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 ==F

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.

• How about a splash screen like Gnome/KDE that tells whats going on? I personally use the Splash extension, but its not quiet verbose.

• This would be useful, if the slowdown is not due to the slowliness of Firefox itself. For me, IE takes 5 seconds to load. Firefox - 35. That is too much, with no clear benefit. Also, I've noticed a much heavier CPU use by Firefox, compared to IE, when starting up and when opening pages. But that's another topic.

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 hdd
   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.

3) Duplicate bookmark folder names are possible. Not good to manage :)

4) I would love to see a star rating mechanism for pages (mimic iTunes). In functional terms, by assigning a rating to a page, the user would automatically bookmark the page. The bookmarks manager could display and optionally allow the sorting of bookmarks according to ratings. This should be easier to do with the new bookmark storage backend.

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 ). The "Later" bookmarks should automatically become accessible offline. When you are temporarily disconnected, they provide you with content.

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 personalize 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)
• Add a simply button to clear the text and the possibility to use the [esc]-control

I realy would like to see the option to search in the bookmarks with the websearch bar so you have one collum with the webresults and possible a second one with the results from the bookmarks and bookmarks-tags in it

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 buggy or dangerous features.

Icon Size

It would be nice to have the Firefox Startup Icon be 125x125 (for windows) or 512x512 (for whatever upcoming Apple OS uses 512x512 icons for its dock). The icon size could alternatively be chosen in the settings.

Integrated Text to Speech

It would be pretty advantageous for many people to have a native integrated Text to speech feature. It could reside in the "View" menu, because it allows people to "view" text with sound. It could Read from selection, field, or whole page. It could be optimized for Wikipedia, by reciting the contents of the article, then it could recite it, saying if a it was starting a new section and such.

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.

Another possibility might be next to the bookmark start on the URL bar, which would be useful to show if the user has cookies for that site (just as it shows if the site is in the user's bookmarks).

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? == Here: May I respectfully disagree! Ogg is a great format, the compression algorithm makes very compact files, the quality is one of the best, and the tools for creating OGG VORBIS files are open-source. Its only draw-back (that I am aware of) is the requirement for some CPU power, (say equivalent to at least a Pentium or Athlon 800 Mhz). But supporting OGG VORBIS, Firefox will help to make popular a great format. Furthermore O.V does not have the MP3, and other proprietary formats Copyrights issues!

FLAC is also a great format, great quality and Losseless, similar to Ogg Vorbis... But files are quite larger.

NOTE: THE BBC has been recently promoting on its web site, MicroSoft proprietary format. Many users complained and asked the BBC to consider an "open-format", and lately the BBC said they will. This will allow open source browsers (like Firefox) to give access to "open-formats" video. ==

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) == 3) In tabbed browsing, I often "jump" from a tab, to an other tab... and need to come back: uneasy when may tabs are open. May I suggest:

a) That each tab has a number, (say a  letter: one character would suffice).
   Deleting a tab, would imply to NOT rename the tabs...(in my view), unless user want to. (Is it a need there).
b) That there is a "stack of tab numbers" with the capability ti "unwind this stack" (going back to the previous stack, onward).

Indeed, there may be a better implemenation, the basic idea being tab naming! Note that tab navigation would be better if it could be done with either mouse, or/and (BETTER in my view), from a keyboard action. Thanks ==

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? Auto-switching would be ideal ie switching to the IE engine when you go to the windows update site.

• It would be useful to add some options to auto-completion. For a single form i would like to clear its history (for example a day I mistyped my login, and every time i have two choices but i don't want to clear all the forms). It would be also useful to say that i don't like auto-completion in a specific form (for example when asking for credit card number)

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
• FR: When downloaded a file, put its url in the properies tab (right-click).

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).

Agreed

I use Mandriva and am horrified that "Linux variants" is only a P2 requirement, I don't see how you can make Linux less important and still say you are trying to remain true to open-source, Windows and Mac are not open-source, yet you make them more important than Linux

Agreed too

I think there are about 20 times more linux-users than mac-users using Firefox, so it's very very strange that Linux is only P2... A better KDE-integration like kDialog for opening/saving files or a KDE printing dialog would be nice too and the source looks like this would be very easy to implement.

