User talk:Marcke

Introduction

Below you will find the functionality I deem important to be implemented in a new version of firefox to make Firefox your "Future Online Desktop".

These are an overview of my personal ideas and some synthesis of ideas of other persons.

Please not that for the moment I only drafted some ideas, and have not made decent sentences out of them.

User Profile Log-in

Provide the ability to log-in with some personal settings. Default you should log-in without these.

This profile should contain:

    * saved passwords
    * bookmarks
    * extensions
    * My Online Documents

Let system be able to login automatically to your "Firefox Account" (Cf. Hotmail account or Gmail account as I predict Google will come up with an Office solution based on FF in the future)

Also maybe enter a session time-out possibility for in public places.

Let me get into some more detail on some parts:

Saved Bookmarks & Passwords

Bookmarks could be saved on your own web-page using FTP-protocol to retrieve them. They could be saved in some password protected XML-file.

My Documents Online

As mentioned before, there should be a My Documents-like folder within FF, that synchronises with a FTP-server, or other kind of storage facility.

Saving of Extensions

Your Extensions could be saved into some kind of package, as suggested here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/User_talk:Autodmc#Lean_and_Mean_vs._Super_Install.

Bundling Packages with FF & Re-Distributing

To build further upon the idea above: The user should be able to make his own install-files bundling his prepared extensions & Settings packages together with his firefox. This would make it easier for Companies or Universities to easily deploy a firefox with good suitable extensions concerning eg. Blackboard, Webmail, etc, to be distributed to students.

If universities make good extensions, this will make a lot of academic students use FF. And as we all know, they are the future decision makers in companies.

This would also encourage the distribution of firefox on other places than the FF website, and thus reaching a much larger population.

This idea is also found on the following wiki: http://wiki.mozilla.org/User_talk:Autodmc#Lean_and_Mean_vs._Super_Install But mine has a more entreprise/University centred approach.

Integrated Office Functions

Platform Independency

Integrating Office-functions into Firefox will lessen the dependence on Operating Systems, and make a platform independent, a similar approach as Java has adopted for its' framework.

This will eventually encourage more people to try out Linux-systems, as their most-used applications are integrated with their FF anyway.

This would allow for the possibility to even run programs as music players, spreadsheets, ...

Online Office Systems

There are allready a lot of companies building or developing an online office system, such as Google, Jotspot(http://www.jotspot.com) and Zoho(http://www.zoho.com).

These applications could give inspiration as to what functions to incorporate.

Some ideas I have are:

• Supporting the integration and integrations of eg. Google docs with OpenOffice.

• Allowing users to open Thunderbird as a tab in FF, and incorporating a link about Thunderbird more prominently into the UI of FF.

• Allowing a "Save to Online Folder"-right click function for saving documents. And off-course allowing this Online (FTP?/GSpace?)-Folder to be specified.

• Allowing the Google Docs Function, PageCreator, ... to be accessed from the google toolbar, as some kind of Extra Layer of tabs.

• A Frontpage-like cisual webpage developer extension to easily create webpages.

• Distributing FF in a lite and a more full version

• Building in the FireFtp-client. Or at least making some kind of Menu with recommended extensions, and a link to all extensions.

• A torrent Download-client, as in Opera

• A built-in web-based Messenger-extensions that connects networks, like Trillian does.

• See a preview of a Tab when moving over it (Cf. Opera)

• Allowing a preview of all opened tabs in one page. (don't know source anymore)

• Allowing all tabs to be arranged next to each other.

• IE Tab Extension, and likewise external application loaders. Loading applications from inside FF will speed the transition into some kind of platform.

This will also enable users who access their webmail from inside msn to use FF, or who use Microsoft updates online. There should also be more explanation about how to change the fact that when you press Inbox in Messenger, you are directed to IE. (I know it is possible to change, but haven't found out how yet.) If they use IE from inside FF, they will build a more affectionate relation with FF, and this would also lessen the need for Public access points to have links to IE as well on their desktop.