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Firefox Accepting Feature Suggestions for Version 3
Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article over at Ars Technica discussing the Firefox team's call for feature suggestions. Version 3 of the software is already in the works, and the team members are looking to the community for ideas on where to go next. From the article: "The wish list is long indeed, and it provides an insight into the desires of the browser community, and a look at the open source development process. While closed-source projects often ask their user community for feedback on requested features, the process is not usually open to the public. For Firefox 3, anyone can both suggest new features and comment on other people's suggestions. The feature requests are divided into categories, such as browser customization, privacy features, security, history, download manager, and other areas. There are suggestions for features found in other competing browsers, such Safari, IE 7 beta, and Opera. IE7 seemed to be featured most prominently, with requests for "low-rights mode," as well as more cosmetic features like skins that mimic Microsoft's browser."
that is what firefox needs!
An open source logo? :-) *duck* Au revoir, monsieur karma
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
ooooh. oooh. ponies!
How about having system prompts popping up in tha status bar instead of popup. And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Since we know the reverse question is asked at Microsoft strategy meetings, what features can we add to Mozilla Firefox make Internet Explorer a less desirable browser? Should Mozilla Firefox strive not to follow web standards like Microsoft, or is that not a very good strategy?
Canvas is just the sort of ad hoc extension that made the 1990's browser wars such an unproductive time for developers. If Firefox/Moz isn't going to focus on standards why should Microsoft. Check out this official documentation on Canvas.
For the most part, <canvas> is compatible with Apple's and other implementations. There are, however, a few issues to be aware of....
If fallback content is desired, some CSS tricks must be employed to mask the fallback content from Safari (which should render just the canvas), and also to mask the CSS tricks themselves from IE (which should render the fallback content). Todo: get hixie to put the CSS bits in (Bold in the original)
Make it fast, compliant and secure. Leave everything else to extensions.
With extensions, Firefox does pretty much anything that anyone could want in a browser. I'd like only two things from Firefox 3:
1. More stability and less memory usage. On both Windows and OS X, Firefox can swallow all your system resources if you leave it running long enough and do enough browsing. On my machines, the program also crashes, infrequently but regularly, most often when a page it's loading is corrupted by a network error. Spend the effort on finding memory leaks and bugs instead of adding gewgaws.
2. Without changing the functionality of the interface or its basic elements, make it prettier. The buttons look big, garish, and way too colorful; look at Safari for one example of a better way. (I use a skin to make my Firefox installs look much like Safari, but I think a more professional/more beautiful interface could inspire more people to switch.)
All I want is a simple option on the "Do you want to remember passwords for this site?" popups that says "no, and never ask EVER for ANY site". The only way to get rid of these worthless annoyances is some obscure setting buried in a menu. While it would be even better not to ever have been asked this in the first place, an option to get rid of all of these on the popup should not be too much to ask for. Other than that, no complaints. Nice clean UI, especially compared to IE7 !!!
Where were you when the voynix came?
I would like to see is the ability to highlight url's that are plain text on a page and have them open in a new tab instead of copy and pasting; maybe this already is out there in an extension but I haven't seen it. If you know it, let me know.
- My question is: Can Slashdot be Slashdotted? -
Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.
.ico file requests.
It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.
Semi-on-topic, on the security front Firefox 2 fixes the bug with tab icon handling that allows fingerprinting of Firefox 1.5 by tracking isolated
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
If Firefox continues fast and not memory hungry, then add all the useful features you want.
My suggestion for firefox 3 is to reduce memory and CPU usage as much as possible, so it could be useful on slower machines with less memory and even faster on modern machines.
Fix the bugs before adding new "features"!
1. When I click on a link that opens a PDF or other document, by default that should open in a separate popup. I hate closing the PDF and then discovering I've also closed Fox and lost the page I was on.
2. I hate the way that items can be moved on the bookmark menu by just dragging the mouse in view mode. Bookmarks disappear and turn up in submenus. After I've spent time setting up the bookmarks, I hate it when I mess it up inadvertently. There is already a dialog box for editing bookmarks, that's a plenty good enough UI for making modifications.
These two remind me of Donald Norman's DOET book, where bad design frustrates users and makes them feel stupid. And please don't answer that "you can get this behavior by going into "Tools Options Configure Advanced We-get-requests..". This should be the way it works out of the box.
I can't count the number of times I've closed a tab and then wanted it back later in the day, but been unable to find the url because I've actually had it open on my desktop for several days (so it's not in yesterday's history.) Being able to sort history by "close time" as well as "open time" would be really useful.
