Talk:Firefox3/PRD

Content in Context

If you are seriously going to look at improving the content experience for users, then you need to look at putting and keeping content (pages cached, bookmarks, etc.) in contexts which are useful to the user. Folder based structuring of bookmarks, or date based ordering is not enough for someone to consider the whole, rather than as a jumble of disconnected pages. We need navigation type information (this page is sub to another, this page is in the same area of the site), we need purpose information from the user (why was I looking, what does it mean), we need automatic clustering of content found (cf Google News), we need ease of processing/mining the information. Ata minimum we need adhoc tagging of pages.

Core should probably be the concept of being able to cache the text (and maybe images) of all pages viewed, with versioning and reloading of new data. The user would be able to select/deselect/customise this (eg I'm researching topic x, I want everything I do stored) and be able to combine, summarise results.

Graphical display of the pages and interconnections found should also be included. Scrolling through stupidly long bookmark lists for something should be a thing of the past.

Think less page viewer centric, more knowledge corpus being addressed for purpose.

Freezing

One thing that I would like is the freezing problem firefox has when you download something and your download history is big and bloated. I know that I just need to do a cleanup but it's quite handy to have the list of completed downloads as it is quicker to open the download from the list than actually going to the directory. It would also be nice if it is date stamped. Just my 2 cents.

I would like to see a debug tool to investigate CPU time and memory usage of single addons. I use several addons and after 3/4 days Firefox really slows down (memory usage is around 500MB), I want to know what exactly causes this.

Drag and drop to Search bar suggestion

To go with 'One time search engine use', there should be an enhancement of the drag and drop procedure for dragging some text onto the search bar. Frequently I find myself having to interrupt my drag and drop because the search engine that I want to search with isn't selected, then select the correct engine and drag and drop again. A way to fix this without adding any extra UI would be to allow dragging and dropping of text to the search engine selection button; after a short delay it would open the search engines drop-down, whereupon the user could drag the text to one of the search engines. When the text is dropped onto one of the search engines, the search box would be populated with the dropped text, and the search initiated.

Extended download history management - suggestion

You could integrate the download manager as a sidebar. It would be even better to make the sidebar floating. This means it would only appear when the user moves the mouse pointer over the collapsed sidebar. You can take a look at netbeans or Visual Studio in order to get a feeling of floating sidebars.

Printing - suggestions

I often find the need to have Firefox print landscape for the user. When you are re looking at the print section of the Firefox code, could the CSS @page landscape/portrait function be understood. Often, the user will need to print 2 pages portrait and then a different page in landscape. It would be nice if it would just set to landscape before print dialog, but could ultimately be overridden by user from the dialog box. Thanks for your time

Can extensions be prevented from breaking other extensions?

The only feature I really want in Firefox 3 is to prevent a given extension from breaking or impairing the operation of other extensions.

As it stands today, there are numerous extensions, many generally included in most users' "must have" category, that interact in undesirable ways with other extensions. This is Firefox 2's biggest shortcoming!

I realize this will be difficult to achieve. But it's the only thing that's on my Firefox 3 wish list.

Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts

I concur with the previous comment - extension conflicts are becoming a big problem. One of the biggest conflicts is over the use of keyboard shortcuts. I'm the developer of Firebug, and one of the biggest complaints I get from users are that they aren't happy with the shortcuts I've chosen, usually because they conflict with shortcuts from other extensions or the OS itself. Some extensions (like Web Developer) have a limited way for users to change keyboard shortcuts, but this is really something that should be built into Firefox itself if you ask me.

Documentation note

On the main planning page you say:

FR: Add-On can be installed in fewer than 3 mouse clicks

How about change this to "at most 2 mouse clicks" as an aid to readers, so they come away with the number "2", which is what you really want them to be thinking of if you mean that 3 mouse clicks is too many.

