Firefox Journal

["Bryan Clark" <bclark redhat com>]

Hey All ~

I know the title is Firefox Journal, but it actually has little to do with Firefox and more to do with chrome, _javascript_, rss, atom, feeds, (fast) history, and bookmarks.  All of which Epiphany have, right?  (well, at least once the SoC code gets merged...)

Here's the basic rundown of what we've been thinking and doing.

* Browser history is important!
** Use it as the way to navigate the web
** Keep it around as much as possible
** Make the history clean and nice such that it's a pleasure to search or read
** Most people keep going back to the same sites, the browser should be working to make that easier than anything else

* Bookmarks are nice, but can become a maintenance task
** Keep bookmarks as a lightweight way of saying "I'd like to remind myself to go back here" instead of what they are currently, "I want to remember this place and bookmarks are the only way to remember where you've been"
** Make it easy to "unbookmark" things, thinking of them the same way GMail allows you to "star" a conversation

* Browser history should be as static as the web is static
** Where there is information about your history the browser should annotate your history with this information, see [1]

* The address bar and search bar are pretty small and silly considering how they are the only inputs the browser has
** We should use the entire page for auto-complete / searching of history and bookmarks, the address bar and search bar separation don't provide most people much help
** Alternative searches should be easily available on every search
** Your preffered search engine should automatically be searched for the top results of whatever you search

* Most web sites are applications, not just pages
** When there is an RSS feed or Sitemap XML we should take advantage of this information to improve the history of that site
** Site maps can give you better URLs 
** RSS / Atom feeds can give you updated information about the site you were at

* Web Passwords suck, keeping track of them and using good ones
** The browser should be helping you create unique passwords for different sites
** The person should only have to have one or two good passwords, with the rest all chained off that one password
** It would be nice to have most of your web passwords sync'd somewhere, especially since most of them are generated

So what we're dong for this is basically overriding the address and search bar; they should be the same thing.  If any of you get a chance to try out the Journal stuff we wrote you'll see that we've taken over the homepage and "new tab page".  By overtaking these two place of activity entry we don' need the URL or Search bar anymore, we can do it all in the browser page.

And by making the History active, interesting, and relevant (via RSS, Atom, and SiteMaps) we can replace the homepage most people use with something that automatically reflects what they have done or where they have been and what's changed since they were there.

There are a number of separate extensions and services out there that are doing this already, however many of these things are integral to the browsers behavior and the expected user experience.  (friendfeed, cocomment,  passwordmaker, google browser sync)

So that's the short rundown of  it all, I'd love to hear thoughts and ideas from everyone.  If you could (I know it might be painful, but...) try out the Firefox Journal so you can see what we've been working on so far.  Like I said there's nothing that's really integral to firefox, this is more of a "web browser" problem in general.

Thanks,
~ Bryan

[1] http://groups.google.com/group/firefox-journal/browse_thread/thread/ec5982481bf6bbc2?hl=en
[2] http://online-desktop.org/wiki/Firefox_Journal