Live Fedora start page proposal

[Donald Fischer]

On 8/28/07, Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com> wrote:
> >  * More useful to users.  The vast majority of the time when Fedora
> > users are launching a new browser, they're looking to do something on
> > the web, not to read the operating system release notes.  Thus, we've
> > proposed to put search front-and-center.
>
> The current default page has quite a bit more than just the release
> notes.  And I think that continuing to provide some of that high-profile
> linking to community sites and documentation is important.  Yes, they're
> in the toolbar, but the fact that they're in the page and with more
> words than just "Planet Fedora?  What's a planet?" is pretty
> important.
>
> That said, there's no reason we couldn't do that in the online page
> which also has search.

Yup, I think there's a good discussion to be had here on what exactly
should be on the page.  Personally I'm a fan of keeping it simple, but
I recognize that others will have good input.

> >  * There is already a link to the release notes in the default browser
> > bookmarks toolbar, which is visible by default, so the content
> > previously on the start page is still just one click away.  We could
> > explore featuring links to release notes or documentation in the start
> > page itself, though keeping the start page simple and lightweight
> > seems best (both for ease of use and performance reasons).
>
> FWIW, the current index.html is like 7.5k.  So I think we can probably
> have a little bit more than just a search entry and still have it be
> simple and lightweight :)

Sure, we haven't really optimized for the purposes of the current prototype.

> >  * Internationalization of the hosted start page and search results
> > pages is certainly doable, just as with the local release notes.
>
> I think that this needs to be more than doable and really has to be a
> requirement.  And that if we do it, we need to have that bit up and
> running and testable with test3, if not earlier (the advantage of it
> being hosted is that we can change it out more easily, right?)

Exactly.  I don't thing translating prior to Test3 would be a problem,
though we haven't actually engaged with the i18n team on this yet.

> >  * For users without Internet connectivity, we could do something
> > fancy to avoid showing an error message, though that would be more
> > than upstream Firefox does.  In fact we have prototyped modifications
> > to Firefox to achieve this, but our conclusion was that the additional
> > complexity is not justified.  Using a web browser without access to
> > the web seems to be a corner case and one in which a warning message
> > is appropriate!  In the offline case, local release notes would still
> > be available from the default bookmarks toolbar.  Tuning offline
> > behavior is an area that we could look at further in conjunction with
> > the community.
>
> While not as critical as internationalization, I do think we need to
> handle this nicely.  While it might seem like a corner case, something
> that continues to come up is starting the desktop with a browser already
> running.  At which case, you didn't start a web browser, you just logged
> in.  And for that, you want to be able to have a nice experience even if
> the network isn't up.

Sure, I'm confident that we can come up with a sane behavior here, and
ideally even push it upstream to Firefox so other distros and
platforms benefit as well.

don