Firefox3/Themes for Data Collection

Firefox Long-Term Themes/Goals Discussion

Discussion document for identifying long-term areas of focus for market research and data collection efforts for Firefox, and short-term identification of target differentiation vectors.

Microformat Detection and Application/Service Linking

• Detecting microformated information (hCard, hCalendar, etc.) and linking this information to actions, applications, and services.
• Momentum is growing around microformats, and Mozilla has an opportunity to take a leadership position for the emergence of semantic information on the Web. Yahoo! is starting to support microformats on the following web properties:

• Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.
• Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and Upcoming.org supports hCalendar.
• Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews.

• Support for microformats could include the ability to:

• export microformated content to desktop applications, (see Tails Export)
• send microformated content to online services (an employee from Upcoming.org modified an open-source Greasemonkey user script to add any hCalendar event to Yahoo! Calendar)
• or to provide contextual actions for identified content such as generating a new mail message from an hCard link.

Increase the value and utility of the information individuals encounter and gather while using the Web

• Improve the quality and quantity of the information that is automatically accumulated while a user is on the Web.

• The browser already caches web page history, but we could extend this metaphor to include other types of tagged content such as microformats (see above).
• Improve the user's ability to expand or restrict what information is automatically accumulated by the browser.

• Provide an ability to for users to explicitly save and tag this information, similar to bookmarking.
• Increase the value of this information by improving the tools for viewing, searching, manipulating, analyzing, and combining the information a user gathers.
• Further increase the value of this information improving the tools for sharing the information a user gathers, and for combining this information with other users' information.
• Give developers new tools to extend the value, functionality, and utility of the user's information.
• Allow users to easily sync their information between computers or devices.

Put users in control of their personal information

Goal: Enable users to track the distribution of their personal information

Store the information that users submit to web sites in their history

Enable users to easily search their history to answer questions like:

• "Who should I notify about my new cell phone number?"
• "Did I really mistype my address when I placed that order?"

Goal: Enable users to put Firefox into a state in which no information is recorded locally about their actions on the Web

• Feature of Safari in OS
• Firefox extension named Stealther

Partner - Customized Distributions

• Easier creation of more deeply customized Firefox packages.
• PC OEMs for gamers, businesses, home users, entertainment, students, etc.
• Allow network admins at businesses to easily provide the browser installation and settings they need.

Enhance support for 3rd Party Service Providers

• One thing that makes Firefox 2 different is support for third party providers: web feed readers and phishing black lists.
• Investigate Web mail and calendaring hooks, syncing with del.icio.us or Google with a simple URL (by partnership with them) for Bookmarks, develop a similar technology like Google Browser Sync for business clients to store the data on a central server or so.

Make a user's Web experiences safer and more secure

• Better inform users when they are at risk through warnings, audits, etc.
• Heuristic methods for anti-phishing
• Extension permissions model?
• Single sign on technologies (user centric identity, sxip, infocard)

Make it easier for users to produce Web content

• What extent can enhancements or changes in the browser encourage users to become authors on the web?
• What are the barriers to entry to becoming a web participant, and not just a web consumer?

Make it easier for users to interact and collaborate on the Web

• One common thread between all the "web 2.0" sites is that they allow sharing and discussion by the people they serve. It would be interesting to examine how enhancements to the browser could enhance this sharing system (perhaps browser support for open authentication mechanisms like OpenID would prove helpful, for example).

Make it easier for users to customize and control their experiences on the Web

• This can be extended by Per Site Preferences (Just an example) or a Download Manager/Accelerator.
• Better support for advanced UI features like notification icons (the famous system tray), alert bubbles, shell integration and the like.

Allow users to easily partition their web experience

• Visually expose the current profile
• Easy switching between profiles

Make browser technology more transparent so users spend less time thinking about the tool and more time just using the Web

• Having delightful or friendly mechanisms to interact with the browser

Blurring of the lines between what is the web and what is a native application

• I should be able to browse to a new "Firefox Native" enabled site, decide that it is valuable, and click an "Install" button to have it appear in the Start menu or on the Dock just like any other application.
• Local application hosting?

Allow users to "install" domain-specific views/visualizations/handling of information

• Domain-specific apps have the opporunity to categorize and present specific kinds of web data to the user in much more usable ways.
• For example, Songbird and Democracy.

Make Firefox features more discoverable

• Deliver a tutorial for key Firefox features
  • References
    • Internet Explorer 7 tutorial
      • Comments
    • Safari feature page and demo video
      • Comments
    • Reference: Opera
      • Comments: This is more like, what a tutorial shouldn't be: long, boring, no visual contents.

• Deliver an "assistant" (don't think clippy, think simple dialogs and overlays) that introduces to UI elements like the anti-phishing balloon, for other features like microsummaries, search plugins, web feeds, places, themes, extensions, etc.

Other - More Feature Focused Areas

• Advanced Tabbed Browsing - Better Tab Heuristics: Open links from Tab next to the Tab instead of at the end of the Tab Bar. Re-Arrange Tabs Opened from Links: A[3][2][1]BC -> A[1][2][3]. Should be enabled by default.
• Advanced Tabbed Browsing - Allow Tabbed Browsing in Groups: Window in Window kind of feature. Ability to split window vertically/horizontally so that each 'split' can have its own set of tabs with the ability to drag and drop tabs from one split to the other.

Reference: Maxthon 2

• Download Manager - Ability to restore downloads across sessions.
• Reduced memory
• More consistent data types. There are a whole bunch of data models in Mozilla (JavaScript, variants, mozStorage, RDF, etc.) and they aren't particularly compatible.
• Hierarchical extension dependency support
• Better support for multi-threading
• Improved RDF support
• Native support for PDF
• Support for ODF
• Image zoom
• Printing improvements
• Download manager: pause/resume, find files, bittorrent as protocol?