Maybe this could be a firefox extention. Hmm.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
"How about having system prompts popping up in tha status bar instead of popup. And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top."
In keeping with my request to allow for intuitive suppression of the nasty ""do you want to remember password for this site?" popups, they should put an option on the system prompts that you can click to make them go to the status bar from then on: "Do you want future such popups on the status bar instead?"
I love how Firefox nicely diminishes popups that come from intentional design of web programmers, but the way Firefox itself throws annoying hard-to-get rid of popups needs some work.
Where were you when the voynix came?
...now that we can run IE6 on Linux?
It even supports active X! Active X! None of the true internet experience will be lost to you now.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Firefox should take its inspiration from Konqueror. The KDE folks have managed to put out a browser that basically fulfills the goals of Firefox. It's lightweight, it's fast, and its extensible.
In many ways, it's even better than Firefox. It uses native widgets rather than XUL, so rendering is noticeably more rapid, and it integrates better with the rest of the desktop (KDE in this case). It offers better CSS support, even passing the Acid2 test (thanks to help from Apple's Safari developers).
Konqueror also uses a lot less memory than Firefox. I've heard Firefox's excessive memory usage blamed on bad extensions and bad caching techniques. However, I've noticed excessive RAM usage even when using a default mozilla.org build, without any third-party extensions.
Unfortunately, Konqueror is tied to KDE at this point, and thus really only runs well under UNIX-style systems. That will change with the release of KDE 4, which should allow for Konqueror to run natively on Windows. Once that happens, Firefox will face some serious competition. That's why their best bet at this time may be to draw from the philosophies of Konqueror, so that they can potentially get there first, and capture the marketshare that Konqueror will otherwise be capturing.
Firefox is a great browser - the extensions and skins available let me make it work exactly like I want it to.
They're feeling the heat from IE7, and loaded v2 up with many of the features I already had using some extensions. But not everyone wants the extras...
So I say on to FF devs:
Less equals more, remove the bloat and bring back our lightweight, secure browser and let us customize it how we want it to be.
Eliza needs an AI-optimized Firefox to run the JavaScript program for artificial intelligence.
AI Mind is a more advanced artificial intelligence at the Saint Stephen AI Project.
Mind.html is a Tutorial Artificial Intelligence that will work properly only if JavaScript works as well in Firefox as in Internet Explorer.
Independent AI projects need support from Firexfox and all future-minded Web browsers as we approach the Semantic Web and the Technological Singularity.-- better Gnome desktop integration (currently, Firefox feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats), including better support for cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop of HTML, images, and other content
-- figure out some way of supporting drag-and-drop file uploads better
-- better editors for textareas (maybe support Mozex officially and find some way of letting users embed their favorite editors right in the page)
-- integrate better with Thunderbird and other Mozilla applications
-- replace the cumbersome XPCOM programming model (IDL compiler and all that) with something that's more like the Objective C object model and runtime
One interesting request appears near the end of the list: the wish for Firefox to be the "fastest browser on the market," even in low-memory configurations such as PCs with only 256 MB of RAM.
I used to browse the web just fine with only 32MB, because back then browsers were written by people who actually knew how to use the free() function.
I believe Firefox should continue to enhance and add support for SVG, SMIL, CSS, HTML, Javascript, MNG, DOM, and other technologies. I have never quite understood why, as well, there is not some sort of portable font system that could be used in web pages, where if a font is unavialable locally, one can be including on the web site, downloaded, and temporalily used to display the web page. One such system is Open Type. As far as implementing new protocol features not yet standardised, I think the best thing to do is go ahead and implement the feature and then send in a protocol document to the W3C or whoever to have it standardised and make the documentation widely avialable.
much like what Pandora did for music, I want firefox to do for porn. If I allow it, it can read the porn sites I frequent and suggest new sites that I might enjoy.
Monstar L
To solve this issue, remove the Adobe Reader plug-in from your Firefox plug-ins folder. This will cause Adobe Reader to launch in a separate process with its own window. Or just ditch Adobe Reader and install Foxit Reader, the PDF viewer with less bloat.
Instead of doing yet another new theme, how about fixing stuff that should be working, like:
* password manager should work for all sites (it doesn't work in yahoo, or any online bank sites, for instance)
* download manager does not keep paused downloads across sessions
* memory usage (need I say more)
Having followed this particular argument for a while, I have little faith left in the devs' ability to listen to good advice.
How about less features, a spelling checker and things like that sound like too much bloat to me. One reason is that my operating system already has one built-in and the second reason is that I wonder how well it will spell check non-english.