Strong Affirmation

As a long-time FireFox user and supporter who plans to code for FireFox, I am bewildered to see Linux only at P2. Even Windows 2000 is above all the Linux distributions combined! Aren't you aware that Linux-users are some of the best coders the world?

Just last week, I was considering testing out Opera as a change, but in the end the prime reason I stayed with FireFox was because of the fact it is open-source software.

Should we supporters, via donating and praising, see no returned support in the form of increased priority for Linux, we would take as betrayal to not only the cause for open-source ideals, but to the entire Linux community. Best wishes.

Basic System Info: Fedora 7 w/ the KDE Desktop.

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)

Corporate installer and centralized configuration

Without a comprehensive, friendly,and well-documented unattended install and management system Firefox will never see widespread use and distribution in the corporate world.

Here are some thoughts to help address these issues:

I would like to suggest that the developers working on Firefox 3 put a lot of emphasis on creating a good method for automated installs and upgrades. With Firefox 2.0.0.x right now the installer packaging is part of the build process. Administrators trying to make their own customized installs have to do a lot of work to learn NCIS, modify the install script, and then build their own version. The installer packaging needs to be separate from the build process and allow post-build customization much like prior versions of Mozilla and Firefox.

I have seen a lot of implementations using .msi installers and group policy templates for the Windows build. FrontMotion has done some great work along these lines - please see http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/fmfirefox.htm for details. I think a more vendor-neutral solution to the corporate-type install should be in order given Firefox's cross-platform heritage. Many companies have multiple OS types to support now, so why not take a different route from Microsoft's preferred method?

I would like to see an official Mozilla re-packaging tool that could include add-ons, updated files, and additional files to official releases.

Along the central management line I would like to have a GUI utility that configured every feature that could be centrally managed. The GUI would create a config file that could be placed on a web server or file system. The packaging tool would provide a way to define the location of the config file. Custom configurations for different users/groups could be accomplished by adding some variable determiners to the config GUI and config file. The configuration file could key some features off user, group membership, computer name, etc. It should be a config file with the possibility of multiple configurations nested in it, especially if this config file is to be hosted on a file system. Config files hosted on a web server could use CGI scripts, etc. to serve up a custom configuration file.

Most (if not all) of the underlying functionality for automated installs and centralized management is already built-in to Firefox. It has never been comprehensively embraced with tools that would make it easy for network admins to take control of Firefox and deploy it in their organizations. Why should administrators keep reinventing the wheel by creating their own installers and install methods when simple tools could be created and reused by everyone?

Thanks for reading my rant...

Multiple Home Pages in Firefox

G'day,

How about the possibility of having "multiple home pages" (start pages) in Firefox?

For instance, every time I jump online (or open Firefox) there are multiple pages that I have a look at, such as web mail, Slashdot, and some other news pages and forums. I can only set one of these as my home page, so that the content of the page is immediately rendered in the browser. As for the remaining pages that I want to have a look at, well, I progressively step through my array of bookmarks. I would say that this likely goes for many of us out there.

Now, wouldn't it be great to be able to define the number of home pages (start pages) in Firefox? Rather than having one home page, what if we could define any number (or a reasonable amount) of home pages that are opened up as individual tabs when starting Firefox? The presence of tabs in Firefox means that there is the potential to realize this feature with minimal effort.

Such a feature could be further enriched by allowing the end-user to customize "when" particular home pages are opened. For instance, in the morning there might be a given set of home pages that I would like to view when starting Fox, which is different to the set of home pages that I wish to view on my breaks, or in the afternoon. We can see that each of these instances throughout the day can be easily defined as time intervals, that have a list of home pages associated to them.

cheers, Amedeo

There's an extension that will do almost what you want: Morning Coffee.

This can be done in Firefox

Go to Tools, Options, Main, Home Page, and enter the list of URLs you want to open each time you open Firefox, separated with a "|" character (without the quotes). For example:

http://www.google.com/|http://www.gmail.com/|http://www.mozilla.org/

Firefox currently out of consideration on Vista, until it gets low-rights security model

No-one who understands the basics of the security architecture of Vista and IE7's protected mode will currently consider using a browser other than IE7 right now, unless security is not a concern for them. There will of course be a number of naive users and those for whom security is not a consideration who will continue to (try to) use Firefox, but right now its days are numbered on Windows.