Optimize User experience: Startup

With Fx2 we get quite a few complaints from users about slow startups. Mostly had to do with their networks or the config for add-ons & auto-updates. What those users bothered is that someone on a slow network may not 'see' their Fx start up for as long as a minute, thinking it is broken. Is there a way to postpone all net activity (including add-ons) until the GUI is fully loaded and visible? Sure would help the 'feel' of a fast application. Maybe make it configurable with a central option: "absolutely no net activity until i call a web address, please" would e.g. make sense for people who do only local browsing or live on costly on-demand network links.

Improvements to the download mechanism

1. Something similar to the "Download Statusbar" extension should replace the current implementation. Having the downloads in a separate tab or sidebar, as suggested by others, is also a good idea.

2. When downloading a file, there should be an option to save the link to that file in the same directory, for example under the name FILE-link.txt. Also, a user-supplied description should be saved, either in that file, or in a separate one. I hope someone comes up with an even better idea for easy access to all downloaded files, e.g. by using a small database which contains the link, the filename on disk, a user-supplied description, and the download time.

Improvements to the bookmarking mechanism

1) I'd like to display the Bookmarks Manager in a separate tab so that I can drag and drop links in a larger pane, and I do not need that much screen space.

(Note to author of 1), this is available by following the following link: [chrome://browser/content/bookmarks/bookmarksManager.xul])

2) There should be an option to sync all bookmarks with a bookmark store:

1. On a (private) web server using:
   1. ftp
   2. sftp
   3. ssh
   4. WEBDAV
   5. Another useful method
2. On a local or locally connected drive
   1. local hhd
   2. network attached storage
   3. flash thumb drive
3. Allow synchronisation of sub-trees between two machines. (e.g I want to synchronise my HTML bookmarks, between home and work, but not my banking or "friends" bookmarks.)
   1. Allow synchronisation to be in one direction only (e.g I want to sync from work to home but not the other way around)

Using that option, the bookmarks should first be loaded from that server after the browser is started and when the bookmark manager is called, as well as each time the bookmarks are changed (either after each change in the Bookmarks Toolbar or after closing the Bookmarks Manager) <NOTE each of these should be configurable>.

Remark: Seems this is already - at least partially - covered by the FR: "ability to synchronize bookmarks with remote service" on http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Firefox_Requirements.

Places (bookmarks)

This is how I see a future bookmarking system:

1) Tags - this will allow a bookmark to be at more than one place, it will place a bookmark in more than one 'folder', so you will still have hierarchal bookmarks

2) Later - a special tag (user-defined of course) that will store a page the user want to read later (for whatever reason, like saw it at work, but want to see it at home), this should have some time since the bookmark analogy, something like the color of the text goes from black to white in 30 days ( the time also should be user defined), the main reason for this is to alert the user to read it, after that time, the bookmark will be erased (or the user should be presented of a wway to store the bookmark on his system as definitive ( this is a brainstorm of the idea, it's all open for discussion ).

3) All of this should be able to sync between computers

Searching features in bookmarks

As it is bookmarks are fairly well set out with a couple of extensions that can help personalise it, however there is one big flaw when the list of bookmarks gets too long. With 200+ bookmarks the search capacities of Firefox would be much appreciated if they were more useful.

we need options so that the search bar in the bookmarks sidebar searches not only in a page's title but also

• URL
• Key words
• Description.

(Possibly an extra tab in the options page for this feature.)

Also Search Results need to have the following features

• Path in bookmarks tree where bookmark is stored
  (this is vital when having hundreds or thousands of bookmarks and want to re-sort them or re-arrange them. Currently you can find them using search, but you have no idea where they are located so as to re-organize them into their appropriate groups.)
• The ability to drag search results into specific bookmark folders, also would be a great improvement for when re-organizing bookmarks
• Folders should also have the keyword field assigned to them for searching

(I do a fair amount of research, many times I collect times of interest throughout the week and then need to organize them later in to the folders I have created for those topics, or as I get more date need to re-organize topics into more concise pieces, currently it is quite a chore to do this)

