Here is the updated version of the search guidelines for Fennec:

5 standard search engines:

You should choose only 1 search engine in each of the following categories.

• Global general search
  • ‘Regular’ global general search, much like in desktop Firefox.
• Reference search
  • Almost all of the time, this will be Wikipedia.
• E-commerce search
  • Both to shop on-line and to consult product information.
  • Store preferred over auctions.
• Local search
  • I.e., “around me” search; e.g. “find the nearest ATM”.
  • Only if available in the region.
• Social search
  • I.e., microblogging platforms/feeds, social networks (no invite-only sites).
  • Only if relevant in the region.

1 extra search engine:

You can choose to use it if no e-commerce/local/social search is available.

• Specific interest search
  • Something specific to the region, reflecting the local way of using the Web.
  • Can be from different categories: e.g. reference (a dictionary or a word reference recommended), entertainment (imdb, youtube, music search), e-commerce (price comparison), general search provider very popular in the region, etc.

The maximum number of search engine plug-ins is 5. Each search engine should be chosen from a different category, as listed above. In rare and well justified cases, we might go for 6 plug-ins total—the sixth one would be then an engine from the additional specific interest category. You can add a specific interest search engine also if there is no e-commerce, local or social search that you would recommend for mobile Firefox for your locale. Or, you can choose to go with fewer plug-ins, which is totally fine, too.

For more context and rationale behind these choices, please take a look at my previous posts on Fennec’s productization.

As always, comments are more than welcome.

We’d like to use the same approach for Fennec. For each locale, we’ll look at the region’s market and try to choose search engines that offer best user experience and bring a lot of added value to Fennec. To facilitate the process of suggesting search engines and choosing a few of them for including in localized Fennec builds, I’d like to suggest the following guidelines for choosing search engines in Fennec.

I propose the following 4 categories of search engines for localizers’ consideration:

• General search
  • 1 global
• Reference search
  • 1 Wikipedia
  • 1 e-commerce (store preferred over auctions)
  • 1 other (optional, a dictionary or a word reference recommended)
• Local search
  (i.e., “around me” search; e.g. “find the nearest ATM”)
  • 1 (only if available in the region)
• Specific interest
  (extra category, use if no local or 2nd/3rd reference search available)
  • 1 (can be from different categories: e.g. entertainment (imdb, youtube, music search), price comparison, general search provider very popular in the region, etc)

Not all categories are required for every locale, in fact, some should be ignored if there are no good search engines available in the region. This applies primarily to the local search (C). If no local search service provider is available in the locale’s region, then we should not include this category at all. Instead, we could look for other interesting search services from other categories and include them under category D. For example, if there’s no local search engine in Germany, then instead of shipping a US-based local search engine with the “de” version of Fennec, we could look for a different type of search engine that would offer good experience and be relevant for German users.

The maximum is 6 search engines. However, if you have good candidates for categories A, B and C, you probably should leave D out, and stay at 4-5 plug-ins. Also, all locales should start with a global general search provider and Wikipedia, and not the en-US defaults. This makes the minimum number of plug-ins equal 2. To sum up:

Minimum: 2 (general search & Wikipedia)
Recommended: 4-5 (subset of A, B, C, D)
Maximum: 6 (A+B+C+D)

To help decide which search engines to choose for each category, I propose to use the following list of criteria, similar to what we use for all productization components across all Mozilla projects, augmented by the compatibility criterion:

• User experience
  • Mobile compatibility
  • Search quality
  • Clean and easy-to-use interface
• Relevancy
  • Popularity in the region
  • Usefulness for locale’s users

To provide some background on the choice of categories: you may wonder for example why I listed e-commerce under “reference”. My assumption is that searching in Fennec is mainly about acquiring information, less so about performing actions on-line (like buying a product). We can then use this information to perform actions off-line, for example take out some cash in the nearest ATM as located by the search engine. A mobile browser brings together two worlds: the off-line world in which we operate and the on-line one in which we acquire information. Consequently, I see e-commerce sites as great sources of information, answering questions like ‘Who wrote that book? What year was this film released? What’s the 4th track on this album?’ etc.

