Posted by Milos | Posted in Web Technology | Posted on 08-12-2009
Hello Madhava. Can you tell me a little about yourself, and how did you first got involved in Mozilla.
I’m Canadian and I live and work in the city of Toronto, where Mozilla has a small office. My first name is Indian and my last name is Swedish, by way of Finland. I’ve been doing interaction and user-experience design for 10 years, always in the software field. I’d followed the Mozilla project for some time, trying out nightlies and reading usability-related bugs, for a while before starting to work for Mozilla in 2007, when I worked on the design of Firefox 3, especially the “Get Add-ons” section of the Add-ons Manager.
What’s your current role in Mozilla and what are your main tasks?
My title at Mozilla is “Designer at Small,” which is a little play on words, given that one of the major considerations in designing for mobile is that the devices are so small. My role, though, is that of user-experience lead for mobile. I spend my time thinking about how the use of a browser is different when people are mobile, and and designing Firefox’s mobile user interface to take these differences into account.
Can you tell me what are the main UI goals in Firefox Mobile?
This is my favorite topic, so I’ve got a long answer for you! We wanted to bring the full Firefox experience — that of a complete modern web-browser — to mobile devices. The user-iterface that was designed for the desktop, though, is clearly not appropriate for a device that will fit in your pocket! On top of this, not only are mobile devices from the computers they use at their desks, but people themselves are also different when they’re mobile. Because of this, the three biggest goals for the UI were these:
1. It’s about the webpage. There’s no control in the browser UI that people spend as much time with as content itself. Firefox tries to be minimal in it’s UI even on the desktop, but on the small screens of mobile it’s a strict requirement. To do this we cut back on the number of primary controls and also get them out of the way when you don’t need them. The titlebar scrolls of the top as you begin to use a page, and tabs and controls like back and forward are placed just past the page edges where you can pull them in if you need them.
2. Minimize typing. Typing is difficult even on the best of phone keyboards, so Firefox tries to offer suggestions for what you might want everywhere possible. The best example of this is the mobile-adapted version of the Firefox “Awesomebar” or Smart Location Bar. Before you even begin to type a webpage title or URL, Firefox makes suggestions based on your own browsing history and bookmarks so that you can just tap on what you want. Other Firefox features, like the password manager, also help minimize typing.
3. Focus on mobile needs. We’ll all be discovering about how people’s browsing differs when they’re mobile over the next few years, but already we know that people do a lot more quick searches for information that they need for whatever they’re doing at the moment in the real world. For example, looking up an address or phone number, or getting an answer to a trivia question from Wikipedia. To support this, we’ve designed in quick searching buttons for a number of common search engines (and it’s fully customizable) so that you can just type what you’re looking for into Firefox, and do the search immediately. Other Firefox like features like location-aware browsing are particularly helpful while mobile.
Why would you, as a end-user, choose Firefox Mobile.
For me, the biggest reason is how quickly you get to the website you want with the awesomebar. When typing is difficult, being able to tap on the site I want, because it’s part of “my” part of the web (the places I go a lot), without typing or just entering one or two letters, is amazing — it changes the way you browse. This gets even more powerful when you add something called Weave Sync (a Mozilla add-on), which lets you synchronize your bookmarks, history, passwords, and tabs to your mobile device. Imagine having the browser on your phone instantly be as “worn-in” to the way you browse as the browser you’ve been training for years on your desktop computer.
That’s one thing that makes for a particularly good user-experience among many, though, like having a browser that can render the whole web, an interface that gets out of your way when you don’t need it, and being able to install add-ons.
Would you please describe the magic under the hood that differs Firefox Mobile from other browsers?
There’s magic in having the same rendering engine and javascript interpreter that power the latest version of desktop Firefox on your phone, which means you have the latest web technology everywhere you go. There’s also magic in the algorithm that powers the awesomebar — it uses measures of the frequency and recency of sites you’ve visited, and applies extra importance to sites that you have bookmarked because those are sites you are particularly interested in. Using these, the browser can make very good guesses about where you want to go, and just offer you something to tap on.
What would you need to improve the most in near future?
There’s a lot of work going on right now to make the browser even faster and more responsive, which is a bigger challenge on mobile devices than on powerful desktop computers. Speed is very important, and this is something that all mobile browsers are working on. We are also trying to get Firefox onto more other mobile platforms — there’s an alpha version for Windows Mobile, and there is investigation going on into making it work on Android.
Do you have any message to current and future users of Firefox Mobile?
Most importantly, start using Firefox on your mobile and get involved to make it more what you need it to be. Whether it’s by sending in your feedback, creating add-ons, or by filing and discussing in bugs, everyone can help make Firefox into an even better browser for mobiles.
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