Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.)
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.
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.
The problem is that basically the only real market share out there for grabs, is people who don't know anything more than "I click in the internet icon". If you give them the bare-bones, they'll go back to IE7.
The solution would seem to be to have official plugins shipped with the browser installer, which power users could deactivate (during installation) or replace.
Though personally I feel some things should just be built in (remembering tabs on restart for instance)
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If you can't understand why a typical computer user (read: not a technical guru) would want a feature like this then you're really out of touch with the general populace.
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?
The slashdot extension ought to have an OMG Ponies theme built into it. Taco's wife would be proud.
.torrent downloading, or at the very least a default Add On button in the corner of the window, so there's no menu a noob has to click into to install features that may become standard in other browsers. That way they are only 3 clicks away from installing a new feature, instead of missing out because it's part of a long menu with no highlighting graphic even.
In FF3 I'd like to see integrated
Oh You POS
Eugh. We don't need more GNOME hideosity. I'd much rather see packages customized for each desktop environment. KDE, GNOME, whatever.
But for the love of God, don't standardize on a user-coddler like GNOME. I used GNOME for three years, with ever-increasing annoyance and frustration, until finally I said to hell with it and tried KDE.
KDE lets me do what I want to do. I'm never going back.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Why can't the extra featueres be first-party extensions that are installed by default, and the installer has a 'Custom' installation option that lets you uncheck all of them? Seems like that would be the best of both worlds.
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
Many web pages depend on GIF's all-or-nothing transparancy rendering. Fixing the pages that weren't designed with GIF's limitations in mind would break those that were.
It's the task of the web developer/designer to make the site pretty. The browser shouldn't try to second-guess them by modifying images to disobey what the image spec specifies. Not by default anyway. I have no beef with this feature being an extension.
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)
Really? If you were going to teach a man to pee, would you insist on holding it for him the first time, to make sure he got it right, or would you just maybe show him, or even, sort of show him, so he hopefully got the idea?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
(The second checkbox only becomes active when the first is ticked)
This presents the user with less choices and the additional options make sense.
There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
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.
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.