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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?"
What's with Mozilla 1.4, er, I mean 1.5, er, I mean 1.6, er, I mean 1.7 being the Last Release Ever?
It has ended it.
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?
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.
My wish is that Mozilla properly render Slashdot. What an embarassment! Someone even went so far as to make a Mozilla plugin that fixed the Slashdot rendering bug! I mean, c'mon people, you'd think that Mozilla would properly render Mozilla's biggest supporter.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
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.
Plus, Firefox seems quicker and more stable to me since I have been using both.
Mozilla and Firefox will merge into one super borwser....MoFox... or perhaps FireZilla
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.
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up... reading.-Henny Youngman
This has been fixed in the trunk for a long time (but not the branch Firefox 1.0 comes from), and will be in Firefox 1.1, whether Mozilla increments to 2.0 or not.
Bug 217527
Bug 264913
If you really, really need a fix now, visit this URL and download one of the nightlies from the trunk [fair warning - some nightlies have some annoying bugs in them, but generally, are pretty good]. It works just fine there, but I'm told requires too many changes to backport into the ff1/mozilla whatever branch.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
Use standard GNU autoconf for the builds. Get rid of all the code that says things like "#ifdef HPUX ... then do this and that and this and that because HP's C++ compiler (no, not that one, the other one... and that specific version, too!) can't make a negative zero or some such tomfoolery ... #endif". When I try to build Firefox 1.0 (One Point Fucking Oh!) on HP-UX 10.20 it falls over and dies because I'm not using HP's C++ compiler... nor the other one... and especially not that version... I'm using gcc! What do you think I am, an idiot? Why would I use anything but gcc/g++?
But it's worse than that. A few simple platform-checking #ifdefs could be fixed, the code converted into autoconf checks and replaced with HAS_FOO macros... but no. The build tree isn't even a tree -- it's a fucking forest! There are like 17 different build trees, each one gnarly and moss-covered and subtly (or not so subtly) different from the next, all plastered together into one shambling mass of code. Some of the sub-trees hard code ld -foo -bar -ZxCvB commands instead of invoking $(CXX) to be the linker. Some of them hard code cc as the compiler instead of using $(CC). I shit you not. Oh, and you can't type "make" in a sub-trees to build just that sub-tree. You have to start all over from the top level. After a few days, I gave up.
It's bad, folks. Really, really bad.
I'd be embarrassed to release something like that as a 1.0 version. 0.6 alpha 2? Sure thing, no problem. But 1.0 is supposed to be finished.
P.S.: your "Firefox" code still unpacks itself in a directory named "mozilla". Not "mozilla-1.7" or "firefox-1.0" either... just plain "mozilla". It looks like a CVS snapshot to me.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a "you must accept cookies in order to see this site" message, and had to pull up a page's HTML source code just to try to find out what address the cookie was coming from.
Firefox is ahead of IE on so many levels, but is years behind on this one.
- SVG
- A better client-side VM.
- Heavy duty form support, including the ability to create and use form "widgets"
- Client-side persistent store
Want to compete with MS's upcoming XAML platform? I believe this list will go a long way toward that.This will allow interactive graphic applications that are just not possible now with primarily text-oriented DHTML.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!