They could remove the "[No]" which doesn't seem to be too useful. What, I'm going to suddenly change my mind after n irritations? Seems like a less likely event than someone initially wanting to answer "Never ask again". Just make it "Yes", "No (for this site)" and "Never ask again, thank you." Problem solved.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
And I'd quite like it if it didn't go down more often than Malda on Hemos.
Preferrably with control on the main panel to disable those sites with annoying float over ads that obstruct the view of the article you are trying to read. This is important since the Shockwave Flash positions itself as a mechanism for advertizers to bypass browser controls. Shockwave needs to be seriously slapped down.
Make keybindings as easy and complete as in opera. There is an extension which lets you configure some keybindings but there is nothing even close to what you can do in opera. I like vim movement in all my apps and i can do most of what i want with the extension but i think that's a feature which should be possible without extension (there is not even a real need for a gui for this, a config file would be fine. currently everything is spread over multiple files in xml iirc)
Stop using all of my goddamned memory.
* Faster performance.
* Less memory usage.
* More standards compliant.
* More secure.
* Support CSS3 and some more SVG stuff.
* Don't add a ping="...
* Make Firefox NOT add URLs to the address bar history list if the domain name entered does not resolve.
They should have a site where people can vote for features. That way they'll know how popular a particular feature might be ... and that might help them decide what features to implement first. Something like vim does here http://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php
I'd like to see support for multi row tabs to be native in firefox (I currently get this from the Tab Mix Plus extension). This feature is already on the 'Feature Brainstorming' wiki - but I have no way to reaffirm support for it.
Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.
Number one on my list:
Wait until the password has been accepted before offering to save it.
Other than that. Slim it down to the bare minimum and let people customize it with extensions.
Firefox hasn't changed its name recently. I think it's about time for something new.
My only suggestion and would be to ensure that the application doesn't crash. Mission accomplished so far.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
1. A fix for this javascript DoS attack:
for(;;) alert("Please restart your browser.");
2. Make hotkeys work everywhere, all the time. (You know when you hit CTRL+L and nothing happens)
3. Make it possible to open javascript links in new tabs.
4. Support for soft hypens.
Just un-tick 'remember passwords for sites' in the configuration.
As long as they use the 'Sys Rq' and 'Scroll Lock' button.
The google searchbox can go. I am aware that it's a cash cow so feel free to include it as an extention enabled by default but it it is annoying and could definatively go.
I've yet to find an extension for this, so if there is one, please let me know.
It's all too often when I middle-click a link to open in a new tab, only to get the tab being "Untitled" and the URL starts with "javascript:". Is it too much to ask that Firefox detect a javascript link and prevent it from opening in a new tab (or window, but usually I catch those), and merely run the javascript?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Can't I get a shark with freakin' lasers? Is that too much to ask?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
But how about 100% standards compliance on the CSS front? This goes for CSS1, CSS2, and the nearly complete CSS2.1. I'm quite sure with things going as they are, CSS3 ought to be available by the time Firefox 3.0 makes a debut.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
My main wish is to be able to configure the mouse menu. Then I could remove crap like "send this link".
The google searchbox can go. I am aware that it's a cash cow so feel free to include it as an extention enabled by default but it it is annoying and could definatively go.
It already is basically an extension enabled by default. It takes, what, five seconds to remove it?
Shortcut stupidity
The browser layout is: ||adressebar || ||Searchbar ||
However, the shortcut is ctrl+k for search and ctrl+l for search - that is to say the exact opposite (at least on a danish keyboard) orientation of the addresse and search bar. Stupid and avoidable usability error which is impossible to fix now as everyone has grown used to it:(
For example:
1. create style object
2. set it's attributes
3. create div object
4. createdDiv.style=styleFromFirstStep
5. all attributes of createdDiv.style are empty
I'm not saying that Firefox isn't a brilliant piece of software, but I would rather see existing functionality to be fixed than getting a new version with more features.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'd like a feature that filters out dup articles :)
http://www.coderoshi.com/
I would love to be able to export an entire set of extensions for use one another machine. Just package them up, and install. I know i can just copy my profile, but i have lots of machines that i use on many different platforms. This would allow for other fun things too. you could package several extensions together for distribution. Adblock+Filterset.G, anyone? or NoScript+Flashblock? I think the extenstions are what make firefox so powerful. Let's see them extend the possibilities...
Check out Freenigma.