The number one priority for Firefox v.next has to be to regain the Windows platform by getting a fully-worked out, low-rights protected mode architecture _done_, and quickly. Everything else is irrelevant IMHO, and the clock is ticking.

Best,

Cecil Ward.

DIST-001b - Uninstall

"Ability to lock in branding (cannot be uninstalled easily)".

hopefully i'm just misunderstanding this comment, but...

i noticed this on the Firefox3/Product Requirements Document in the distribution section. is this a good idea? I thought firefox was supposed to stay away from the bad ideas of IE...

my suggestion is to make it easy as hell to uninstall. make people use it because they like it, not because it's difficult to uninstall, and integrates into the users system so that firefox can "lock in branding".

Bug Report on Win XP -Tablet PC 2005SP2, keyboard issues...

I have a bug issue that I can not see as reported as yet.

I get this bug when using GranParadiso/3.0a4 on Windows XP - Tablet PC 2005SP2.

I should have access to two on-screen keyboards, a fixed one (which I'm using now - but it takes up 20% of the total screen before browser buttons etc.) or a smaller floating pop-up one that floats near to where I select to type...

I also have this same issue in Gmail and advised them but as yet have still had no joy.

Thanx for your time...

Neno

Live RSS Feeds on Bookmarks Toolbar links

I would like to suggest this. Many websites use RSS feeds, but in firefox the RSS feeds take up room on the toolbar and it looks generically the same. I believe it would be more efficient if one had a website bookmarked on the bookmark toolbar to enable an option to also have a live feed from that book mark, that perhaps shows when a person hovers over the link for an amount of time or clicks only the icon. That would save room and create more convenience for a person to follow updates on a website.

Geral.

Addresses Preview Improvement

This is a simple usability feature that will improve a lot the user experience when typing a new address in the address bar. Would be great if it just match not only the whole sequence, but *any* part of the history addresses.

Eg.:

When typing "wiki", it would suggest (obviously based on the history): - http://wiki.mozilla.org - http://www.cin.ufpe.br/wiki - http://www.photo.wiki.com - http://www.wikipedia.com

It will avoid having to type all the prefix before what really matter: The "wiki" word. It is a real problem for me because a have to type all the prefix "http://www.cin.ufpe.br/" to get suggestions about the subdomains I want, like "http://www.cin.ufpe.br/course1" or "http://www.cin.ufpe.br/course2" etc. Also sometimes I don't remember exactly the address, just typing the "main word" will help me to find out. I think you've got the idea! =)

The suggestions should also be ranked by the number of access, etc...

Keep the name Firefox instead of Grand Paradiso

Please, I hope it's not too late to preserve the Firefox name. "Firefox" already means "the second most popular web browser", it's short, easy to pronounce (in spanish and english at least) and it's cool. Finally, the word "Firefox" has a dollar price. Don't throw it away (or sell it).

I missed the word Firefox in my taskbar. Please use the name Grand Paradiso in the version name or use a name like "Firefox3", "Firefox 3 - Grand Paradiso" or "Firefox Grand Paradiso".

ummm, "Gran Paradiso" is just a codename...

"Gran Paradiso" is just the codename for the alpha releases of Firefox 3.0. Once it's ready to go final, it will still be called Firefox like always.

PLZ SUPPORT WIN98

PLENTY OF PEOPLE IN INDIA STILL USING WINDOWS 98 WHY U NOT SUPPORT THAT OS ? PLEASE CONCERN THIS - DIEHARD FAN OF FIREFOX

Windows 98 is an unsupported OS anyway

Microsoft has already dropped support for Windows 98 anyway. If you don't mind running an outdated, unsupported OS then why would you mind running an older version of Firefox on it?

Open New Tab Right Next the Parent Tab

I think it's very useful: First enable the "New pages on new tabs" instead of "New pages on new window" by default (most of users don't know how to do this)

Then, please make that new links open right next the parent tab, not in the end of the tabs in a window. Also, when closing a tab it should back to the parent tab or the last tab viewed not the rightest tab as it is. Frequently I have to drag and drop the new tab to the position near the parent tab to keep my navigation organized (similar things grouped).

