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by phlsa 4329 days ago
Hi, I'm one of the people who worked on this and I wanted to provide a little background and a few clarifications.

Lightspeed is currently not a product. It's a collection of sketches and thoughts. It is also NOT the next version of Firefox. While some ideas might find their way into mainline Firefox at some point, many of the assumptions on which Lightspeed is based are the exact opposites of Firefox core values (e.g. no settings or customization in Lightspeed).

More than anything else, Lightspeed helps us think outside the box that Firefox is. It's a place where we can dare to explore more radical thoughts like not having any settings or or even menus. Having constraints like these stimulates creativity much like, for example, the character limit on tweets forces you to make your message more concise.

Ideas are worthless when they just exist in your head. Sketching out Lightspeed has helped us to make make lots of ideas more tangible, so they can be evaluated.

That being said, just reading through this thread has sparked some interesting new thoughts – we'll keep experimenting :)

4 comments

Search operators are super powerful and awesome to use in google - providing a way to use those from the browser itself can help provide a distraction free environment, but also opens up new possibilities:

bm:“tag" - show list of all bookmarks with that tag

Just a thought.

Windows tried to do that with their search (in Vista, 7, and 8). It has been a disaster. Hidden functionality is a UI and UX anti-pattern.

How do people know to type "bm:" for Bookmarks? Google? Is a Google search now part of the UI's workflow? Or will people simply stop using Bookmarks because it is so obscure (you're seeing this with mobile browsers, Bookmarks are hidden so go unutilised).

Ditto with Windows. In Windows 9x you had a nice UI for search that allowed the user to: Search file/folder names, search within (contents), and to filter by file type and file date(s). In Windows Vista+ it is now hidden strings like "filetype:" (and that is the least obscure example, try doing the between-dates thing WITHOUT googling how first). Plus now "unknown file types" cannot be search within at all (even if you alter the indexer's settings it no longer works, you have to add each file type in the registry as a "text file").

I kind of agree, though hidden powerful features aren't inherently an anti-pattern (see, e.g. keyboard shortcuts). You just need to provide affordances for everyone to be able to use an interface at some useful level.

I'm a fan of the style of gmail's advanced search (for example), which has all the various fields to fill in if you drop it down, but then when you execute the search, it converts them into the search operators, thus teaching you how to use them (if you care enough to pay attention...if not, the field boxes are still there for you to use).

Windows Vista had the advanced search bar, the UI offered similar search options that were available in Windows (95-XP).

Vista advanced search: http://www.mydigitallife.info/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/vis...

Win95: http://toastytech.com/guis/win95find.png ; WinXP: http://www.adammathes.com/academic/search-engines/desktop/xp... ; Win2k: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/features/sea...

The major difference was that Vista (Longhorn) originally was meant to be powered by WinFS and Vista shipped just with Windows Search (the indexing service that was also available for WinXP as "Desktop Search").

For some unknown reasons the advanced search bar is absent in Windows 7+.

That history is funny. Win95 was also supposed to ship with WinFS, but instead it got only a "you don't ask for a find-like tool anymore" search window.

I don't know if MS finished the WinFS specification already.

> Hidden functionality is a UI and UX anti-pattern

I suppose the entire terminal, by that argument, is an anti-pattern. I feel a little better about not ever getting past mediocre in shell. :)

The existing equivalent¹ is to do:

    + tag
1: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...
A little off topic, but what program was used to produce the video?
Based on the comments here and those that appear under the article, people in general are not at all impressed by these ideas.

I don't think the hatred is as universal as it is for, say, Australis, but it's close enough that it should be discomforting.

What is your response to this? Do you think it's right to continue work on a project that the majority of people dislike for a variety of very legitimate reasons?

"Do you think it's right to continue work on a project that the majority of people dislike for a variety of very legitimate reasons?"

Almost certainly yes. How else can you find new, previously unknown products and ideas of value? Don't you ever just brainstorm crazy ideas because you don't know where an idea will take you? You know... think different... here's to the crazy one's.

Didn't sama just publish a blog post about that: http://blog.samaltman.com/stupid-apps-and-changing-the-world

Also, "majority of people" might need to be edited to say "majority of a subset of people who are HN readers/commenters and who are so interested in browsers that they watch nearly 10 minutes of video on the topic."

"Based on the comments here and those that appear under the article, people in general are not at all impressed by these ideas." I wouldn't say that is a fair assessment, many people took it for what it was (a UI/UX experiment), and quite a few people who did take to it badly mistakenly thought it was a Firefox design concept.
Well, to be fair, the last 2 Firefox "design concepts" got almost verbatim into the mainline despite almost unanimous complaints, and now I have 2 different plugins installed to correct the mess they created.
It's only a "mess" to some, I personally have no beef with Australis, and the beauty of Firefox is that it allows for you to customise it to work how you want (hence you were able to 'fix' it). This flexibility means there's still plenty of room for UI experimentation. Besides, this Lightspeed design is explicitly not for Firefox, the designers acknowledge part of what makes Firefox what it is is the customisability, this design is seeing what could be done with an alternative browser.
i just read the comments here on HN for ~10 minutes and i'd say most all were positive and in the brainstorming spirit. what do you mean "hatred"??
What exactly might? The day Firefox gets even 10% of the way to this is the day I stop using it.