;-)
No need to thank me, it was a Slashdot post that tipped me off.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
What I would like to see is some of the community-created extensions built into the sofware. "What about bloat, though?" some would ask, in which case I say this: Include the features in seperate download, and then include the "custom" option during install. Furthermore, some of the more popular extensions -especially those relating to Tab options- should be incorporated into the normal options dialogue (TabMixPlus, for example).
Also, although I know I can add search engines myself, I'd like to see Wikipedia inlcuded in the default list.
I am a Linux user who is sick and tired of web sites telling me to download Flash 8. Let's be more ambitious with flash and develop an alternative completely open source version. It can be kept up to date much faster, can be made to honour local settings, and it could even "block" itself as part of its own design. Bundle it with Firefox and then we will be able to break the last proprietary stronghold on web browsing.
This is - by far - my main reason for not using firefox.
Just a short time ago, I had to boot of Linux, and into Windows, because a web-site I needed to use didn' work with firefox, or opera.
While I know that you can right click to access a menu to add a pare as a bookmark, I really really hate the fact that in the bookmark menu the add bookmarks and manage bookmark controls scroll with the rest of the bookmarks. I can't tell how many times I've been at the end of a long list of bookmarks and had to scroll all the way back up to the top of the list to access the "bookmark this page!" In IE6 the manage and add "favorites" menu items stay put. That's teh ONLY thing that IE does better than Firefox!
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Untill Firefox supports 'Active X' components it will never achive the market penetration that it requires to displace IE. Supporting 'Active X' components, a Microsoft web standard, will also make it more acceptable to corporate IT departments since lagacy web services will not have to be re-written in order to run in its non Microsoft standard environment resulting in a lower cost of conversion.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I'd like proper multi-user support in both Unix and Windows:
= 55 for the reasons I can't use Firefox on school computers.
1. Security updates: allow non-root users to update the main system copy by prompting for the root (or Windows Admin) password.
2. Multi-user networks: allow Firefox to be installed on a network device and completely runnable from that device, along with customizable paths for the cache/configuration data, and integration with Windows Policies. It would be extra-nice if FF had zero Windows registry dependencies. See https://oalinfo.tamu.edu/faq/faq_viewer.asp?faqID
3. Ability to back up and restore the password store to/from ASCII file.
4. Ability to completely pack up a user's data (passwords, bookmarks, history, font settings, even cache) to a single archive file that can be passed around a USB stick. So that when I go to a new computer, I can start FF and point it to the USB file and it will immediately behave like my home copy.
1.
i refox/browse_frm/thread/16b9d61305fecba8
One of the most useful features of Firefox is the ability to manipulate a web page before displaying it (e.g. Adblock, Greasemonkey, Stylish). Power users are taking advantage of the ability to customize web pages to suit their own needs. However, these customizations are becoming increasingly complex and varied. Different extensions can manipulate the page in conflicting ways and it can be unclear what will take precedence.
There should be a processing pipeline where the page can be manipulated or accessed so that these manipulations are more clearly defined and easier to control. For example (page -> Microformat extraction -> Greasemonkey -> Chickenfoot -> Adblock -> Display the page). Conditional execution of a particular stage should be supported.
2.
Javascript,Python Ruby Consoles.
There is a fierce demand for console access to web pages to manipulate content "on the fly", for testing and development purposes or to extract data (examples: Firebug, Chickenfoot).
Firefox should provide facilities that are conducive to create these kinds of apps and even more powerful ones (Python console w/BeautifulSoup or Ruby console w/Hpricot)
3.
Roaming profiles:
Many (most?) people use more than one computer. Is it that difficult to be able to store your profile on a central server and source your local Firefox profile from that? Storing browsing sessions would be a big plus.
4.
Somehow encourage semantic web pages (e.g. microformats). Often data is presented in a page in a manner which is easy to view but difficult for a computer to parse. I don't want to have to write a parser to extract the data from a page. The microformat detector should help with this, or more generally the metadata exposer proposal: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.f
See also PiggyBank extension.
Since I'm only a geek by avocation, rather than by vocation...
So close to being a perfect pun: "Since I'm only a geek by avocation, rather than by a vocation..."
Unless this happened.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Don't you think that creating this kind of page is a great help for IE? Of course they can read so they can as well use all ideas from it. If we want FireFox to win browser war we need to give it an edge.
How else can we convince Joe User to switch? For them it's just a browser. They have no idea about security, CSS compliance and so. The only thing that works with them is features. Plain simple and useful. But if we post our thoughts on webpage IE will have them, Opera will have them, Safari will have them. Then how can we convince Joe User to install it? He doesn't need to install it, IE for him is THE SAME.