Security

Recently, there has been an increasing amount of security problems discovered in Firefox. Since September 2006, there hasn't been a month without an update fixing several severe security problems. While I welcome these problems being found and fixed, I am a little worried about the quality of the Firefox code. Security problems get exploited more and more agressively. Many users originally switched from IE to Firefox for security reasons. That's why I feel it is important to make sure that the current code is relatively secure. While absolute security probably cannot be reached it is important to get the code to a quality level where new security issues come up at a much slower rate, hopefully no more then one severe issue per year. Making sure existing things work isn't as exciting as creating something new. That's why the new Feature list should be kept relatively limited so more resources can be used to improve the security of the existing code instead of adding new, potentially bugy or dangerous features.

Internationalization/i18n

Thai

Thai line/word-breaking issues has been a major drawback of Mozilla product for a long time (since Netscape opensourced in 1998). Nowaday, Mozilla is the last major open source project without Thai line/word-breaking capability (OpenOffice and Konqueror solved this). More details on this bug could be found in this bugzilla bug.

This issue may be fixed by Robert O'Callan new text rendering engine. But he can't guarantee it will be finished in time. Setting this issue in high priority goal might be help. ROC and Mozilla i18n guys may have some opinions on this.

GUI: Quick access to cookie policy for the current site

Being a little paranoid, I like to allow cookies only to the web sites I find trustworthy, and even then I only grant cookies if it has substantial benefit for me (comfort or that an important site would not work without it completely).

Often I find myself denying a site a cookie and afterwards realizing it was not a so-good idea. To find the blocking rule for the server is then rather hard, as there is no search view and most servers start with "www". There should be a quick way to adjust the cookie policy for the current site.

I'm thinking of something similar to the button the NoScript Addon is putting in the bottom right corner of the screen, where you can change the script execution settings for the given site.

Government Audience

Although you may be bunching it in with Enterprise Users, I suggest to add a Government audience. Government has some significant differences from the other four audiences that should be addressed.

ogg theora/vorbis playback

It would be great if ogg theora playback made it into Firefox 3 :) ... at the FOMS conference where open media developers meet last Thursday and Friday we identified the inclusion ogg theora into firefox as important goal. [1] An early version of liboggplay was demoed at the conference. Liboggplay is a small statically linked ogg theora, vorbis and possibly Speex playback library. I will query about logistics in the newsgroup.

Security concerns: Quite frankly, both the ogg theora and ogg vorbis codecs aren't particulary popular. So i'm not sure if adding them is worth exposing the end user to the risk of one of those codecs containing security relevant bugs. As far as i know there haven't been any such bugs found yet in these codecs but i suspect that's mostly because they aren't that popular. What efforts has the ogg team gone through to make sure liboggplay is secure?

Tabbed Browsing

Here is something I would like to see in the new version:

Since you have tabbed browsing, and the tabs are movable (within the same window), would it be possible to 1) get one of the tab to form a new window and 2) move the tabs across windows? (I don't mind having to refresh inbetween, but a lot of sites have frames that covers the actual URL so navigating after copy and pasting the URL may becomes troublesome sometimes) (most of them comes from opening too many tabs and I would like to be able to reorganize the tabs into different windows)

Download Manager

1. The download manager and download details window both look just ugly and awkward (that's about interface). It is well worth thinking about shaping it up and fixing the bug if download is being suspended (by other traffic, not by the means of pausing it), the progress bar disappears;
2. Maybe it could be disintegrated as a separate application, which is being loaded whenever a download takes place, so that closing the browser or its crash doesn't interfere with downloads;
3. Last but not least a necessary feature is the possibility to do these two things:
   1. To pause the downloads and continue them after closing and re-opening the download manager
   2. To download a single file from multiple mirrors (I mean the possibility to add them manually)
4. A nice to have feature could be a possibility to incorporate a web-spider (an application, which saves the current documents and all linked documents (for example, 1st level directly linked, all levels directly linked on the same server, etc...)) into the DL manager, so that user can have a local copy of an useful webpage.

