Firefox:2.0 Product Planning

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This page is intended to collect ideas for features that we'll be investigating and evaluating for inclusion in Firefox 2 and 3.


Brainstorming Session Rough Notes

completely unsorted, unorganized and completely raw

  • auto-save text area persistance
  • xulrunner - fx2 or fx3
  • stub installers
  • identity
    • single sign-on
    • password and cookie management
  • annotation of web content
  • tabbed browsing
  • session saver
  • search improvements
  • rss view and management
  • extensions security
    • white listing and black listing (of both extensions and plugins)
    • third-party signing of extensions by mozilla
  • instrumentation
    • history navigation
    • install/uninstall
  • spell check
  • notifcation/status/security UI
  • anti-phising
  • aging population accessibility
    • smart font sizing
    • real page zoom
  • "find" and other integration for web apps and text areas
  • user directed zoom windows
    • panning vs. scrollbars
  • Extensions
    • APIs and versioning
    • "options" management
  • improving themes/skinning capabilities
  • Gecko performance/footprint/benchmarks
    • "s5" example
  • developer tools
    • venkman
    • DOM inspector
    • embedded content accessibility
  • app integration
  • os integration
  • bittorrent/p2p capabilities
    • locating content
    • participating
  • greasemonkey-like content manipulation
    • site specific options
    • consumer accessibility
  • transactional DOM
  • adblock and remote filter sets
  • bookmarks and history navigation and management
    • scrapbook or grabbag concept
    • content management, tagging, ease of use
    • history navigation
    • meta data
    • full-text search
    • implicit filtering for relevance
    • remote/sharing APIs and integration pts
    • auto-linking/smart tagging
    • preserving DOM state
    • baynesian training
    • portabile profile
  • auto-complete from:
    • middle of word
    • anywhere in UI
    • local filenames
  • download manager
    • parse/resume
    • schedule
    • p2p support
  • device and application synching
  • surfacing page info
    • ease of content acquisition
    • rss detection
    • media type detection
  • leveraging micro-formats to drive automation
  • better use of cache
  • offline mode
    • browsing
    • apps
  • portable versions of apps
    • USB, zip drivers
  • intro/tutorial mode
  • bluetooth support
    • send url or content to device (pda, phone)
  • page change notification
  • pre-cognitive fetches

Background Materials / Suggestions

Tutorial mode

There's a bit of a dilemma where explanitory and cautionary messages are concerned: They are essental for novices but frustrating for pros, even if only shown once. At the moment, a good example within Firefox eludes me (though I'm sure there are some), but the one that comes to mind is the drive root hiding that WinXP does on first startup. Novices really shouldn't be messing with that, but any experienced user has a pretty good idea what's safe and what's not, especially if they're coming from another installation of WinXP. In fact, WinXP has a bunch of that kind of message, to the point where you find yourself wishing for a button somewhere labelled "I am not an idiot!"

The problem here is that the company that shall not be named has decided to be user friendly to the point where you expect an airbag when it crashes, leaving the experts banging their heads on the padded walls. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the command-line *nixes, which come with no obvious user instruction at all. The novice is left perplexed, especially as the only obvious command (help) is usually of no help at all.

Now, both ends of the spectrum have their uses, hence it makes sense to use both. I suggest giving a prompt on first launch (per profile) that allows you to select from "Full tutorial / New to the web", "Firefox tutorial / New to Firefox", "New feature tutorial / New to this version", and "No tutorial / Guru" (aka my "I am not an idiot!" button from above). Basically, they all specify a level of messages to show. Full Tutorial should include everything that a new user needs to know to start browsing the web. Firefox tutorial should concentrate on pointing out where the elements that they're familiar with have gone, including that Bookmarks=Favorites, Options(=Preferences) is under Tools, etc. New to this version points out new features and changed behaviors (might want to include a way to specify which version they're coming from rather than assuming the most recent). No tutorial, naturally, turns it all off.

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