I think Mozilla should ditch this kind of webpage. It should be substituted with simple 'Post a feature webpage' plus some moderators to filter them out. What do you think?
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
I'd like to see a more efficient layout for widescreen laptops.
Right now I'm using Gnome and Firefox and vertically, I'm using every pixel, but horizontally a lot of space is wasted.
Under Windows, I minimize FF 1.5.x and it does not return focus to the last open window (assuming FF and another window open and I minimize FF to access the other window). Before the 1.5.x line (possibly earlier, don't quite remember), it minimized and returned focus nicely. This is something I'd like to have back. If there is a solution to this, someone kindly point me there. And the memory issues people talk about...
My wishes ...
... and make so I can force those javascript hover-over ads to act 'hidden' without the javascript program knowing.
/., you know)
... also, I know this is wishfull thinking but it would be nice if various movie formats, ... wishfull thinking)
...
... or so I can open a linux xterm in a new tab. (great for development)
It would be nice if I can force javascript popups to open in another tab if I like
I hate it when I hover over a link, and it doesn't tell me what it links to at the bottom of the page,
can you force it?
It woud be cool if the bookmarks, the view source, and the javascript debug could be opened in new tabs.
If fact, why not put most all the menu options in a tab that can brought up by pressing F2 of something
have a built in spell checker for posts (for
have an option on firefox where it won't play flash nor sounds unless I click on it.
pdf, mp3, and ogg integrated into the linux browser by default. ( i know, too much proprietary crap
have it so I can drag and drop tabs from one window to another (so I can consolidate stuff)
Have an option so that if I go beyond a certain number of tabs, it will create 2 rows of them or more.
Crazy wish
Have a firefox plugin that renders X programs in different tabs, so I can use it as a window manager on Linux.
NOTE: I recently set up firefox so that it loaded up my own local html page on startup which
not only had all my favorite bookmarks on it, but also hacked it to have my most used Linux programs
on it - that I can click and run. I love it. It's the best program manager I've ever had.
I made it so that any reference to "shell:" will run a script I wrote, so that for example shell:tet
will run the tetris program when clicked on.
1.Improve the memory usage.
2.Better ways to find extentions that are leaking resources.
3.If a URL being displayed results in "host not found", "cant contact server" or an error such as 404, it should not be added to the history. Also, URLs should only be added to the history once they get past that step and actually recieve a "200 ok" reply from the server with a piece of data or something. (i.e. if I press escape to cancel loading before it actually loads, it shouldnt go in the history)
4.Bring back MNG support.
5.Better security features. I want to see a world where (once a small amount of initial setup is taken care of), encrypting and/or signing an email is as simple as clicking a button on the email compose form with the program doing the rest. (although this feature is probobly more a thunderbird feature than a firefox feature)
firefox uses tabs, but for some reason it doesn't use full multiple document interface. MDI is nice when 1. you're anal about having only one firefox window open, and 2. you want to compare several pages in that window.
a look at the open source development process. While closed-source projects often ask their user community for feedback on requested features, the process is not usually open to the public.
This has less to do with open source and closed source as it has to do with how a developement team goes about deciding what to work on next. Once again the open source community tries their best to look like idealists but instead falls flat on it's face.
Perhaps it's time to take Firefox to the corporate world and allow it to be managed through MS Group Policy and ensure that it can be deployed in mass without user intervention. This would be the fastest way to gain corporate acceptance which would introduce Firefox to an entirely new audience.
I swear I didn't know it was loaded...
A facility to observe when a website has alternate stylesheets and allowing you to switch between them.
Primarily speed.
Anyone who has used utorrent will know exactly how software SHOULD be developed.
The WHOLE functioning program is 170kB. It is as or MORE feature rich than Azureus, which is a MUCH larger memory/cpu hog. Wish it was open source so everyone could learn how to code like that.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- A facility to observe when a website has alternate stylesheets and allowing you to switch between them. - The old history/bookmarks behaviour. You could select multiple entries in the list, so you wouldn't have to move them one at a time. - Other fixes specifically introduced to make Firefox more like IE. Like that stupid green 'go' triangle attached to the address bar. Now my parents, having typed a URL at the keyboard with their finger on return think it's mandatory to find the mouse, the button and click it. - Disabling useful functions by default. Find as you type. The greatest feature, enabled, new users find it instantly, ooh how handy. Disabled, who knows it's there to want? - Underlining links by default. == IE.
I want the file-size back down to around 4-5 megs. I just want something fast, small, highly customizable(as far as looks, functionality and not bloated). That means no torrent downloader. It should be made an option from the official mozilla start screen, but if a user does not need it, then it doesn't have to be packed in.