Following this line of thinking, I see two main objectives for the search plug-ins from the user’s perspective:

1. acquire general information, knowledge, definitions, and
2. acquire location-specific information.

A third objective, this time from Mozilla’s point of view, is to demonstrate the feature called “adding search engine plug-ins to the chrome”. It could be argued that including more search engine plug-ins than Fennec’s search bar can fit would have an advantage of demonstrating the horizontal swipe-ability of the bar. On the other hand, offering less engines by default has two additional advantages:

1. There’s an empty space on the right of the bar (cleaner interface), possibly encouraging the user to fill it, by adding new plug-ins.
2. The first plug-in the user adds by herself will be visible right away on the search bar (it won’t be hidden) which, as I believe, will be more rewarding for the user and will make it easier to understand what has just happened (no questions like “Where is this search plug-in I just installed?”).

These reasons are convincing to me. I also believe that it is important to keep the interface clean. Contrary to Firefox, search plug-ins are a highly visible piece of UI in Fennec, somewhat similar to the bookmarks toolbar in a desktop browser. It is therefore crucial to find the right balance between offering more functionality with more search engines and keeping the interface clean and uncluttered. Let’s remember that the browser (together with the search bar) belongs to the user.

Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Clustory: reinventing the tabs in the browser (Mozilla Concept Series) from Staś Małolepszy on Vimeo.

In the video above (slightly too lengthy, I admit), I try to explore a different approach to managing visited pages. I suggest using the loads of data stored in the browsing history (mining for patterns!) and present it in a way that exposes two new dimensions: time and tasks.

The clustory screen (a portmanteau word from “cluster” and “history”) would present a timeline of the visited pages, organized by themes, topics, or actions. Each horizontal line represents a cluster, and the pages belonging to the clusters are portrayed using screenshot thumbnails or favicons. At the top, there’s a timeline indicating the time of visits, and giving some other contextual information like the weather or even (not illustrated in the mock-up) wi-fi hotspot names (SSIDs), which you could identify as your own, your company’s or your school’s.

The sidebar on the right gives you some details about each cluster, such as:

• a user-given name,
• most important keyword as identified by the clustering algorithm,
• last activity time,
• total time spent on the pages belonging to the cluster,
• action buttons: forget, bookmark, share (all pages in the cluster).

The page that you were viewing most recently is always the biggest thumbnail on the screen, to make it easy to click on it and leave the clustory screen. Moreover, it never disappears from the screen, even if you pan to see older visits or clusters that are below the page fold. Its meta-information is always visible, too. To get more information about other clusters, just hover over them, to expand them and show bigger thumbnails, as well some additional metadata.

You can drag and drop pages across clusters, for example when the algorithm isn’t accurate enough and made a mistake. Dropping a page into a new cluster would make the algorithm recalculate the probabilities of each word indicating that a new page belongs to it. Pages currently in the cluster would stay in it.

Which brings me to data mining. I believe that it would be sufficient to represent web documents as unordered collections of words that occur in them (the bag-of-words model). You could even go as far as checking only if a word is present in the document, without counting its occurrences. This would lead to a very simple binary representation that could then be used by a Naive Bayes classifier. The advantage of such approach is that we would be storing minimal amount of data per visited page and we wouldn’t need to recalculate the weights for each word and each document after opening a new page (as using an idf-based weight would require).

Please watch the video, download the Keynote presentation and share your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Today, let’s discuss the compatibility criterion, which I believe is the most important guideline for localizers to consider.

The compatibility criterion: Services included in Fennec must render correctly on mobile devices, assuring good readability and ease of interaction.

The compatibility criterion is important, because it allows us to base on Firefox’s guidelines and adapt them to the mobile context. In other words, Fennec’s productization should follow Firefox’s guidelines, making exceptions when the compatibilty criterion is not met.

As you probably remember, there are 5 productization components in Firefox, mapping to components in Fennec (in fact, the future of the live bookmark and the getting started page in Fennec is uncertain, but let’s just assume for now that they’re in):

1. Content handlers (a.k.a feed readers)
2. Protocol handlers (currently: webcal, mailto, irc)
3. Search engines
4. News feed (a.k.a. Live Bookmark)
5. The ‘Getting Started’ page

Fennec should ship only with services that meet the compatibility criterion. We should not promote websites that render badly on mobile devices, are impossible to read (e.g. because of the broken layout not adapted to the small screen), or impossible to interact with on mobile devices.