Some general changes

• It's worth to be self-critical and review the possibilities to react to the popular Firefox Myths, especially looking at the security and web standards sections.

• It's worth to see Firefox loading much faster and have a bit smaller memory footprint, especially on older machines.

• A 64-bit version of the browser is really welcome!

• A possibility to make incorporation of other rendering engines and switching between them, e.g., MSHTML, KHTML is very welcome. Maybe it's possible to add a flexible interface to enable this?

Typo?

Is openID, Cardspace, identity support in password manager p1 or p2 as the appendix and p1 areas are conflicting

Make MAF a default part of Firefox3

Mozilla Archive Format (http://maf.mozdev.org/)

Mozilla Archive format is something that is very important to may users It allows you to save WebPages or groups of WebPages in Tabs for Firefox. (For example many times people want to save an article or mail one to someone and they send a bookmark and the site goes dead)

It also allows you to read and write .mht the Microsoft Web Archive format.

The reason that this should be added are important:

1. Allows users keep a archive of WebPages in a single file for reference purposes (recipts, verification of what pages used to have on them, reference for working java script examples, portfolios of work done etc.

1. Allows users to migrate from IE to Firefox on windows or Linux (or other platforms supported by Firefox) and ultimately have choice to move to other OS platforms

1. Increase the popularity of this format to allow plugins to be developed for Google desktop, beagle etc. So that users will be able to search inside these documents from the file system

Reasons that this needs to be moved out of a Extension:

1. This Extension no longer works on Linux and has not been updated in years

1. The current Extention needs to be hacked to even be able to continue working on windows with Firefox 2.0

1. Promotion of Firefox, many people I know of rely on the IE .mht format, when a new version of Firefox came out and the extension didn't work anymore they moved back to IE. Having this as built in feature could insure this would continue to work across builds.

Allow live bookmarks to be created and edited manually

Currrently iyou cannot manually create a live bookmark by using Add bookmark
needs to be a checkbox on creation when making a bookmark that says it is a live bookmark) and one in editing bookmark section as well

For example if you add a bookmark and its location is live bookmark: http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

It does not show up as a live bookmark but just gives xml type error if you click on it like This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.

I have had several occasions also when importing bookmarks had them break
(so no longer a live bookmark)

Allow popups from this site until end of session option

Currently when a popup is detected a yellow bar appears at the top of the html page with an options button when the "Options" button is pressed a menu is displayed with the following:

• Allow popups from www...
• Edit Popup Blocker Options...
• Don't show this message when popup are blocked
• ________________________________________________
• Show www... (note this does not always appear)

My Suggestion would be
Add an extra menu item and modify the item below the line in the menu like below:

• Allow popups from www...
• Edit Popup Blocker Options...
• Don't show this message when popup are blocked
• ________________________________________________
• Show www.... (ALWAYS have this appear)
• Allow popups from www... until end of session

Questions About Printing FRs

1. "FR: pages should break without dividing paragraphs". What does this mean?
2. "FR: print layout should look like rendered layout". What does this mean?

It might be useful to have an option to dump the exact screen layout to a printer. However in general that won't result in nice-looking printouts; lines will straddle page boundaries, and columns will turn out very badly. It also means saying that we're not going to support CSS print-specific styles.

Leveraging Places

Some Fx team members met and talked about ways to leverage Places in Fx3. The notes are here.

This short-list is the product of taking the salient themes from the Places talk at the Firefox summit, and condensing them into specific N/FRs. These are the potential N/FRs that came out of the meeting.