A plugin for AD admins to adminster FF as they do IE. Maybe then it'd appear as default browser in more big corporate sites.
With a lot of tabs open I can easily get Firefox to grow to 500-600 MB. This is absurd, even on a system with 2GB memory.
The people running the show at the Mozilla Foundation / Corporation don't care about what the community wants. They know that they know best what everybody else needs, and they're going to give it to you, and you're going to like it whether you like it or not.
Voting on bugs, working on this wishlist, posting to the wishlist newsgroup, are all a total waste of time and cycles. Just don't do it.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Hi! You must not be new here.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
God damn PDF pop-up shit! Everything should always display within the browser without exception ever.
(well, everything except the goatse.cx guy, which I don't want displayed in my browser -- though it's not really a pop-up thing either)
How about supporting id on client-side image maps when the pages that they're on are served as text/html? It's the only major browser that doesn't support this.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
That's a really good idea. Firefox has a modular extension system already. The core developers should use it more often. Anything that isn't necessary to core should be an uninstallable extension. Or to take that a step further, they could be disabled during installation, or not even downloaded unless enabled during installation. Built-in spellchecker, mouse gestures, phishing detectors, etc. come to mind as features that should be possible to completely remove.
Essentially, it runs like this:
As an example, the goal of the organization might be to increase adoption of Firefox amongst non-technical users. As a subgoal, it might be to ensure that people that are currently using firefox do not migrate back to IE when Microsoft releases IE7.
So: You product goals would be:
Now you have a metric by which to choose features. This makes it obvious - you should include a lot of the basic extensions by default. New people picking it up will not come across adblock, foxclocks, new themes - and the like. Make that easier. Now that I've got my non-computer literate fiancee to use firefox instead of IE - how to I encourage her friends to use it? She loves it (no popup ads!) but I want to burn a CD with the extensions on it - but that's not easy.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
1. Catch up to KHTML, which is years ahead of you (and increasing) in both speed and standards compliance.
2. Put MNG/JNG back in. Your reasons for not doing so sound increasingly stupid over time, and also they better describe MathML which didn't get removed. Also see #1.
FireFox was designed to be a light-weight browser so I do think that there should be a stripped down version for those who want a no bloat, lightening-fast, browser and then a full version with some extensions available to choose from. Some features from FF v3 I would like to see though are: A built-in UserAgent Spoofer Customizable context menus Although I agree it's a horrible security risk, ActiveX does have some legitimate uses so (on the Windows version) giving the option to open the page in IE may be a nice addition. Full compliance with CSS/2/3 Fix some of the memory issues, even though they're not near as bad as some might say as you can see here.
THey should just copy Opera and make it run firefox extensions... do that and we would have the best browser EVER
only from people who are willing to register and login at their wiki, not from 'the public'.
My two biggest requests would be
1. An option to enable an *ABSOLUTE* restriction on new content windows. Even with the 'pop up blocker' fully enabled some sites still manage to open new windows. I would like these FORCED into new tabs, always, NEVER permitting additional content windows to open (dialogs for FF itself, preferences, etc would still be acceptable)
2. An interative javascript debugger, that includes the ability to run scripts in a 'step mode', override/block the execution of specific js statements (or force conditional branches), and change the contents of variables.
3. An ability to prevent detection of the absence of specific plugins, enabling the user to take control back of media served by websites (eg, "Sorry, you dont have Microsoft DRM-enforcing plugin X, so we wont serve this media to you" - the ability to force the site to just give the URI to the browser, and let the *USER* decide how to retrieve it and what to do with it from there)
This is a HUGE issue as it prevents Drag and Drop file uploads for AJAX applications.
Sure, there is a FF Extension to solve this, but requires the user to install for such a behavior to work.
This should be a native solution. Can Firefox please reconsider their stance on this issue?
For years, drag and dropping of files into application windows has been EXPECTED behavior.
Firefox should allow AJAX applications the same sort of functionality.
As it stands, Firefox is the only browser I can not create a strictly script based solution for.
Below is an example. As we can see, the dragdrop event is useless except for preventing the dragdrop event from continuing propagation after we capture it.Also, firefox (on Mac at least) does not properly recognize an onBlur when I click on a non-firefox application window.
onBlur only happens when we click on a 2nd Firefox browser window - bad bad bad.
This and the above dragdrop issue means that Firefox is not properly supporting OS integration.
Addressing these issues would be huge in more robust user experience and application capabilities for AJAX developers.
