Mozilla Design Challenge Announced: Design a Home Tab for Firefox 4

There's no place like home. The Home Tab, that is. The Mozilla Labs team is hosting a design challenge to come up with an innovative design for the Home Tab in Firefox 4. This is a new feature for Firefox 4, a tab that will always be open to display information about the browser. The challenge is open to all, developer skills aren't necessary.

Many users default to "portals" like Yahoo! or an iGoogle page as a home page, and make use of widgets meant for the masses. The Mozilla team is looking to provide a more personal experience. The question is "what are some interesting uses of a Firefox-hosted start page?" Since the Home Tab will have a bit more access to the user's data and be open to wider customization, the sky is the limit. Portals make for an interesting starting point, but winning designs will likely go farther than a standard start page.

You don't need to be a developer to enter. Just provide a mockup of the idea along with a video less than three minutes long to explain the idea. Templates for wirefames and mockups are provided on the site.

The Moz folks are making full use of social media with the challenge. Participants are to upload ideas to YouTube, Vimeo, or Flickr, and then tag the idea with "mozconcept." You'll also need to fill out the submission form to make sure the idea is considered.

Winners will be chosen by popular vote, starting on February 15th. Submissions are due by February 14, and the winners will be announced on March 15th. If you're interested in real-time updates, you can follow @mozconcept on Twitter.

Prizes, if any, for the challenge aren't listed in the announcement. However, if you use Firefox heavily, having your design accepted might be reward enough.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.