The good news is that I don’t expect there are many websites that don’t conform to this guideline. After all, Fennec’s developers have gone to great lengths to make sure the browsing experience is as good as on a desktop browser. You can pan and zoom easily, increasing the text size and focusing on chosen part of the website.

But I can imagine a couple of scenarios effectively breaking the mobile user experience, for example:

• a Flash-based ad covering a significant area of the website which is difficult to close/discard (due to very small close button),
• a non-standard input element with no accessibility fallback, which makes typing text into it difficult or impossible,
• websites detecting a small-screen device (which as a practice is not bad) and offering a broken layout.

I’m sure you can think of more example like these. Feel free to add them in the comments.

Mozilla’s mission ensures that the Internet, desktop and mobile alike, evolves in the  correct direction. In this context, that means open, participatory, and innovative. Good for the users. With Fennec, we’re becoming reponsible for building mobile Web the right way. We have the momentum and power to make an impact and make sure web designers and developers don’t ignore mobile in their projects. Because with no doubt, mobile will become one of the most important contexts of using Web, independently of region or demographics. Even more so, mobile is gaining a lot of traction in developing countries, which skip directly to the age of personal and portable computing. I like to think that we’re responsible for the direction in which the mobile Web evolves: open, participatory, and innovative.

Please add your thoughts. Is this criterion too strict? Too vague? Just right?

* * *

In the next post I’ll try to summarize my thinking about the search engines in particular and suggest a couple of categories of search engines that we might want to ship Fennec with.

This race is only about to start :)

Aviary.pl meetings have always been a perfect combination of work (organization, planning, status updates, learning) and fun (Wii, bowling, pubs). We’re set for the new elections of our “steering committee”, we’re planning to organize a series of localization sprints on MDC (first one coming this Saturday!) and we did a lot of thinking on how to improve the transparency of our team and the process of finding new localizers. I hope to be able to share some positive results soon! :) For now, for more background in Polish, see posts by Hubert and Rafał.

A big ‘thank you’ goes to Hubert for all the hard work with organizing the meeting and to Mozilla Europe for making it possible!

Coming back to France was even more fun. I had my plane back to France scheduled for Monday morning but due to the poor weather conditions (seriously, I don’t recall seeing a fog like that ever before), all flights were seriously delayed, and some even got canceled. In a unexpected stroke of luck, my plane was one of the very few that morning that did take off.

And so I’m back in France, eating crusty baguettes every morning and practicing the French “r” (at which I suck). Destination for next week: Paris & Barcelona!

Wczoraj o 19:00 Mozilla ogłosiła wydanie Firefoksa 3. Zainteresowanie na całym świecie było olbrzymie i na samym początku serwery nie wytrzymały, ale już po godzinie udało się wszystko naprawić. Z tego względu, Dzień Pobierania trwa do godziny 20:16 dzisiaj w Polsce (18:16 UTC).

W tej chwili liczba pobrań wynosi 5 445 604. Po zaledwie 15 godzinach! Obie Ameryki już śpią, więc obecnie to Azja pobiera. Europa niedawno się obudziła i cały dzień dopiero przed nami :-)

Ponieważ w Księdze Rekordów Guinnessa nie ma jeszcze zapisu o pobraniach aplikacji w ciągu 24 godzin, Dzień Pobierania to próba ustanowienia nowego rekordu, a nie pobicia już istniejącego. Aby mieć jakiś punkt odniesienia, chcieliśmy na początku przebić wynik z 2006 roku, kiedy to w ciągu jednego dnia Firefox 2 został pobrany 1,6 miliona razy.

Wczoraj ten wynik osiągnęliśmy po 5 godzinach :)

I pędzimy naprzód. Udział Firefoksa 3 w rynku wzrósł w ciągu tych 15 godzin z 1% do 4%! Pobiera cały świat, bo Firefox został jednocześnie wydany w 46 językach. Czy ro przypadkiem nie zasługuje na kolejny rekord świata?

