improving microsummary discoverability

For Firefox 3, in addition to investigating our feature set for control over your web experience (about which more soon), I'm also looking into useful usability and functionality improvements to Firefox's support for microsummaries.

One glaring weakness is discoverability. In Firefox 2, it's hard to know if a page you're browsing has a microsummary, since you have to open the Add Bookmark dialog to find out, and you have to grok the significance of the drop-marker in the Name field.

Feeds, by comparison, are much more discoverable, since Firefox displays the feed icon in the location bar when a page provides a feed. Perhaps a similar mechanism would be useful for microsummaries.

To find out, I put together a prototype extension which displays an icon in the location bar when a web page has a microsummary.



When you click the icon, Firefox opens the Add Bookmark dialog and selects the microsummary as the "live title" for the bookmark.



Then just select the folder you want the bookmark to be created in (f.e. the Bookmarks Toolbar) and press the Add button to add a bookmark labeled with the microsummary for the page.



The extension is now available on addons.mozilla.org. Try it out with some of these sites and generators, and let me know what you think. Does the behavior make sense? What other behavior might we associate with the icon (f.e. drag-and-drop to the bookmarks toolbar)? What should happen when there are multiple microsummaries?

Notes:

1. The extension works in both Minefield and Firefox 2.0 and with both generated and site-provided microsummaries.
   
2. The location bar icon is intentionally blank, since I have no idea what kind of graphic should represent microsummaries. I would have made it colorless, too, but then it would have been invisible.
   
3. I named the extension something generic because I plan to prototype additional enhancements in future versions of it.
4. Adding an icon to the location bar for every interesting piece of content, especially in the age of burgeoning microformats, probably won't scale, so this may well be the wrong solution for the problem.

folks who made microsummaries happen

My primary responsibility for Firefox 2 was to implement support for microsummaries.  It was a large task, and I couldn't have done it without significant assistance from a number of other folks.

Mike Connor and Mike Beltzner saw the potential early on and encouraged me to work on microsummaries for Firefox 2.  Both also helped in innumerable other ways, including code, user experience, and nomenclature reviews.

Mike Shaver provided invaluable early feedback, including coming up with the name "microsummary".

Ben Goodger and Brett Wilson helped me navigate the treacherous waters of the bookmarks code (and the gentler shoals of Places) to get the architecture and integration points right.

I'm extremely appreciative of the many hours Boris Zbarsky spent working through complicated technical issues with me, particularly how to download and parse an HTML page in Firefox without any front-end impact.  Boris was incredibly helpful, and I've seen him do the same for many other developers.  He's a real credit to the community.

Much props to Jonas Sicking, Dan Veditz, Darin Fisher, and David Baron for their thorough security review.

Eric Shepherd rocked the docs on many levels (writing, reviewing, organizing).

A veritable bevy of coders contributed patches: Dietrich Ayala, Simon Bünzli,  Regis Caspar, Justin Dolske, Kevin Gerich, Pam Greene, Adam Guthrie, Joey Minta, and Phil Ringnalda.

And many other folks made microsummaries better by contributing bug reports, suggestions, microsummary generators, integration into blogging tools, and prototypes of future enhancements/add-ons.

Thank you, everyone!

(And apologies to those whose contributions I forgot to mention.)

content filtering, manipulation, and control in Firefox 3

Over in mozilla.dev.planning, Deb has posted an article about Firefox's newly updated Feature Brainstorming list.

For the next version of Firefox, I'm going to take a particularly close look at the application's feature set for content filtering, manipulation, and control.

I'll look at the functionality Firefox currently provides, try to figure out what it should be providing (based on a variety of metrics), and identify a discrete set of changes (new features, enhancements, and even removal of existing code) which can provide evolutionary and/or breakthrough improvements to this area in the Firefox 3 timeframe.

I have a few ideas, which I've added to the brainstorming list; and others have added many more; but there are bound to be great ideas we haven't yet captured.  So if you have some, please contribute them to the list!