Mozilla Invites Ideas On Firefox 4’s Home Tab In Winter’ 09 Design Challenge

While working toward the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla would like to listen to you and invite your submission of creative ideas in designing the “Home Tab”, a replacement for the old “Home Button”. Mozilla has again launched its winter’ 09 Design Challenge, the third design challenge of the year to help Mozilla Lab’s design team to determine the future design direction of Firefox’s new Home Tab feature.

Mozilla plans to remove the Home button from the browser and add a “Home tab” instead. While allowing users to keep the existing function where they can display their preferred starting page, Mozilla also want this new feature to do more and that’s why Mozilla needs users’ ideas to develop a more innovative and creative user interface design for the browser. Some ideas to get those creative juices flowing are cast out by the team:

“An explicit non-goal of this challenge is to design something like My Yahoo, iGoogle or similar start pages that let you put widgets/gadgets. This is not because we don’t think this use case is valuable, but we’re much more interested in what a browser start page can do with full access to the browser. An interesting example is something like the about:me extension, which shows you trends in your browsing habits. Unlike mainstream portals like Yahoo and MSN, the locally hosted Firefox home tab can potentially offer users an experience that is innately personal, and tailored to each user’s incredibly unique personalities and interests.”

Users who are keen to participate in this winter’ 09 Design Challenge are required to create a short video explaining their idea, presenting the mockup and showing how their idea works. Participants’ video can contain anything from a napkin drawing, a wireframe, to a polished graphic/prototype. Users can go over to the Winter ‘09 Design Challenge site to find out more or get started.