Z okazji wydania trójki, na świecie odbywają się w tym tygodniu spotkania użytkowników. My w Polsce też zachęcamy do organizowania takich spotkań: wystarczy umówić się ze znajomymi w pubie czy kawiarni i ogłosić to na stronie Mozilla Party. Aviary.pl będzie obecne na dwóch takich spotkaniach: w Krakowie (w sobotę) i w Warszawie (w niedzielę). Zapraszamy!

A tymczasem, pobierz Firefoksa przed 20:16 :)

Mamy więc niesłychanie aktywne forum oraz centrum pomocy na stronach MozillaPL, mamy polskie SUMO, czyli support.mozilla.com – oficjalne strony pomocy dla Firefoksa, a w nieco dalszej perspektywie – dla wszystkich produktów Mozilli. Po polsku jest też strona z dodatkami dla Firefoksa i po polsku także będą takie strony, jak “pierwsze kroki”, które pomogą użytkownikom (nie tylko nowym!) poznać Firefoksa 3.

Cały ten wysiłek jest uzasadniony czymś, co dla nas stanowi niewyobrażalną motywację. W niewielu innych krajach Europy Firefox jest tak popularny jak w Polsce (prawie 36%!). Nasi użytkownicy nie dali o sobie zapomnieć także podczas trwających właśnie przygotowań do Dnia Pobierania, kiedy to wszyscy razem spróbujemy pobić rekord Guinnessa w liczbie pobrań programu komputerowego w ciągu 24 godzin. Polska od samego początku utrzymuje się na 2. pozycji, a wyprzedzają nas tylko Stany Zjednoczone (Brazylia depcze zaś po piętach).

Wracając do tłumaczeń i stron: właśnie na SUMO chciałbym skupić nieco więcej uwagi. Polskim SUMO opiekuje się Marek Wawoczny, sam założyciel MozilliPL. Mimo ogromnego wysiłku, jaki Marek włożył już w tłumaczenie SUMO, wciąż można nam pomóc, do czego serdecznie zachęcam i do czego nawiązuje tytuł posta.

Otóż w tę niedzielę zakończy się organizowany przez Mozillę konkurs mający na celu przygotowanie screencastów ilustrujących artykuły SUMO. Pisemne instrukcje są dobre, ale jak wszyscy wiemy, nic nie działa tak dobrze, jak prowadzący za rekę film z wyjaśnieniami (no, może prowadzący za rękę znajomy).

Aby wziąć udział w konkursie, wystarczy wybrać jeden z artykułów Top 100 SUMO i przygotować krótki film pokazujący wykonywanie instrukcji z artykułu. Do tworzenia screencastów można użyć polecanego przez Mozillę programu Jing (działa pod Windows i Mac OS X). David Tenser, opiekun SUMO, poprosił wczoraj na swoim blogu, by w miarę możliwości skupiać się na 6 podanych przez niego artykułach, które wciaż czekają na swoje screencasty.

Oczywiście, jak to na konkurs przystało, przewidziano nagrody :)

Po więcej informacji o samym konkursie odsyłam na stronę mu poświęconą, poniżej zaś, w ramach zachęty i pokazania, że da się i że zajmuje to mniej niż godzinę, dwa screencasty które przygotowałem dla artykułu Backing up your information.

Backing up your profile

Restoring a profile backup

A zatem pomysł dla ponad 80 tysięcy Polaków, którzy zapisali się na Dzień Pobierania: jeśli macie godzinę w ten weekend, podczas której chcecie pomóc nam tuż przed wydaniem Firefoksa 3, weźcie udział w konkursie! :-) A jeśli wolicie pracę z tekstem, to zapraszam do pomocy przy tłumaczeniu i korekcie – wystarczy e-mail do Marka na adres: mwawoczny w domenie aviary.pl.

Zapraszam do przyłączenia się do wspólnego bicia rekordu: Dzień Pobierania.

3 firefoxes for the soon-to-happen Firefox 3 release. I didn’t have my camera around, so a shot from my mobile phone was the best I could get. (Taken in the Ménagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.)