Planning For Mozilla 2.0

wikinerd writes "The MozillaWiki maintains a number of pages on Mozilla 2.0 which reveals lots of possible new features of the popular browser. What does your wishlist include about Mozilla 2.0, and how has the release of Firefox affected your use of Mozilla?"

Comments

Who has firefox affectd my use of Mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has ended it.

Re:Who has firefox affectd my use of Mozilla?

[gandell]

Ditto. Mozilla was bloated anyway. If you wanted its full features, you could take advantage of it, but I preferred the lighter Firefox, anyway.
The features I wanted are already found in Firefox (i.e., tabbed browsing, popup blocker, themes & extensions). I just don't need Mozilla any more.

New Theme

[Frogbert]

How about a new Theme? I personaly dispise the current theme and the way the various toolbars interact within mozilla.

Also how about a way to manage Mozilla using Windows group policies?

What about a MSI package?

Re:New Theme

[Ciderx]

Shameless advertising post!

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http://spaces.msn.com/members/in-cider/

Simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine are pretty simple.

A graphical history record (i.e. one that keeps a stored image of places where I've been, rather than a mere text description, as most give very limited info of what that particular site was).

And, an RSS reader equivalent to FeedDemon.

Re:Simple

[KlaymenDK]

[A graphical history record]

That, combined with a history TREE instead of a linear, self-overwriting history (go back 3 pages and click another link -- those 3 pages will drop out of the history). That's what I wish for.

And for the troll/poster thinking this is for prn -- nope, it's for retrieving pages with 'unknown' URLs. Surfing page to page, one is likely to not read the URL or page title, but to recognize the page body.

Firefox never worked for me...

[Bloodlent]

So I always used Moz. Personally I think the best change for Moz would be to make it less bloated, and make it totally modular. Basically make it so you can strip away most of the program and turn it into something closely resembling Firefox if you so choose.

Magnifying

[Szentigrade]

I would like to see something like what opera has with web page magnification. Its on firefox too but you cant make images any bigger then they already are like you can with opera. But i still like FF better.

build in page validator.

[AeiwiMaster]

I would like to see a build in page validator.

There is a lot of badly coded web pages out there.

It might take a rewrite of gecko by I think it is wroth it.

The normal web based validators really don't cut it
when your developing dynamic cgi scripts.

A feature I'd like to see...

[ChrisK077]

A kick-ass feature I'd like to see in Mozilla and Firefox would be to automatically break up long words/numers/urls at the edge of the screen.

Since I have a TFT with 1280x1024 resolution, I often increase font sizes when browsing the web to reduce eye strain, but that often causes horizontal scroll bars to appear when long words or urls are in the text, making it much less convenient to read, e.g. in those ubiquitous phpBB based forums.

A Manual

[obender]

I know it does not sound like much but I think a manual is what Mozilla really needs. Many users that switch from IE get to use Mozilla/Firefox the same way they used IE and not more. And there's much more to Mozilla than just tab browsing.

I still remember the day when I tried running two separate instances of Mozilla on the same Windows machine. Neither Google nor the forums helped. Luckily I can still read C++.

Open source should mean you can look into the source if you want to, not that you have to look into the source every time you try something non trivial.

My picks

[Anonymous Coward]

• SVG support.
• Make it easier to disable flash temporarily so I can turn it off on those sites that abuse it.
• Make a better interface for managing plug-ins and extensions. Let me enable/disable them and check for updates for them.
• Change Mozilla 2.0 to basically be Firefox+Thunderbird sharing the same rendering engine (for reduced memory usage if you use both).
• Improve the download manager. Show the date/time something was downloaded, and let me sort by that field. That way the download manager becomes a download history as well. Allow plugins to use new download methods that integrate with the download manager (eg Rsync, BitTorrent)
• Jpeg2000 support.
• I like to browse with text size increased. But every time I open a new tab or window, I have to re-increase the text size. So let me set an option so the text size is always 125% or 150% of normal, unless I reduce it. And no, changing font sizes in options does not do the same thing.
• When increasing or decreasing text size, my place in the current web page is lost. I have to scroll around to find where I was. Make changing text size preserve my current place on the page.
• Remember what tabs I was reading (and my place in those tabs) so if Mozilla crashes or I close it, I can go back to where I was instantly.
• Ship with more themes and a few of the more popular extensions already installed.
• Add an HTML verifier to Mozilla. Let me choose an option from the menu, and Mozilla will verify the HTML of the page I'm viewing.
• Do a thorough security audit. Mozilla is gaining in popularity, and security bugs are starting to be more common. All new patches should be reviewed by a group of security-minded folk.
• Produce more and better documentation and examples for XUL. Try to get more people writing extensions.
• Port Mozilla to the last great platform it doesn't yet run on: Emacs.

Gecko Rendering Engine

[lwells-au]

Though its not directly related to the Mozilla Suite (sorry, I tried to RTFA, but its down) my biggest wish is to see the Gecko Rendering Engine (GRE) finally split from the Mozilla/Firefox/et al code base. This seems to have completely dropped off the road map despite being discussed for months (years?).

