October 13th, 2008

Posted by David Grober @ 7:47 am

Categories: General

Tags:

title required?

October 2nd, 2008

FOWA 2009: Interview with Mozilla UX chief; what's next for the web?

Posted by David Grober @ 6:58 am

Categories: General

Tags:

Shortly after having a door slam in my face and it nearly breaking my nose, I sat down with Aza Raskin, the head of user experiences at Mozilla Labs to not just discuss where Mozilla is heading in the near future but what he sees in the next-generation World Wide Web.

This interview was done over a cup of coffee in a bustling room. Everything said here is from Raskin himself, with notes taken by myself and paraphrased on occasion to make it readable.

The views from the UX guy

As the head of user experiences at Mozilla Labs, he looks at future-proofing Mozilla as an organisation, and as a result focuses mainly on the web. He assists and helps out on other non-Firefox projects but does spend the most portion of time on the browser. Even though he and his team are separate from the Firefox development team, he has a large sway of input. On the other hand, some bits he suggests go in and some do not.

Firefox 3.6 will be the next release of Mozilla’s open-source browser and will be specifically designed to have Windows users in mind. The new user interface will incorporate many of the technologies that Vista and Windows 7 have such as the Aero theme; more so with Windows 7 though as multi-touch features will be included in the browsers functionality.

The future of the web is difficult to guess or estimate in any capacity. Nevertheless, everyone desires an open web. Microsoft, Apple, and Google with their respective browsers are all aiming for the sole majority share of the marketshare. Raskin assures me that this is not Mozilla’s aim. As a not-for-profit organisation, they benefit from having a wide range of users but on the most part the userbase is the size it is through personal, hands-on experience and “Word of Mouth 2.0″. The aim is not to get 100% of the marketshare, but enough to get the shift and the space to create.

Something Raskin mentioned in the “open web” were things such as Flash and Silverlight - technologies which are plug-ins but don’t allow you to view the source. In his opinion it is important that everything you see, view and use should provide the code alongside it. Having non-view source so you don’t know what is going on is not an “open web”. There will of course be exceptions to this, but I’m sure you understand what he means.

I asked why Firefox 3.5 had slowed down, become more sluggish and more lethargic in quality and usage from personal experience. On a slight digression…

As a journalist and the son of a psychologist I have a combined set of skills, albeit not qualified, to allow me to effectively and accurately pinpoint the personality traits and pitfalls of one’s character. In this case, I see Raskin as an honest man who cares for his work, who knows he is held accountable by the end-user but also a man who takes responsibility. Alongside that, I got the impression of subtle frustration with himself, perhaps, as a highly intelligent man unlike anything I have seen before, in that his perception of the world is different to that of the average person; seeing the world in numbers and what cannot be seen by most.

So throw the psychological element in this and I believed him whole-heartedly when he said it was predominantly Adobe Flash which slowed things down. More often than not, websites hold Flash advertising which is why when you open a selection of ten random tabs, the collective memory going towards running these advertisements cause Firefox’s memory footprint to rocket. I believed him; it made perfect sense.

He told me that Firefox 3.5 was introduced to make things better. With different technologies incorporating a more user-centric set of experiences such GeoLocation, Private Browsing and SeaMonkey, these were base-level features to make the end-user more client (rather than cloud) based and provide an overall enhanced experience; not only on their own volition but to keep up with other competing browsers.

Google and Microsoft have huge research departments with thousands of people working towards making their browsers accessible but also house the potential for a wealth of features for future releases. Mozilla has “tens” of people, but as Firefox is open source, anyone from academics, students, universities, developers and ordinary consumers make the research process so much more democratic. This is what drove him to work on Mozilla Ubiquity.

Along with this and their “personas”, the customisable themes which you can see in the first image above, the browser should be yours and not be the company developing the browser to determine what it should look like. People love personalisation through their sites, bookmarks and add-ons, which is another reason as to why Firefox has done so well.

The future of Firefox –>