Auto-hide Search Bar

It's inconvenient having to close the search bar (CRTL + F) which it's now being used. It should auto-hide smoothly after few minutes...

Multiple Files Upload

Firefox should support a browser for multiple files upload! I only have this programming in flash...

Print Events

The addition in JavaScript of the onbeforeprint and onafterprint events would be very useful. This would allow web developers the flexibility to make page changes specific to a printed web page. Most users do not use printer friendly links, especially less tech savvy users, and they should not be denied the same print specific layouts by using file->print.

I would think these events should fire on:

Shortcut key (control-p)

Click on print button, if on toolbar

File -> Print

The argument could be made that this should be out of the specific web pages' hands. The current non-implementation gives the print functionality via the browser's print operations a what-you-see-is-what-you-get printout. If this requirement is deemed critical for users, I would argue for a configuration setting, either in about:config or the print dialog, to force the print of the page "as-is", defaulted to false. This would simply not fire the onbeforeprint and onafterprint during a print operation. I would think that most or all users would prefer a printer friendly page automatically, and if they insisted on an exact printout, would be willing to discover the setting to do so.

Thank you kindly for consideration in this matter.

Improved DHTML performance

You are probably all working very hard on this, so I might be pointing out the obvious. But I'm really concerned about Firefox' performance on DHTML level. I'm a web developer that dares to push the limits of a browser, and, although I've always put a "Works best in Firefox" logo on every application I've made, I simply can't do it this time. Even IE6 is rendering the site and moving the elements better then Firefox is, and IE7 works like a charm! (If you want to see what I mean: http://game.dolumar.be/ )

Back Button Open In New Tab functionality

A feature I would like to see in ongoing versions of Firefox is to use the Back button to load the previously accessed page into a NEW tab. Thus if Page A has links to pages A1 and A2, and I follow a link to Page A1, I would like to be able to re-open page A while keeping Page A1 open. Some people may point out that this can currently be accomplished by pressing Back, then re-opening A1 with the right-click function Open Link In New Tab, but there are several reasons I may not want to do this: 1) I may have entered data into a form in Page A1 which I feel is at risk if the Back button is pressed, 2) Page A1 may take appreciable time to reload, 3) I may want to keep page A1 as it is but anticipate it may do a forced update if I go Back and then Open Link In New Tab.

The user interface functionality to implement this would be to simply have a right-click functionality added on the Back button with "Open Previous Link In New Tab". This would keep it methodologically similar to the options for clicking on a link in a page. Ideally the new tab opened would be opened with the History of the previous tab, but that would not be absolutely essential: 99% of the time, the previous page is the one I require.

Copying and pasting data from Firefox to Excel

I'd like to see the copy feature improved. For example, if I copy the data in the cells from this page http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/top-50-cities-2006.html using Firefox and paste into Excel, all the data goes into cell A1. However, if I copy the same data from the same page using IE and paste into Excel, the data is pasted correctly into the spreadsheet. That's the only reason I use IE during times of data mining. Otherwise, I'm all Firefox.  : ) Keep up the great work. -Brian

Great Idea: why not extend it to ODF (Open Document Format)?

Or the Corel Formats? There are so many…

Manage search engines

In Firefox 3 the add-ons like Flash Player,... are already in the add-ons panel, with the themes and the extensions but I would like to see something like that in the same panel for the search engines.

Windows 98 support

Although Windows 98 Second Edition is no longer supported by Microsoft effective on July 11, 2006, it still enjoys use by people who like to run older games and for use in running older educational programs at schools. The reason Microsoft does not support the Windows 9x source code anymore is because of the cost of supporting 2 lines of source code even though the Windows 9x source code is the safer line supported by DOS which is the maintenance operating system according to Chris Quirke, Most Valuable Professional of Microsoft. http://www.spywarepoint.com/forums/t26963-p7-microsoft-zero-day-security-holes-being-exploited.html http://cquirke.blogspot.com/

    The secunia.com website highlights how Windows 98 Second Edition is safer than Windows 2000 and Windows XP when running Mozilla Firefox because Internet Explorer has many security vulnerabilities. Even if Windows 98 Second Edition is given a Priority 2 or Priority 3 status I would still be glad to see Mozilla Firefox 3 support it.

