I totally agree with what you say about Vimeo. I love the fact that when your not interacting with the video all you get is the video. This concept was applied by Facebook with their videos and it's a huge UI plus.

That was great. But where do I get hold of Episode 1?

Hey guys, great overview.

I wish I could share the work we have been doing for the past year which gets very deep into "uncharted territory" using multimodal inputs, controlled vocabularies, and, addresses globalization issues.. but it is all proprietary until the first commercial products launch this year. This is a really good primer for non-designers to understand things, and i especially like the simple way you discussed discoverability vs. usability. Traditional web applications for general use-web users are far more more limiting than the "hardcore" interfaces and technology we have at our disposal for back office tasks.

And I do like using the term "Chrome" instead of "GUIless Interfaces" which doesn't roll of the tongue very well.

So, what if someone were to take the idea of Quicksilver/Enso Humanized to the next level? ;)

Hi guys,

Nice posting. Definitely something that interests me.

As a web designer I'm constantly looking to speed up my own processes of use in Firefox. Having a 24" 1920x1080px screen as my main screen means that width or "full screen" is never really a concern. Firefox always sits aligned right using about 1280px of the width. I usually position an external firebug window to the left of this so that I can analyse different HTML elements and work out what CSS is doing what.

Where the issue comes in for me is in the height of the viewable content area. If I'm in the process of developing a website, the chrome of the browser is of minimal importance unless I need to search for a way around an issue (which is now nicely covered by ubiquity.

I have already customised my own chrome space to maximise the space available. The menu bar is gone, with the compact menu extension taking sitting beside the 'small icon' back and forward buttons, I generally have my bookmarks toolbar hidden, and by adding a toggle button for turning the web developer toolbar off and on I can generally work with 1 toolbar for back/forward, menu, refresh, stop, address bar, search box. After that I have my tabs (usually 2 rows thanks to TabMix Plus, and finally I have my status bar, showing me HTML Tidy errors, Firebug errors, and measureit & colorzilla buttons.

However, using full screen mode is an unnecessary waste of space for me as it occupies the entire width of the browser - something which I imagine a lot of people will find the case as default monitor sizes and resolutions increase.

Something that I imagine would be exceedingly useful would be a second full screen mode. One that maintains the window size on your monitor, but hides the toolbars, menubars, status bar etc. This could be something that you'd access through Ctrl+F11. Mousing over the top area would bring up your tabs or address bar, mousing over the bottom area might reveal your status bar, and I think Firefox should implement something similar to Chrome with regard to UI feedback on hovering over a link. I think without fail I check the link location in the status bar when I'm considering visiting it. This is lost in full screen mode. A solution such as the default link location feedback in Chrome would be very useful in full screen, or else you're browsing blind.

Of course, these are entirely thoughts from a heavy firefox user who spends his days working with it, and may not seem as useful to the general user (most of whom probably only discover a tiny percentage of the features of the application), but as I was watching the video above this 'second' full screen idea popped into my head and I thought I should mention it whilst it was fresh.

A number of other applications offer this form of UI hiding, in addition to an overall full screen mode. The first one that springs to mind is Photoshop/Illustrator which allow you to cycle through view modes in order to minimize the impact of the UI and let you focus on the content.

Now, I've waffled on enough so I'm going to stop there. It's great to see such thought and planning go into the development of the Firefox UI and I'm sure that we'll all see huge benefit from this.

And many thanks for Ubiquity - love it, can't wait to see it expand further.

Keep up the good work.

Alex

I made a very crude sketch of what I would like to see in a browser without chrome. :)

flickr.com/photos/johanl/3243533921/

Thank you for explaining the difference between discover-ability and usability. Last year I had to come to grips that your design can't be all things to all people so you must optimize for majority. (Obviously, their are workarounds, such as intro tutorials.)

Thanks for a great podcast. Keep it up!