TIA for your consideration of these points.
V
Better native open media support would be ideal:t outlines the specs for an ideal feature set.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Firefox_Ogg_Suppor
It's absurd that I have to code up basically an extension to add a new search engine to the search box. Galeon has had the ability to add a new "smart bookmark" by just copying and pasting the appropriate URL for years. AcidSearch for Safari, will automatically find and add the appropriate search URL for you if you want. Firefox on the other hand is makes it incredibly difficult, or causes you to resort to those ugly Rollyo pages.
Completely unacceptable, and worst of all, I don't even understand how they even thought that their approach was even remotely necessary.
Sometimes grey keys (arrows, home, end) stop working in edit controls and address field.
It seems to be unperedictable. It happens since some time of working, or it may appear in
new instance of FF, just launched (but while another instance already running)
Finally, that nursery rhyme makes sense. I always wondered why the poor weasel has to go 'pop'. The cruel bastards...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
An off switch for the memory leak : P
There needs to be a way to have SRP6 authentication for HTTP. One of the reasons that phishing is so easy is because the server never proves to the client that it knows your password (or a hash of it). SRP6 authenticates in both directions without revealing the password hash to an eavesdropper, or to an impostor client or server. Combined with a secure password entry dialog box that can't be spoofed, this would do a lot to prevent phishing.
Note that SSL alone is not enough to combat the problem. There exist phishing sites with valid SSL certificates. Sure, the domain name is different in the address bar, but phishing would never work if users actually read the address bar to begin with.
The best would be SRP over SSL, although this is quite expensive because it would require double the number of large-exponent modular exponentiations on the server side.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
There doesn't seem to be an option anymore to do what most people are probably going to want to do, which is just set the homepage to whatever's in the current tab. One step forward, two steps back.
Provide an option to set a time after which the Find bar disappears, e.g. 10 seconds. After that time it can slide down out of view. Also provide a hotkey that closes the Find bar, maybe CTRL+SHIFT+F.
Slashdotter
One of the many selectable styles is called "OMG !!! ..."
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
As a more general rule, I don't want anything to have a larger scope than it needs.
- Dialogs part of their own tab, functionality like menus, address bar etc not blocked.
- Any sound from a tab in the background should be locked out.
- If any bloody thing tries to resize the window, let it resize its own area rather than the whole Firefox window.
I hate it when I open a link in new tab, keep reading the original page and the new tab resizes. It's also completely horrid when you've opened ten tabs to let them load in the background and some music starts playing without any way of knowing which tab to close to get rid of it.
Firefox needs a better 'Work Offline' feature. IE's is better.
I suppose it's due to the whole Mozilla-Google bias of doing everything online, and away from the desktop where Microsoft reigns supreme.
But as a user, I'd like the ability to work offline if possible.
Just -- no.
Javascript is the exactly wrong language for doing anything AI-like. Go back to your silly ALICE bots.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Better contrast between the currently open tab and the other tabs.
Well, here's mine. A small light fast browser. It shows text and images. Tabs are swell, after that-leave it out. It has to be smaller lighter and faster than a barebones FF is now. LOW memory and CPU requirements, stable, secure, no cruft nor bloat,and designed from the ground up for Linux, not a one size fits nobody like they have now. I don't need a browser to wax the car while skindiving in the gulf and receiving stock ticker quotes via an automated blog that is pushed with an atomized RSS AJAXCOMET feed over a podcast that is mashed into a synergy of leveragisms. Nope, don't need it.
Have ctrl-F search the frickin' textareas.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I suggest stability. Firefox 1.5.* crashes every day or two on my Linux box. I've been an enthusiastic Firefox/Mozilla user for years; its stability is at a low on Linux.
Unless you can guarantee that it will be free of bugs (and therefore: security vulnerabilities), I think the [best] future of complex Internet clients is to be heavily sandboxed. They should have less capability than the user himself, so that when a compromise happens, the process doesn't have much access to anything.
I don't know if that means that most of it should run as nobody, or if it should be chrooted, or whatever. But take away as many capabilities as you can. Jails: they're not just for servers anymore.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Bilt ni sepllchecker si s MUST!
It would be nice for Firefox to understand basic HTML 4 from 1997 like <em/foo/
Yes, it's valid HTML 4. No, Slash hasn't mangled it. Try a validator if you don't believe me.
You'd think that with all this lip-service they pay to standards compliance, they'd be able to catch up with the specifications published nine years ago.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
2) Please add a webserver. Yes, a webserver. I'm serious. Add it! It will change the way the internet works.