Vendor Microsoft Affected By 32 Secunia advisories Unpatched 9% (3 of 32 Secunia advisories) Most Critical Unpatched The most severe unpatched Secunia advisory affecting Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition, with all vendor patches applied, is rated Less critical http://secunia.com/product/13/

Vendor Microsoft Affected By 194 Secunia advisories Unpatched 15% (30 of 194 Secunia advisories Most Critical Unpatched The most severe unpatched Secunia advisory affecting Microsoft Windows XP Professional, with all vendor patches applied, is rated Highly critical http://secunia.com/product/22/

Vendor Microsoft Affected By 164 Secunia advisories Unpatched 13% (22 of 164 Secunia advisories) Most Critical Unpatched The most severe unpatched Secunia advisory affecting Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, with all vendor patches applied, is rated Highly critical http://secunia.com/product/1/

Automaticaly change proxy's

There is an option in Firefox to detect automatically the proxy's But for me it isn't working, on Mac nor on Windows.

Can better?

Printing functions

Wouldn't it be nice to have the option to chose for 'print only on first page':

---

    header 1         header 2        header 3     

---

             print only on first page             

---

                     webpage

- - - - -

---

             print only on first page             

---

   footer 1         footer 2         footer 3     

---

and than the other pages:

---

    header 1         header 2        header 3     

---

                     webpage

- - - - -

---

   footer 1         footer 2         footer 3     

---

Just for information that you want to have, but wouldn't want to look at whole the time...

Search bookmarks

When you are typing something in the search field for the web, it would be nice if Firefox would also search in your bookmarks (tags and bookmarks foldernames also).

Possible that FF would show a second column with those search results.

Better treatment 'Closed tabs'

When I close a tab that I acually wouldn't have to close, I want to press command+Z (control+Z on windows), but that isn't working. This would be a nice to have

full-screen-width text with columns!

.....Back in the dawn of time (1982), Bill Gates begat a PC screen that was 640 pixels wide, that permitted only 80 characters on a line -- the same as on a typewriter (remember them?). .....Then came the internet browser, and with a lot of those 640 screens still around, developers decided that the only way to get an article to you was to roll it down like toilet paper, narrow but long. .....It made sense then, but that was then. Last year the New York Times came out with its "Times Reader," which took any article in the paper and laid it out all the way across the screen vertically and (yesss!) horizontally, in multiple columns that are easy to read. In fact, on today's detailed screens such an article is clearer, bigger, with less page-fumbling, and easier to hold up than it is in the paper edition. The Times is selling this version of its FREE web edition for $15 a month (almost the price of the hard copies). .....There had to be an answer to this organized pickpocketing of web readers, and so an obscure coder named Manu wrote a routine using the script-running extension Greasemonkey. It has started small, converting only a dozen websites, but gloriously, one of them was nytimes.com. Now there is a free version of what the Times is selling for $180 a year. (That's $1,800,000, even if they have only 10,000 users.) .....When you think about it, today's browsers look awfully dumb. And that includes Firefox. Here we are with giant screens that can hold the whole top half of a newspaper page, every letter razor-sharp, and these screens are WIDE. Yet the browser windows continue to be narrow, and very high. Rather than glancing from column to column with folded arms, we clickety-click the down arrow or spacebar, and if we need a name from earlier, we clickety-click back up to get it, and clickety-click back to where we were reading. We're in the dark ages of browsers, and we don't even know it! .....When you have read your whole gigantic multi-column screen, you hit a right-arrow and find another screen of multi-column text. Even the longest Times articles wrap it up before the second screen is covered. .....Manu knows this is the wave of the future, but he has a job and a family and no time to develop this idea. He is happy to let someone else be the hero. Pick up where he left off by visiting http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9022. .....You will find that he uses the "print" function of a web page as a crutch. But any coder with smarts and dusk-to-dawn energy can make this tool "copy" the text, take note of its font, and lay it out full screen with multiple columns. Is anybody reading this? (Or do these notes just fade away unseen?) If so, what are you hanging around for? It's time to write code! -- yankeedam

