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.

superkarn• 16 years ago

I use it to go back multiple pages at a time via the drop down list.

weixiyen• 16 years 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.

tessro• 16 years ago

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

barrkel• 16 years ago

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

bradgessler• 16 years ago

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

CoryMathews9• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

robryan• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

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

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