Attention,
context,
continuity
What we learned trying to rethink the browser.
This is not a proposal to rebuild Flowstate. It is a record of territory explored: what was built, what I saw in it, where ideas collided with reality, what survived, and which paths may be worth walking again.
Flowstate was an experimental Firefox-derived browser built around Views, ViewGroups, Workspaces, River, Sessions, Mega Back, Set Aside / Restore, Focus states, and Companion. I joined after much of that foundation had been built. My principal contribution was as the replacement design lead: brainstorming with the team, helping synthesize and extend the work, connecting it to research and strategy, and presenting it to the larger organization.
People don't experience their work as tabs.
Browsers expose implementation objects. People experience activities: researching, writing, planning, comparing, wandering, stopping, returning, and finishing.
Stopping isn't finishing.
Set Aside meant: I am not doing this now, but I am not done. Save the activity, clear the working surface, and make it possible to resume later.
Revisit
Set Aside / Resume as general verbs. Thing → View → Activity → Session → Thread. A Thread is the intention that survives multiple sessions.
Attention has bandwidth.
Every element that asks to be noticed spends a finite resource. The interface therefore has a volume, not just a layout.
Attention belongs to the person.
Software may suggest, remember and assist, but the person decides what deserves attention. Focus should be self-defined rather than prescribed.
Revisit
A Signal control that changes UI volume in coordinated steps. Self-defined Focus states learned from repeated choices, then suggested rather than imposed.
Attention has depth.
Visual art supplies a useful model: foreground is immediate and detailed; middle ground surrounds the subject and can approach; background remains in awareness but is quieter, slower and predictable.
Software can let information approach and recede without disappearing.
Spotlight / Daylight / Starlight
- Spotlight — what has my attention now.
- Daylight — surrounding context, available and capable of approaching.
- Starlight — distant, stable orientation: goals and durable context.
Revisit
Distance = where something sits in attention. Prominence = how strongly it asks to be noticed. Approach / Recede · Emphasize / Quiet · Expand / Compress · Reveal / Suppress.
Give activity shape.
Flowstate was not simply restyling tabs. StageManager maintained Workspaces, Views, ViewGroups, workspace history, current state, navigation direction and a History Carousel.
Reality
Performance, discoverability, accessibility, browser architecture and restoration determine whether a spatial model feels credible. The source even warms likely destinations before selection to preserve perceived immediacy.
Gathering meaning.
The earliest Firefox View exploration began with fragments: incomplete, disconnected and distributed in value. The desired transformation was to remove noise, amplify signal, bring things into focus, connect them and create value over time.
Information accumulates. Meaning is gathered.
Reality
The data needed to infer relationships may be split across incompatible databases, retention rules, devices, services and privacy boundaries. A concept diagram can imply relationships a database cannot represent, a sync system cannot carry, or a privacy model should not infer.
Revisit
Signal = information relevant to the present intention. Can accumulated context produce meaning without indiscriminate collection?
Presentation is a user capability.
Customization usually means making software look the way I like. A stronger capability is: I can regulate how the digital world reaches me.
Type size, page width, content scale, density, saturation, contrast, motion and prominence can help construct an environment appropriate to my state, energy, ability, environment and intention.
Action → State → Behavior.
“Put notifications in the background” is an action. “Notifications are background” is a state. “New notifications arrive as tiny, quiet dots” is the resulting behavior.
Attention — Starlight / Daylight / Spotlight
Prominence — Quiet / Present / Assertive
Focus — Open / Engaged / Deep
Companion beside the activity.
Companion is broader than AI agent. A Companion is something or someone brought alongside an activity because they can contribute to it. The activity stays primary.
- A real person on a call.
- A specialist role: programmer, designer, researcher, editor.
- A historical or philosophical perspective grounded in documented work.
- A temperament: skeptic, optimist, critic, beginner.
- Salon — several people, agents, roles or perspectives assembled around an activity.
Reality
Context is powerful and dangerous. Privacy, consent, provenance, trust, model limitations and access boundaries determine what a Companion should know or do.
What reality taught us.
The useful story is not “great ideas versus compromise.” Ideas encounter the world. Sometimes reality blocks them; sometimes it improves them; sometimes it reveals that the idea itself is wrong.
- Technical — architecture, databases, synchronization, performance.
- Privacy / trust — enough context to help can conflict with minimizing what the system knows.
- Product — a beautiful interaction may be difficult to discover or explain.
- Measurement — what can be measured may not be the hypothesis being tested.
- Organizational — staffing, ownership, strategy, deadlines, investment thresholds.
- Temporal — sometimes the capability needed simply does not exist yet.
Good question, bad answer. Right need, wrong metaphor. Technically impossible then. We were early.
Working vocabulary, 2026.
Technology should understand what I am trying to do, preserve the context around it, and help me decide what deserves my attention now.
Three principles
Attention has bandwidth.
Attention has depth.
Attention belongs to the person.