Resampling Options for Image Scaling (Enables Higher Quality)

-Currently, Firefox will just resize large images to fit in the browser window. This method is adequate, but better options should be provided for users; however it's up to them to enable it or not (depending on system capability/performance),

-We may borrow algorithm/codes from other open-source projects (such as The GIMP). Options that could be provided are : 1. Resample (Lanczos) - highest quality; slowest 2. Resample (Bicubic) - better quality 3. Resample (Bilinear) - good quality 4. Resize only (Nearest Neighbour) - lowest quality; fastest

-Detailed explanation/information could be provided as tooltips and within the documentation (help file).

-The most easy way to assess this (my) suggestion is at Wikipedia Featured Pictures page : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_pictures. Here, most pictures are usually way larger than common monitor resolutions; so when Firefox automatically scaled the picture, the first impression (of that picture) is not as good as it should be (imagine jaggies/aliasing when scaling a picture to 1/4th of its original size).

-This feature could be determined by Firefox at first run (after setup) whether to turn it on or not by assessing the system performance. Later, user could change through the Options...

Regards, --Musafir86 21:56, 12 March 2008 (PDT)

First Run Auto-Tuning/Optimization (Out-of-Box Experience)

-Some software (mostly OS) have first run wizard that will auto-configure their (common) settings. In Microsoft(R) Windows(R), they call it Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE). Firefox already have this, but only for importing preference/user data (cookies, history, etc.) and setting default browser.

-How about we also auto-configure other options to optimize the end-user experience? We may ask the user to close other running programs/tasks so the final result would be the best. Examples of settings that we can configure are: 1. Network speed (turn on pipelining, max connections, etc.) 2. Image scaling algorithm (refer here : [2]) 3. GUI effects/skins (turning off on ancient systems) 4. Others (we can think later)

-We could provide each option on its own page so user may skip them if he/she doesn't want it.

Regards, --Musafir86 00:40, 13 March 2008 (PDT)

Bookmarks referring to unbookmarked sites

First problem: some websites have multiple adresses.

Simple example: http://www.wesnoth.org and http://wesnoth.org are two different websites with the same contents I had bookmarked the first one, but an other webpage on the web refers to the second one. Result: I didn't see the star from places and I bookmarked twice

Second problem: I came on a webpage that is familiar but I don't remember from what.

A nice to have would then be a system that indicates when you already have a bookmark referring to a webpage on that website.

-> Bookmarked: http://www.wesnoth.org or http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Project or something else on the website,

-> Indicates: http://wesnoth.org/, http//www.wesnoth.org/wiki/Play when you later are browsing on this pages

so you can seen that you have already been interested in this site. I have done it with bold tekst, but it is also possible with a background color or something like that.

Some people might say that we have now the new dropdown menu in the locationbar. Yes, but what to do with some hundreds of bookmarks? Searching around costs in this case to many time, surely if you don't remember what you are searching. And this increases the easy of use from the places-system.

Protect tabs from accidental closing

When the user clicks the Close Box on a tab, close the tab only it is already selected. Otherwise select the tab and leave it open.

Why this would be useful

Because the Close Box is surrounded by the label that one must click to select the tab, it is easy to close a tab when one intends to select it. Once the tab is closed, there is no way to recover it. This may result in losing a large amount of work (e.g., in a form) irretrievably and without warning.

Why this would be intuitive

If a user tries to close a non-selected tab by clicking its Close Box and finds that the tab does not close, her first impulse will be to click the Close Box again. Because the first click selects the tab, the second click will close the tab as intended. After doing this a few times, the user will consciously or unconsciously come to understand the feature.

--User:jhsachs 6 April 2008

SVG Performance Improvements

SVG is often unbearably slow. Since it has great potential for improving webmasters' layouting and webpage design, it should be sped up to a useful performance level. This may involve more hardware acceleration, I don't know. --Aetherane 07:39, 16 June 2008 (PDT)

Firefox 3 Compatibility issues

I was wondering if there has been any success at making Firefox 3 compatible with Microsoft Silverlight. I really don't understand why it is compatible with Firefox 2.0.0.14 and not Firefox 3. There is a lot of documentation about this problem here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432371 I hope someone has an answer and can fix this.

Auto-hide Status Bar.

It would be nice to have the possibility to choose an auto-hide option for the status bar, that could disappear when the page loading is complete. Something similar is present in Google Chrome browser and I find it useful...

Clearing private data should have a context option

I find 'clear private data'-function very handy, but sometimes i want to clear session of a specific site without losing the other session on the other window on the other desktop.

Clear private data should have a context option (dimension) or something like that, i.e:

• clear private data for every site (default)
• clear private data for current site
• clear private data for all sites on this window

Why isn't the schedule updated?

The schedule only has info up until Beta 4. Isn't a complete schedule the single most important thing to involve the users in Firefox's development? I think so.

"Firefox is already running, but not responding" suggestion

This error message ticks me off to no end whenever I see it and it gets frustrating to keep seeing it time and time again on Firefox 3.5.

And of course, the moment I open my Task Manager to close the 'not responding' Firefox process, IT EXITS!

As such, I would like to make a request for the "Firefox is already running but not responding" dialog box: add a "Force Quit Firefox" button.

Seriously. It'd end a lot of headaches.

Local content (from hard drive) should never be cached.

What reason is there for local content to ever be cached? In development, often most testing is local. This necessitates extra steps to ensure everything is refreshed every time an edit is made.

Clearing cache should be complete, every time.

Some files don't get cleared for a page that is currently open. This problem has plagued Firefox for years. Where it is most noticeable is with Flash apps that load multiple Flash files. The subsequent SWF files are NEVER cleared from the cache unless the user closes the window or navigates away from the page the files are on. This makes for extra steps in clearing in the cache for every edit. As a developer I have to explain this process repeatedly to many clients and colleagues. They are either confused or frustrated by the issue. 

Caching: The Ghost of the Internet

Any developer knows, caching can be a confusing hinderance of development. I've often wondered how many times I've solved an issue, but was unaware because the page cached and I had already moved on to the next hacky attempt at a solution. As ubiquitous as caching is to the web, clearing of the cache should be simpler and options/controls for the cache could be me robust for every browser.

I can think of several ways to improve caching. It seems like it's always a buried option that is always in a different place in the tools or preferences, and has a different and obscure hot key, for every browser. In Firefox, it's clumped in with a bunch of other "Private data", in IE it involves clicking through and confirmation in several annoying windows. Even the single window Firefox uses for confirmation is an annoyance to me. It makes people feel like they are doing something "techy" which is scary to them, when really there shouldn't be any risk to clearing a cache, and therefore no need for any confirmation. Just DO it!

Seriously. Imagine as a developer, at the 11th hour of many projects, having to diagnose cached items for why your clients are seeing funny stuff, asking them what browser they are using, and going through the process of clearing the cache on the phone. Then imagine this being true for just about anything that goes wrong just because you need to rule that out.

An option to have a "clear cache" button right next to the reload button would be awesome. How about an option to force every reload to clear cached items for the current page. How about a check box that defeats all caching without changing other caching options (in prefs would be cool but right on the browse would be cool too). There could be an indicator on the browser window that shows weather or not there are any cached items on the page. There could be a way to reveal what items are cached right on the page.

I believe caching is important enough to be it's own preference panel. There, you could specify caching options for individual pages or domains, like max/min file size, file types to cache, duration to keep files and max cache size for each page/domain.

Is this crazy? I know it would save me TON time, trouble, and sanity.

Tab Reordering/Tearing Animations

It would be nice to have tab animations when the user grabs a tab, and rearranges it on the tabs toolbar. An example of this is in Chrome and Safari, where the tabs move themselves accordingly to where the user holds the grabbed tab at the moment. This makes the reorganization of tabs look more smooth. However, there should be an choice in the options page where the user can allow/disable these animations. Also, animations should be added for when tabs are torn from the toolbar, and are either used to make a new window, or join another window's tabs. These animations are also found in Chrome and Safari, and add a nice touch to the browsing experience. These animations would make the browsing on Firefox look more smooth and seamless.