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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."
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;"
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?
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?
...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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.