Mozilla has very quietly made some product announcements during the last week. Mozilla Product Strategy Design team gave us a glimpse of what they have been working on. Alex Limi has termed Safari as “a pretty miserable experience” and he has taken it upon himself to improve it. Hence, among the offering is their version of an iPad browser, Junior.
The prototype browser is very minimalistic; no tabs, no address bar. There are only two buttons located midway at the screen, in perfect reach for our thumbs. One button is ‘back’ which has a pretty obvious function. The other is a ‘plus’ signed button and this one takes you to new things.
Plus button opens up a new page with history tabs, new rectangular logos for favourites and the address bar. History pages are shown as thumbnails. The favourite logos are a new interesting thing. According to Limi, these rectangular logos are easier to browse through and locate as compared to text or the usual square logos. They plan to ship out logos for the top 500 websites with the browser and also incorporate the mechanism to add other website as favourites. As for the address bar, it works as expected. Other operations such as refresh, forward and print are available but slightly hidden away so as not to tarnish the simplistic look of the browser.
Viewing multiple tabs has intentionally been left out, which is kind of a blessing in disguise. Multiple tabs are usually left open for later viewing and generally end up being closed without ever viewed. So going back and forth between website is meant to improve our web acumen.
Junior appears to be a promising browser, ergonomically made for iPad usage, with a hassle free UI.
facebook comments:
