Hi, I work with the online desktop team at Red Hat. I'd like to propose that starting with Fedora 8, the default browser start page be changed to a live web page centered on web search. Here's why I think this simple change makes sense: * 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. * Fedora-tuned search features. For example, we can make it easy to search for Creative Commons licensed content, a feature that should be especially interesting and relevant to Fedora users. Likewise, we could make it easy to search within, or highlight results from, certain sites likely to be more relevant to Fedora users (such as Fedora documentation, user discussion lists, and community forums). * Opportunity for ad-subsidized sponsorships. Fedora's large user audience is potentially valuable to web search providers whose business is to display contextual text ads next to search results. Fedora can pursue an affiliate relationship to share in the ad revenue for search traffic originating at the start page, thus enabling additional investment in the broader Fedora Project. * An ongoing connection to users. A hosted start page is a chance to have a live channel to communicate news or announcements to the Fedora user base (for example, a simple one-liner to announce the availability of a new release or a new community resource). We put together a working prototype in order to make the discussion concrete, which you can try out here: http://start.fedoraproject.org That design and functionality there is definitely not set in stone, but gets the basic idea across and would be a serviceable starting point for user testing. To try this out, there's only one small change required in the distribution itself, which is to swap the default URL in the browser configuration to http://start.fedoraproject.org. This switch is a time-sensitive issue with respect to Test2, since we'd like to field this in at least one and ideally two test releases before deciding to release it in a final Fedora version. Independent of the release cycle, and across all versions of Fedora, we can evolve the contents on the page, including discussing and investigating possible sponsorship/affiliate agreements. Those changes don't need to be bound to the distribution release cycle. Some further comments on points raised in prior discussions of this topic with the advisory board and community members earlier this year: * The change is only to the default. Just like now, users will be able to change the start page to whatever they like whenever they like. * 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). * Internationalization of the hosted start page and search results pages is certainly doable, just as with the local release notes. * Red Hat will supply the server infrastructure and bandwidth required for this project. * Starting with a hosted page featuring search prominently is already the default behavior of upstream Firefox on Linux, as well as Firefox on Mac and Windows. * 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 there are a number of details left to figure out, I think we understand this sufficiently well to merit fielding it for a test as the default start page in Test2. thanks, don _______________________________________________ fedora-advisory-board mailing list fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board
