Sneak Peek into Mozilla LABS , People who gave us Firefox and Thunderbird
Mozilla Labs need no introductions. It is a website which should be looked at everyday to have alook at the latest and greatest – what mozilla working on at the Labs. These are the same people who have given the Firefox and Thunderbird .
Personas
Personas for Firefox is a extension that adds lightweight theming to your browser. It’s an experiment in personalizing. You can download it or read on for more information.
Personas builds upon the ideas that:
- themes today are too hard to find, install and use
- graphic designers should be able to style the browser without having to code
- browsers can be more than just desktop software, they can include online components
- people just want their computer to be a little more fun and personal
Labs has just begun exploring the possible benefits of an online component to deliver a better browser experience. There much to explore in this regard; Personas is a simple example. Persona selector is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. All changes to the browser chrome are applied instantly, with no need to restart.
Prism
Prism (formerly, Webrunner) is a prototype application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop.
Learn More
- Prism Prototype Now Available for Mac and Linux
- Major Update to Prism, First Prototype of Browser Integration
Get Prism
- Install the Prism for Firefox extension for Firefox 3.0b3pre or greater, Windows/Mac/Linux.
- To try out the standalone version of Prism (v0.9), download and install it:
Download Prism for Windows
Download Prism for Mac OS X
Download Prism for Linux
Test Pilot
Test Pilot is an idea for a new user testing program for Mozilla Labs that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for Labs experiments.
Presently, whenever Mozilla publishes a new experiment we rely upon the blogosphere and word-of-mouth to attract the attention of people interested in trying it out. We then hope that some number of those early adopters will come back and find the appropriate place to provide feedback.
The problem is that we are systemically biasing feedback towards only those who happen to hear about a particular experiment (on a given day) and in those cases skew to the technically-savvy early adopter. It is therefore very hard to derive conclusions representative of our much larger and increasingly mainstream user base.
We also have no structured way in which to request feedback, and in particular, positive feedback. People are much more likely to take the time to dig in and figure out how to provide feedback if they have a negative reaction. It’s also likely true that the less technical adopters are confused when faced with Mozilla’s panoply of feedback options.
And finally, at the end of this “testing process,” we effectively throw away the interested people who have taken the time to volunteer as testers and start over again from scratch the next time around.
Weave
As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.
One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services. Please have a look at the complete article which i wrote sometime back.
