Pin the web homescreen: no more drawers and scrolling issues

B2G OS Foxfooding
#1

It seems there’s no way to have the legacy (?) homescreen feature of “drawers” when switching the homescreen to the new “pin the web” one.

Drawers allowed to group icons, and then “close” the drawer (and then only the 6 first icons would appear, shrinked). This way you could have more icons on the same screen, and using drawers, never need to scroll your homescreen.

The issue with scrolling is:
1/ you need to find where your icon is, it’s not always in the same place
2/ it’s even worse with the new pin the web homescreen, where you could try to scroll up/down, but it also mixes some horizontal scrolling, sometimes switching you to the “pin the web page”.

I guess there’s many solutions to those issues: point 1/ could be solved by either reintroducing the “drawers”, or by allowing more columns (we only have the choice between 3 and 4 at the moment).
Point 2/ could be fixed by only allowing the scroll in one direction (vertical or horizontal) at a given time.

Thoughts? Did I miss something obvious?

Mathieu

#2

I think the homescreen has been rewritten from scratch for 2.6 and, due to time constraints, it doesn’t feature app grouping. So, it’s not a design choice but rather a temporary issue. I don’t know how the new homescreen is going to look like in the future, neither whether app grouping is going to be implemented as it was or in a different way. I guess UX and UI people will know more about that.

I agree with you on issue 2. Apart from usability, I think it’s horrible to see: it’s not clear anymore whether the homescreen is a column or a two-dimensional plane, and the scrollbar can move horizontally towards the center of the screen.