Summary

Firefox current default homepage mechanism was introduced in gutsy and will be redone during Lucid cycle. Improvements include work on the offline/online startup experience, by removing the user visible URL redirection as well as reducing the latency of the offline detection. On top we improve the default homepage experience to adapt to the users chrome search defaults.

Rational

Improving the default homepage experience, will boost stickiness. In contrast, the current redirection mechanism used for online/offline page display delivers a suboptimal, sometimes even confusing user experience.

Release Notes

Firefox ships an improved default homepage experience that adapts to your search habits.

Design

• ship an about:ubunthome page that does not redirect; in contrast, the about:ubuntuhome handler directly displays the online/offline content

• the users default chrome search provider name will be added to the start.ubuntu.com URL displayed.
• reduce startup latency by relying on network-manager indicated online status only; this means, that we do not perform an active probe for online/offline state anymore.

Implementation

• [asac] Implement about:ubuntuhome in ubufox
• Maintain/Addd a mapping for searchplugin names to URLs in ubufox
  • If user switches the chrome search provider that has no mapping, this mechanism defaults to the last known search provider used.
• design online pages for:

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Google

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Yahoo

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Ask

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Wikipedia

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/UbuntuPackageSearch

• test and deploy online pages for:

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Google

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Yahoo

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Ask

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Wikipedia

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/UbuntuPackageSearch

• maybe make also map lang-country specific URLs so that we can deliver a localized search experience - where needed. Example URLs:

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Google/en_US

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Google/en_GB

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Google/en

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Yahoo/...

  • http://start.ubuntu.com/10.04/Wikipedia/...

• update ubuntu-docs/kubuntu-docs/xubuntu-docs etc. to generate absolute URLs for .css, .js, .png and other resources references from within the offline homepages

Comments

• [rickspencer3] Why would the home pages include Wikipedia and package search, but not Amazon and others?