really clever interface elements here. i wonder how well the 2d plane metaphor will scale down when you have a lot of items open on your actual mobile device. have you considered utilizing paging on the plane?

It seems to me that people might easily over-pan in trying to access the nav buttons and accidentally zoom out. Wouldn't it be sufficient to have the zoom out in only one horizontal pan. Nonetheless, interesting and exciting UI concept!

Unbelievable approach to the mobile web. Love it! When will it be made available?

It's a nice start. The zoomed-in control layout is quite good.

I think you'll still run into real estate issues on zoom-out, even on large, 480x320 screens. On slower phones I'd imagine you'll run into render-speed issues. if there are a fair number of tabs open.

The grouping concept and having multiple tabs open are both EXTREMELY valuable considering the way heavy web users work, even on phones.

Have you considered 'cubes' on a 2-d plane to group tabs? Open a single 'cube' (like open all bookmarks in tab) to get a group of web pages you often use together.
You'd mentioned the 'self trainable gesture' for zoom-out. You could also do 2 other easy gestures for 'cube rotate' without needing zoom out.

I remember seeing a very high quality 3d desktop, bumptop, that explored pen-centric (aka non-multitouch) and grouping concepts you may find valuable when trying to make the most of your screen real-estate.

I love it, excellent design, usability looks awesome.

I sincerely hope that this makes it into the final product for firefox mobile.

dopeness bro!

this is one of the most compelling ways of making gestures discoverable that i've ever seen.

Extremely cool. I would love to see this on an Android based phone. It would blow the balls off of mobile Safari.

I'd suggest possibly moving the new tab button down to the bottom of the screen as having it be in the upper-left would require me to stretch my thumb the furthest distance (if you're right handed). Even better would be the ability to drag the button, much like the windows.

When will this be available for beta testing, I have a blackberry curve that is begging for a feature rich browser like this!

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions! We hope to have a beta version of Firefox out by the end of the year, both for various flavors of Linux-based phones, as well as Windows Mobile. More after that.

Very interesting demo, I'm excited about FireFox joining the mobile space. My only concern would be for us Treo users. How exactly will we be able to render webpages without using a microscope to see them? Even a page like slashdot which you demoed in the video would have teeny tiny font size if the whole page were rendered across one horizontal screen. Is there some sort of zoom function to a page specific area (ala iPhone)?

Yep. There will be in-page zoom functionality as well.

What's the resolution suppose to be on the device? I'm wondering because my phone is 240x320.

Looking cool, what I'd like to see tho is a loose grid that snaps your pages in to nice uniform lines as it seems a bit messy. You could maybe also create a stacking feature to address many items, for example, your going out pages, you have 6, pop them on top of each other and then they stack up, double click them and expand to see only those spread out in their own grid and so on. Loving the gestures, full screen, looking mean!

fantastic work! think about how "open in background tab" will work (most searches lead to open bunches of tabs in the background so they're loaded already when you want to go through them). Also think about how "child" tabs will be grouped on the desktop of tabs--would want them to be close, maybe even stacked...

(Bonus: Perhaps tabs opened from links on the current page can be represented as thumbnails on the "right pan" so you can quickly see what "child" tabs are available. And if viewing a tab that was opened from a link on another page, closing that tab could optionally take you back the the originating page...)

Awesome, Open Source for life.

Keep up the good work.

Excellent work. I agree with Aaron's comments above. The grouping & nesting needs a bit more thought. Being able to stack / nest tabs would be very valuable. Create your own IA on the fly, basically.

Awesome stuff. I really hope that this becomes a reality, it's a very creative and innovative idea. I also really hope that this comes out for Android, it would suck for me to be without my Firefox!

this has to be one of the most incredible things i have ever seen, please post if you need beta's!!!

neat and cool :)
the best thing about it is that all the space is for the content