Web
Contents
Introduction
A simple, clean, beautiful view of the web.
Participants
Design: WilliamJonMcCann, JakubSteiner
Development: XanLopez, DiegoEscalanteUrrelo
Status
Needs design 
Design in progress Needs implementation Implementation in progress Stable
Objectives
Primary
- Focus on the current page content
- Provide inter page navigation
- Support:
- Printing
- Saving page as PDF
- Sharing links easily
- Integrate web search functionality
- Support in page search
- Support page multi-tasking without reloading content, interrupting active sessions, or losing form data
- Displaying page view history
- Clearing page view history
- Saving form submission data
- Saving web usernames and passwords
- Provide a reminding function for things to do/read later
- Identify pages as important so they may appear more prominently in search results
- Make it very easy to reopen a closed page
- Provide a way to turn a page into an application
- Use the OS notification system for page notifications
Secondary
- Reader view
Non-Goals
- Not designed to be a web developer tool
Constraints
Relevant Art
Opera for Windows
Safari
Firefox for Android
Chrome
WebOS 3
Litl Webbook
Discussion
Tentative Design
Tabless experiment
http://jimmac.fedorapeople.org/gnome3/web-page-switching.webm
Personal Data
Web passwords and cookies used to identify a session/person are stored.
Relevant use cases:
- Look up a specific password, cookie for a site.
- Wipe all traces. Clear all passwords, all cookies.
- "Incognito Mode"- Do no store any browsing history, downloads, cookies temporarily.
Individual passwords can be managed in the Credentials app. Managing cookies is out of scope, it really is only useful for web developers.
Todo:
- design "save as app" dialog
- name
- icon
- option to add to dash launcher
- presentation and behavior of search results
- linear / grid
- prioritization of search results
- open pages
- favorities
- recent history
- suggestions
- known "site specific search" (opensearch) providers
- how to enable site specific search (tab?)
- Overview of history:
- favorites vs bookmarks - pinned vs noted
- recent vs frecent
- compression of results
- how to remove items from history
Comments
(These are comments on the interface outlined in web-overview.png and web-webpage.png)
It might be interesting to have an interface that is similar to the Documents app, but the nature of the Web is very different from the user's personal documents. The Web it is a huge collection, largely unorganised; browsing it is partly a matter of making sense of that information and adapting it to one's needs and interests.
All other desktop browsers are using tabs and they seem to be doing quite fine, so I think that we would need a good and grounded rationale to move away from that. I am not saying that we can not do it, just that we would need to have a good understanding of why that would be a good idea. Switching between open tabs is the second or third most common action in the web (the most common is following links) and this design proposal would make it harder to do so.
One of the benefits of tabs is that they act as reminders. If they are not immediately visible, they would need to be kept in the user's working memory. This would be made worse if we sorted the open-pages list by access time: the list would change every time, so the user would always need to scan it to find the desired page. Episodic memory would not work ("I opened this page and then that one") and spatial memory would not work ("work-related pages are towards the left side"). With many open tabs, this design has a very real risk that some of them would simply be forgotten over time.
It is true that tabs fail when the user has opened too many, but it is not quite clear how this design would improve this corner case. Nevertheless, there is certainly room for improvement on the current status of browser tabs. There seem to be marked personal differences among users: some people rarely switch tabs, whereas others use them profusely to organise their browsing. It is true that tabs-on-top fail these power-users; maybe we could provide a second UI for them, for instance by allowing to place tabs on the side and auto-organising them in trees.
Having a Home page/tab/... to organise browsing, like Firefox and others do, is a good idea. It allows us to provide a custom place from where to begin browsing the web. It could have a central URL+Search bar, plus views for favourites, recent, read queue, bookmarks, history... It is open to debate if this view should let you organise your open tabs as well.
Some reading on browsing habits and related topics:
- "Parallel Browsing Behavior on the Web", Jeff Huang et al., 2010
- "Web Page Revisitation Revisited: Implications of a Long-term Click-stream Study of Browser Usage", Obendorf et al., CHI 2007 Proceedings
- "A Study of Tabbed Browsing Among Mozilla Firefox Users", Dubroy et al., CHI 2010
- "Large Scale Analysis of Web Revisitation Patterns", Adar et al., CHI 2008
"The Perfect Search Engine Is Not Enough:A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search", Teevan et al., CHI 2004
-- Felipe Erias