Firefox/Features/UX Priorities

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Want help make the user experience of Firefox the best it can be? Here are the top priorities identified by the UX team. They are in order of priority, grouped under new features, revised features, and polish/cleanup.

If you want to help out with any of these, get in touch with Alex Limi to coordinate, limi@mozilla.com.

New features

1. Sharing (UX tracked in bug 642684)
2. Identity (UX tracked at http://areweprettyyet.com/5/accountManager for now)
3. Home tab, putting it in an app tab (bug 544819) is the first step
4. New tab page
5. Taskbar Web Apps
6. In-browser preview + Save of common content (PDF, cd:attachment, mp3, etc)
7. Add-ons: Standardized toolbar/doorhanger (pane) support
8. Tab multiselect: bug 566510
9. File upload indicators: We should supply a standard way of showing progress on file uploads via forms, people are using Flash to do this right now, and it sucks.

Feature revision

1. Install/Update: Channel switcher, bug 644517
2. Install/Update: Silent updates & on shutdown where we can't do silent
3. User control of extensions & plugins, bug 596343
4. Panorama groups should persist, load on-demand
5. In-line autocomplete, bug 566489 — how quickly a user can get to a site is a key part of the perceived performance, we also need to do a better job with the audience that “speaks URLs”
6. Opt-in activation for plugins that are unknown/slow (similar to Flashblock), better missing plugin experience, ability to soft-block 0-day using click-to-play. Settings: Render (Always|when clicked|never), "Don't ask me to install this plugin again"
7. Panorama improvements
8. Panel-based Download Manager (see [Limi's article http://limi.net/articles/improving-download-behaviors-web-browsers] Improved download manager)
9. Find-in-page cleanup
10. OS X 10.7 features: scrollbar, full screen mode, three-finger gestures
11. Self-sharing feature for F1, aka. "For Later"
12. Install/Update: Mac improvements, bug 516362
13. Install/Update: Stub installer
14. Install/Update: Easier fresh install
15. Add zoom controls to the Firefox menu: bug 592147 or should show an indicator when the zoom level deviates from the standard. Also: ability to set a global zoom level.
16. Default UI for contentEditable, cleanup, make it output better code
17. Improved discovery pane in add-ons manager
18. Backgrounds and themes view in the add-ons manager/live preview
19. Sync Promotion
20. Private browsing windows open without restart
21. Private browsing theme change (darkened)
22. Import dialog doesn't offer Sync import or Chrome import
23. Don't let add-ons that are not compatible with an unsupported version of Firefox stop you from upgrading: bug 597598 — i.e. an add-on that doesn't work with 3.6 nor with 4.0 shouldn't stop you from upgrading your Firefox 3.5 to 4.0
24. Better missing plugin experience
25. Improve fullscreen experience, especially in preparation for OS X 10.7
26. Self-documenting keyboard shortcut overview, (generated from the code?) — should inform a keyboard shortcut cleanup

Polish/cleanup

1. Overall UI responsiveness and drawing operations
2. Tab animations: tab close behavior, tab open behavior (bug 578327 and/or bug 530203?), tab drag (bug 455694) tab detach (bug 485105), eliminate redundant title text (bug 583890)
3. Location/Search bar cleanup, bug 592909
4. App tabs: chromeless app tabs, bug 585445 (includes: Cmd/Ctrl-L doesn't bring up the AwesomeBar when location bar is hidden)
5. App tabs: Global app tabs, bug 587873
6. Fix Firefox menu rendering, bug 594821
7. Make Search local to the tab (at least for tabs-on-top): bug 565740
8. Remove 3-second delay from AMO installs bug 561177
9. Put back keyboard shortcuts that went "missing", F6 on Windows is a big one, possibly Ctrl-E too
10. Don't show "about:blank" in URL bar of new tabs
11. Mac windows without tabs render incorrectly
12. AwesomeBar results visual design, bug 587909
13. File type cursors, especially useful for binary downloads + PDFs (“the land mines of the internet”)
14. Find bar should disappear on navigation events, bug 628179
15. New tab should never lose focus from URL/search bar (this got implemented only halfway)
16. Web sites should never be allowed to resize main window, only pop-ups
17. Display the domain in black and the path in grey: bug 451833 — makes domains more readable and prominent, parity with other browsers# Papercuts: Flash stealing focus, copy/paste rich vs plain text
18. Doorhangers + modal dialogs cleanup, keep eliminating notifications (e.g. update -> Home tab): httpauth bug 567804, Popups blocked bug 588317, XPI install bug 588266, onunload bug 588292
19. Expose prefs that made it too late (tabs-on-demand, DNT, always restore tabs, switch-to-tab in location bar prefs)
20. List All Tabs menu should list closed tabs/windows for more obvious undo: bug 597593
21. Animation for doorhangers, so it's obvious that you can bring them back
22. Styling for indicators in the URL bar (password, geo, etc)
23. Favicon outside SSL indicator, improve visual design
24. Improved about:sessionrestore
25. Context menu cleanup
26. Extract PDF to main menu (windows)
27. Better about:config — make it easier to reset to defaults, to view only changed values, and make boolean values checkboxes instead of text labels, add autocomplete for “about:”
28. Remove the flash message on new tab on open
29. full screen on windows (display the firefox button, normal window controls)
30. Update default fonts
31. In-content windows like Add-ons manager should remember if you pulled them out to separate windows.
32. Caps Lock indicator in password field
33. Multiselect support for disable/remove add-ons
34. Don't import useless bookmarks: We currently import bookmarks from IE (Windows Marketplace, Windows Update, etc) that aren't even usable from Firefox, and that the user didn't add. With Sync, suddenly you have this on your phone too.
35. Improve OS X "select" tag rendering, dropdown menu should look like OSX dropdown menus rather than windows in more cases (it drops down to platform-independent version now)
36. Get rid of tab overflow indicators (might need some simple user testing to make sure)
37. Allow shorter tabs, use gradients instead of ellipses for text overflow
38. Visually distinguish visible tabs in List All Tabs menu
39. Firefox/Projects/Eradicate Startup Dialogs
40. Attach “create custom search” onto search form completion dropdowns (possibly with threshold, detect search fields, 3rd time etc)
41. Improve session restore screen to support groups/windows better
42. Move "Know your rights" bug 571584 and Firefox update available bug 588227 to home tab snippets
43. Ctrl-tab should know about tab order instead of just moving left-to-right
44. Clone tab history (and form/session data?) from parent tab when opening a new one
45. Tooltips stick around and overlay other apps on OS X when switching apps