With Eclipse, a Java IDE, you can position tabs in any logical assortment you see fit by just dragging the tab, e.g.:
-----
|1| |
|-|2|
|3| |
-----
is a perfectly valid tab configuration. Here, 1 & 3 take up the upper-left quarter and the lower-left quarter of the window respectively. 2 takes the entire right half. With larger monitors becomming the norm, this would be a great enhancement for those who would like to make better use of their horizontal space.
Compatibility with Mac OS X "Services", such as Chinese Text Converter, etc.
Reading the comments here, the majority of people want bugs fixed, performance improved, extra flexibility in installs and maintenance, or existing partially implemented features finished. There are thousands of quite valid bugs in bugzilla covering most of these.
But of course, these jobs are distinctly unfun and tedious, so instead developers create a wiki looking for new answers that they like - exciting and fun new features to work on.
Of the 20 or so bugs I voted on or logged to Mozilla bugzilla, only one or two have been fixed in about 3 years. It looks right now like the remainder will never be fixed.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Make the tabs work like Firefox 1.5?
Maintenance is considered tedious by most programmers (for good reasons), and thus most would rather work on new features than on fixing existing ones. But please, ho please, could the Mozilla gang just go through their Bugzilla and have a look at lingering bugs and enhancement request ? There are bugs that have been assigned for *years* that are still lingering, with the devs just not providing any feedback about potential resolution. Either close them as WONTFIX, so people will know that it will not get worked upon anymore, or actually assign some ressource to it and have them fixed, once and for all. Or mark them as FIXED, if they happened to be somehow.
Beside that, trimming the memory footprint would nice, as would be better standard support and better locale handling. Firefox (actually, Mozilla in general) is a pretty mature project now, so I would rather see incremental improvements in stability, performance and standard/locale support than any new whizbang feature.
:wq
I like keeping a history of sites I visit, But I dont when Im looking at porn or surfing slashdot at work, so just a button to disable recording the history. That would make the history useful again.
modular;
if there are toooo many features let the user decide what they want to include or disable.
let we have feature where the plugins etc be enabled for particular sites & disabled for particular.
multi line tab browser or a easy navigaion if you are opening over 30+ tabs
At certain font sizes, the letter spacing just looks bad... letters touching each other. IE probably avoids this by having only 5 font size selections. Firefox has ~50, but some in-between sizes just look bad.
If I copy/paste part of a web page, esp. If I copy just part of a table -- and then try to paste this into Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, it doesn't work very well. The formatting and table cells get lost. IE6 does a much better job of copy/paste -- it preserves the formatting nicely. (I haven't tried OpenOffice/StarOffice -- I assume it's similar.)
IE also seems to Print better -- the letter-spacing looks better, more WYSIWYG.
I love Firefox, but I have to switch to IE quite often to copy/paste and print.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
how about merging patches submitted by distributions quickly and releasing more often, to avoid the current mess that resulted in the creation of Iceweasel, for starters?
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Trying to figure out which of the multitude of settings in about:config need to be changed to achieve a certain effect is a bitch.
1) Make the stop button work when I press it, not some time later, but when I press it. (I'm on dial-up, it can often take minutes before the browser will stop)
2) On a related note, pausing a download should pause it when I request it to do so, not some time later, but now. It would also be nice to be able to resume a download after the browser has been closed or the computer restarted.
3) A page is not "Done" as long as javascripts are still happily downloading crap. Make the status bar text aware of javascript actions. (grr I hate javascript)
4) It would be really really nice if the browser did not start a new cache (without deleting the old one) should the power happen to go out or if another application causes the computer to lockup. I can understand the fear theat the last files downloaded might be corrupt, but that is no reason to reject the entire cache.
(and of course, please optimise memory use)
I would like to see that direct URL download feature that allows you to easily download a file where you don't have a page with a link you can right-click on (such as when you get the URL from outlook). That way you don't need to navigate to a particular PDF to save the file. Right now, I have a simple html page I made to get around this (linkDownload.href=txtURL.value) but I would prefer not to have to bother to install/recreate it on new machines.
So you can use control + F to open up the find in page dialog, but how do you close it? Escape if the text box has focus, but what if it doesn't? Control + F should close the search box if it is pressed twice. Or another control + key combo.
This one is probably trivial to fix:
I go to this web site, and try to save the page:
http://blogs.edmunds.com/karl/239
IE saves it using this filename:
Karl on Cars - GM's EV1 -- Who Killed Common Sense.htm
Firefox saves it as:
239.htm