Discoverability

• NFR: Improve discoverability of where you've been before.
• FR: List bookmarks in location bar dropdown
• FR: "see more" under the last 5 hist entries
• FR: Sort location bar dropdown by MRU (if user uses bms, then put those first, then stars, then history)
• FR: Sort location bar dropdown by MRVisited (and other metadata)

Search

• NFR: Search across the "local web experience"
• NFR: Search for things based on when you saw it, what it's called, what you were searching for, where it came from, whether you found it interesting.
• FR: Unified results from searching multiple datastores (bm, hist, tags/stars)
• FR: UI for when/where you want that search
• FR: UI for parsing/viewing the results
• FR: Add favicons to location bar dropdown, and other results
• FR: Richer search of history in location bar (include page title and full-text-indexing of content)
• FR: Type-ahead search based on multiple criteria

Starring/Tagging

• NFR: Mark something of interest
• NFR: Unmark it
• NFR: View and search pages of interest
• FR: Add/edit/delete interestingness
• FR: Annotate a page, to say that it's interesting

Horizontal/Vertical Split View of Browser Tab-Pages

I haven't been able to find a feature in ffox, if it already exists, that will allow me to split the page of each browser tab view. This is very convenient for, among other things, to look at the column headers when viewing & browsing data of long tables.

MY SUGGESTION WOULD BE:

I love to watch movie trailers with Quicktime. But every time I install Quicktime, my Mozilla Browser CAN'T play some videos and animations. Or worse, there are some pages I can't even see.

Instead, a quicktime logo with an interrogative sign appears. I downloaded Microsoft Internet Explorer, and this did not happen with this browser. That's how I know it's the Mozilla Browser the one who has this problem.

Please solve this problem!!!

Reload/Stop in a single button

in flock this button is by default, maybe this option could be optional.

Tabbed browsing & misc

Tabbrowsing:

• The name «Tab locking» is already reserved for another feature, however let's define a new necessary feature with the same name here: possibility to lock a tab to prevent its accidental closing - user needs to unlock it first, then close;
• Session saving - like some commercial browsers already have - the possibility that the browser can be closed along with the tabs, but after re-opening it, content of all the prevously opened tabs appears again;
• Multiple homepages to open in different tabs @ browser startup.

Note: this function already is available in firefox 2. Misc:

• Maybe it could be just useful to share the temporary internet files folder with msie?

Ubuntu Linux as P1 Platform

Given that Ubuntu appears to be by far the most popular end-user Linux distribution, and its targeted audience and user experience goals are the most closely aligned with ours, it should be a P1 platform in addition to Red Hat Linux (or instead of it, if we can only have one P1 Linux platform).

Suggested Guidelines for new versions

There should be a lot of minor versions (in the form 2.x.y.z) before we have another "big bang" to version 3. Reserve the big changes for when a new version of XHTML or CSS needs to be implemented. The problems with the "big bang" approach are...

1) A LOT of stuff changes, and "everything you know is wrong", like the interface and admin changes in Win2K => WinXP => Vista.

2) it takes forever to get it done (e.g. Vista)

3) because you're putting in so much new code into a "point zero" release, you can be certain that it will have bugs/security-holes. And that's why many people are suggesting to stay away from Vista until Service Pack 1.

The linux kernel is an example of small incremental improvements over time adding up to a major improvement. As I write this, it's at 2.6.18.r-6.

1) Change is managable and gradual.

2) A non-security change can be made as part of a minor version bump NOW, without having to wait years for the next "big bang".

3) Linux versus Windows security... 'nuff said.

Except for basics like rendering engine and overall GUI, as much as possible in the "features" end should be moved out to extensions. One stated goal of V3 is...

• Delivering the right set of features - not too many or too few. (The goal is to create a useful browser, not a minimal browser.)

The problem with that goal is that if you ask 6 different users, you'll get half-a-dozen versions of "the right set of features". Move "features" to extensions, and distribute Firefox with a "standard bundle" of extensions. Then let people add/delete/replace "features" to their hearts' content.

64bit builds

64-bit CPUs for end users are a reality. It'd be a shame if firefox 3.0 didn't support a rock solid 64 bit experience. Even OO.org supports it! Right now there are issues...(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=237202)