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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."
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?
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
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?
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.
-- 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
3. Ability to save any browsing session. That is, save everything you are presently doing in Firefox to a big file. After that, Firefox can be closed, your computer can be shut off, etc, and later you can come back, open Firefox, and load your browsing session from the saved file.
Hello to the person who modded this down! (As overrated no less.)
The above comment is funny. In fact, it's geek humour. This being slashdot we like:
Geek humour.
Corrections to the article.
Massivly technical explanations on related subjects that enlighten us.
Things we do not like:
Moderators who are too used to Digg and mod down anything they personally don't like, even if it's factually correct and/or relevant and/or insightful humour, having the gall to cancel out the mod points of someone who, despite only getting given points every few months, still thought the comment was funny enough to mod up.
May I direct your attention to the setting which allows you to apply a penalty of -lots'o'points to anything marked as "funny" so that you personally never see anything entertaining again.
Thank you for your attention. That is all.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
I take it you haven't read the CSS specs. There's no way that you're going to make it "fast" and "compliant" at the same time. You'll have to chose one of them. The reason some browsers feel fast today is because we have fast computers or they skip corners when it comes to the standards.
Oh, one good step would to make an "force xml mode", in which xhtml is allowed, but non xml-compilent markup is rejected. I'm only guessing, but if the render engine doesn't have to be bothered by guessing, it can be made a little faster, even though it's marginal. Also, it would make browsing more interesting; you visit all those "Valid XTHML 1.0!"-sites and quickly realize they aren't.
And, as an addendum to that, make extensions run in some sort of "protected memory" area so they can't take the browser down with them. If that's not possible at least make instances of the browser run seperately so a crash doesn't take down the whole lot.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
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.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
"Barebones, browser only, users must install their own extensions. Most geeks will want this one."
That's what FF is supposed to be. I don't know why they are putting in all kinds of profiles features and crud, but FF was supposed to be the barebones browser that wa included in the Mozilla suite.
I hate printers.
YES! KISS! I just want it to start quickly and load pages FAST! Not sure of others' experiences, but on my Fedora box, Firefox is a dog (and yes I tried all the config hacks that are supposed to work). On the same machine as a dual boot, Firefox for Windows XP runs much faster and loads pages much faster...
If someone wants feature X, Y, or Z, let them have it, but make it an option if it slows down the browser.
I'd also like a "bloated" browser as well, full of plugins that are considered useful, carefully maintained, and also checked to make sure they all work well together.
It's called Opera, and works like a charm.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
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
I believe that, in most cases, the problems lies in the page generation. I guess most webmaster test their "static page" layout against xhtml validator, and then use PHP or ASP to generate their code at production-time, thus mixing server code and presentation code. A nice solution I find for this problems are XML constructors like Ruby's Builder and Rails' Markaby. Both of them save a lot of typing (no clumsy </tags>) and will scream at schema error.
* This is my own personal opinion.
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.
Compatibility with Mac OS X "Services", such as Chinese Text Converter, etc.
Make the tabs work like Firefox 1.5?