Infrastructure (with no UI)

Projects we care about that have UX impact, but little to no UI.

1. Bundle Flash with Firefox
2. In-browser PDF display — PDFkit on Mac? http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/
3. Detection of captive portals
4. JägerMonkey for UI
5. Resource Packages
6. jemalloc support on Mac
7. Smarter disk cache
8. More performance data, memory usage data, CPU usage data, hang detection as part of system pings — what we can't measure, we can't improve
9. SSL should support form restore too, possibly with timeout
10. Reusable grouping API for tabs (so other extensions, e.g. VerticalTabs, can reuse Panorama groups), tabs need UUIDs.
11. Gmail/GC + Netflix
12. Reinstall experience: a way to ask if they want fresh settings or keep their old ones

Research projects

Projects we need to get started early, since they need more data and/or design explorations.

1. Combine URL and search bar: We should make common actions available in the location bar, and do some user testing to figure out what patterns people use while searching vs. entering URLs. Also figure out what the percentages are via metrics.
2. Do user testing on various SSL/identity variants, see if there's a difference and whether we can help people understand it better when they want to.
3. In-content preferences (including unifying customization/appearance/themes, eliminating unneeded windows), faster navigation, better grouping
4. User test various progress indicator variations (perception of speed): Better indicator for how much of a page is downloaded, maybe even separate indicator for page vs resources on the page.
5. Unify bookmarks/history/tabs and make the transition between them more seamless, browse + search UIs for these
6. Better Customization UI, should be in-content, include appearance and toolbar customization in one.
7. Ability to manage hundreds of tabs in low memory situations (serialization, freeze JS, etc)
8. Look into network latency issues, prefetch, preload-on-hover, "optimize away the network when we can", etc
9. Tablet UI
10. Design and plan for "Actions" (include menu items in this, like Dietrich's extension?)
11. New design for "Find text in page"
12. Built-in translation: Capability of selecting text and translating it, offer to translate page when not in user's selected language
13. Improved content authoring/editing: Provide a great, default UI for contentEditable: Everyone constructs their own UI on top of contentEditable at the moment, we should supply a good default implementation, like we do for video controls. Table editing in particular is bad ,the inner workings of contentEditable need some love too.
14. Merge folders & tags
15. "The Vault", a way to save/freeze content, save encrypted to Sync container, and have them follow you around (receipts, tickets, etc)
16. Combine URL/search bar, support actions
17. Multiuser support, logging in to your browser, sandboxed secure profiles
18. Collecting people/locations/time, service discovery, navigable pages in the browser include meta-pages of location, people, etc.
19. Global Undo: For closing tabs, closing windows, figure out what should and shouldn't be in the undo stack.
20. Saving web pages in a way that doesn't suck: Receipts, offline reading (“read later”), Paolo has a related project here, MAF: http://maf.mozdev.org/
21. New interface primitives for extensions: combine the multitude of hook-in points to a single interface.
22. Unify plugins and extension listings, straighten out the language (add-ons)
23. Volume per tab and/or some way to indicate "which tab is making noise"
24. Sidebar tabs: A power-user interface that gives you better control of large number of open pages. Partial thumbnails, grouping, filtering. blog post #1, blog post #2 (limi)
25. History as a parallel timeline? Better indication in human terms and navigation of sites in history (wei's sprint wei's video Simile Timeline Slife
26. Sync my contacts across sites, let me use my Facebook people elsewhere, autocomplete people (with faces)
27. Web page quick look: User-triggered way to get an idea of where a link will go, possibly show a preview or some information about where a link leads
28. Vista/Win7 explorer-like interface for navigating favorites, get rid of URLs when displaying favorites

Tool & process improvements

• community for design discussion?
• omnigraffle stencils for awpy
• new nighly build icon
• visualization tool for progress on a feature over time: treadmill
• HTML bugmail / new bugzilla theme