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Video Demo Of Firefox Mobile Browser Surfaces, Looks Incredible


Posted by Eric Zeman, Jun 12, 2008 09:20 AM

Wow. That's all I can say right now. It's been about nine months since Mozilla promised to "rock the mobile Web" with its forthcoming mobile version of the Firefox browser. If the final product bears even the slightest resemblance to the browser demonstrated in this video, every other mobile browser out there has a lot to worry about.


Aza Raskin, head of user experience over at Mozilla Labs, posted a video demonstration on a potential candidate for Firefox Mobile. He also writes in detail some nice explanations on why Mozilla has taken this direction with mobile Firefox.

The browser seen in this demo is not a final release candidate, but it should be. Based on using a touch-screen device, Mozilla has solved all the navigational pains associated with mobile browsing by using simple panning gestures. Need to access the control buttons or URL bar? Pan in any direction. Most of the time, 100% of the phone's pixels are being used to display content, not navigational controls. You only see the nav controls when you want to.

Secondly, it uses a zoom effect to control tabs. You can zoom way in and out, and set up groupings of tabs in clusters of associated content, such as communications Web sites, and so on. Being able to cluster tabs like this is just plain cool. Because the display is a 2-D plane, you can arrange the tabs and documents in any way that you want.

Of course, words can only say so much. Watch the video here:


Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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