669166 - First run about:home is too cluttered with widgets

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110704 Firefox/7.0a1 Fennec/7.0a1

Currently about:home has received another widget added to it through bug 666973, and it is in my opinion that about:home has too cluttered and complicated with widgets for options and directions. It feels like there's a little too much going on. Is there any way to consolidate or tweak (width of some of the bottom buttons) all the widgets?

I'd be curious what others think.

Comment 1

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

bug 666973 talks about addding something to firstrun, but this one is about adding a widget to about:home, which is the start page people see every time. Just looking for clarification - are we putting language selection on about:home?

Comment 2

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

To be clear - I think something has to hit a pretty high bar of user-value to make it onto about:home, and I'd be all for a review of whether there are things we can remove.

Comment 3

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

Related bug: bug 646899 -- update visual style of about:home

Comment 4

[Wesley Johnston (:wesj)]

We are showing "Choose Language" on about:home only on firstrun (i.e. if the sidebar animation was also shown). This was done when we decided not to show the locale picker on firstrun. More up-to-date mockups of the flow we want for FF8 are in:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49885370@N03/5905672146/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Comment 5

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

If the additional "widget" for "Choose Language" is too much, we can remove the "Tabs from last time" widget on firstrun, since it is always empty.

Comment 6

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Hi all, here is a proposed fix for decluttering the first run about:home, in context with other changes from bug 64689

http://www.flickr.com/photos/61892693@N03/6009696614/in/photostream/

Note moving the language picker up into the help/feedback segmented control

Let me know if you have any questions, thanks!

Ian

Comment 7

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

^ that was supposed to read bug 646899, sorry

Comment 8

[Thomas Arend [:tarend]]

From Bug 672352: we need a way to explain permissions to users. I suggest to go beyond that and explain browser features incl. Privacy to new users:

My proposal is to add a section "Meet your new mobile browser" (to be rephrased) to the new redesigned about:home and to keep it there for a few days after installation or upgrade. That link / button would link to a page that shows (1) new and important features (with links to most recent release notes and to http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/features/), (2) How Firefox protects your privacy. (2) could describe (a) DNT and related features, (b) have a section "Permissions explained" as requested here. 

Ian, could you chime in and potentially provide design mocks that would keep the clean and light character of the redesigned about:home page while integrating this new request? Note that, perhaps, "feedback" and "help" could be collapsed into one "Help" or "Contact" element.