The idea of running the GRE as a service (started at boot) and then simply launching the frontends for the various Mozilla apps (in my case, Firefox and possibly Thunderbird) appeals to me immensely.

I value "snapiness" greatly when it comes to my web browser and email apps. Having to run multiple instances of the same rendering engine is a bit of a downer IMHO. (Yes, I realise there are some benefits. Yes, I realise we all tend to have ample computing power.)

Some changes I would like to see

[Anonymous Coward]

• load in less than 5 seconds on 1+G CPUs, all O/S
• use less memory when a large number of pages are loaded (I can easily use most of my 256M on my laptop), maybe provide a max memory limit option
• include mozilla.org packages for Linux O/S (rpms, debs, etc.) released along with the default tarball and accessible for update programs (e.g., yum) (O/S/package release managers?)
• support Active X controls under Windows
• option to shrink the text (reduce font size, ec.) when I shrink a window
• include integration with desktop search and include a free search add-on for non-Windows O/Ss
• include an easier ability to get updates, plugins, etc. and load them in via current native format without a cycle of "download, save, rpm -Uvh, etc." but not without prompting and some type of verification (easier but not automatic and not a virus/trojan vector)
• updates, packages, etc. for Linux should be in the native package formats (rpm, deb, etc.)
• include an RSS reader
• provide some form of diagnostics to the user when mozilla fails to properly start (I've had this with multiple O/Ss and multiple versions -- it fails to start and no error is displayed)
• provide some form of reset settings/options when you can't get mozilla to properly load
• include a mode where mozilla can run under a chroot jail and possibly under a secure account under Linux/UNIX
• include option for pdf printing
• include 3d rendering and VRML as plugins
• provide some xquery support (plugin?)
• include a wget type mirror tools (plugin?)

Of course, some of the above may alreay be planned but as I can't get on mozilla's web site, I can't check.... Maybe it was slashdotted?

Missing the point...

[alyosha1]

One of Mozilla's greatest strengths is not as just a web-browser but as a cross-platform application development platform.
Just try playing around with XUL a little. It's surprising what it can do. I'm just starting out with it, but having worked my way through MFC, QT, TCL/TK, WTL, GTK++, FLTK, wxWidgets etc. etc. in search of the One True UI Library, I'm liking what I've seen so far.

Re:2.0?

[bunratty]

Talk about ancient history! When mozilla.org first decided to focus on Firefox, they were going to "replace" the suite with FIrefox/Thunderbird. They quickly junked that plan when they realized that many large organizations, including ones that support Mozilla with money or developers, preferred the suite. Dropping support for the suite would mean losing those companies' support for Mozilla.

platform platform platform

[ramGits]

As a web app developer, what I would love to see for the Moz & FF 2.0 series is an expanded set of capabilities as an application platform. The top few items on my list would include:

• SVG

  This will allow interactive graphic applications that are just not possible now with primarily text-oriented DHTML.

• A better client-side VM.

  Like real compiled Javascript 2.0 or perhaps a Python VM. You can do some amazing and surprising things with client-side JS, but as web apps tackle what are now primarily the domain of "fat" installed apps, we're going to need some real client side power. The ability to create and call libraries of routines will prove to be important.

• Heavy duty form support, including the ability to create and use form "widgets"

  These issues are being addressed in both Ian Hickson's WHAT-WG and W3C's Xforms. Implementations of these in compiled code would be great.

• Client-side persistent store

  From what I gather, Moz 2.0 will embed the small SQL engine SQLite to store it's configuration data, etc.. How about providing access to this engine for web apps? Think of it as maybe a cookie on some relational algebra radioactive steriods. Imagine being able to download chunks of data from your server-side store and work with them locally. You would effectively have web apps that continue to work when disconnected from the web.

Want to compete with MS's upcoming XAML platform? I believe this list will go a long way toward that.

I would love to use Mozilla or Firefox BUT..

[shancock]

For some reason the Firefox engine will not print from my Samsung ML1750 printer without skewing the text up. Everything else prints on it fine. This is a show stopper for me and I am using Opera (which works fine with the printer).

I want/prefer/like my email integrated into the browser. Firefox/Thunderbird works OK but not as well as Mozilla. But overall I prefer the Firefox browser for tabbing, speed and ease of user. It just feels good. It's nice to have choices again. I am a happy camper even with the problems.

Pull-away tabbed browsing

[PhrackCreak]

I would like to see an extension to tabbed browsing where you could grab a tab and make a new window out of it and pull it out of the current window. And I guess the inverse transform would be handy - allow merging of windows into tabs.

Most of my boxen have virtual desktops, so it's handy sometimes to have different windows on each desktop each with several tabs on the same subject. For example, I'll have one desktop with slashdot and a few links alongside IRC and another desktop reading API documentation for a project.

Another reason this is useful is so that when you open links from the mail program in a new tab, it does not always put the tab in the window you want.