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Talk:Firefox/Feature Brainstorming: Difference between revisions
Android Brainstorming and improving Ubuntu for Android
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This would make it possible to watch Hulu in the pop-out player, and have it always visible. | This would make it possible to watch Hulu in the pop-out player, and have it always visible. | ||
== GetURL for TinyURL and similar addresses == | |||
I would love to see a feature that would let users mouse over a shortened link (like one provided by TinyURL or such) and would display the full web address of the re-direct. | |||
[[User:TheUncleBob|TheUncleBob]] 16:55, 15 August 2009 (UTC) | |||
== Tab Locking == | |||
The idea of tab locking is a good idea. However I don't think it should be limited to only to the domain as the original creator suggested in the Brainstorming section. My reasoning behind this has to deal with watching video. If I am watching a video that happens to be a bit long, I generally do some other browsing in other tabs. Sometimes I accidentally navigate off of my movie page. | |||
I believe a tab locking feature that would prevent me from navigating away to any other page would be best. Or even as was originally suggested, forced an "open in new tab" for the locked page. | |||
Also it should prevent me from being able to drag the tab into a new browser window, or at least have the option to prevent this. When I am on a page with a flash movie playing, sometimes i click on the tab and accidentally move it just slightly and it opens a browser window with that page and the flash video resets. | |||
== User-specified Java runtime == | |||
I suggest to implement a way (e.g. config parameter, command-line option, ...) to instruct FireFox not to use the Java runtime found automatically (e.g. by scanning Windows registry), but instead a different one specified by the user. For instance, when using Portable Firefox off a USB stick, it would be very useful to be able to run a Java applet via a Java runtime installed on the same removable storage. | |||
== Advanced tab loading control == | |||
I don't generally use bookmarks because I'm too busy to ever look back at them anyway. Instead, when I find a Web page that interests me, whether I've already read through it or intend to at a later date, I leave the tab open and let the session manager save it. | |||
This works awesome and allows me to stumble upon Web sites or topics that I had forgotten about. As a computer programmer, I'm often trying to learn about multiple subjects at the same time and this allows me to keep useful material available for me to find later when I have time to work through it. | |||
Unfortunately, this leads me to have sessions with 50 or 60 or more tabs open. It isn't a problem for most of the day, but everyday when I first start Firefox (and occasionally throughout the day as some OSes force me to restart the computer) I have to wait a LONG time for Firefox to become responsive because it's busy loading all of those tabs, many of them from very expensive sites. Additionally, the session often includes multiple tabs from YouTube or the like, which all start playing as soon as they've loaded; not only wasting resources, but forcing me to search through the mess of tabs to pause the playback. | |||
I was pleased to find that somebody had already suggested a solution[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstorming:Tabs,_Sidebar,_Windows#Advanced_tab_loading_control]. Loading the session, but refraining from actually loading every tab until requested. In practice, I probably have between 3 and 10 tabs that I use regularly, while the rest are just there for me to rediscover when I have time for them. It would be nice if those X tabs that I regularly use would load when the session is loaded, but the remainder would just load empty or placeholder tabs that are waiting for user interaction before loading. Firefox could also [optionally?] load these other tabs incrementally over time as it finds itself running idly. | |||
This would greatly improve the user experience of Firefox for myself (and many others I've heard do this). | |||
==Disable Backspace== | |||
[[Firefox/Feature Brainstorming:User Interface#Disable Backspace Navigation]] | |||
A very good suggestion. But perhaps instead, make hotkeys modifiable. | |||
== Performance == | |||
As many guys have already said: Firefox is too slow in terms of its start-up time. This is also the main reason why other people choose a different browser (for marketing aspects ;) )<br /> | |||
I list a few thoughts about how to shorten the start-up time (Could be alreay implemented though). In general, it is a good idea to start particular things delayed after FF has already been started (see superfetch at Windows Vista/7). | |||
<ul> | |||
<li> Do not instantiate views of the menu at start-up (I think this is partly implemented).</li> | |||
<li> Do not build the full bookmark list. Use lazy displaying of invisible nodes of folders.</li> | |||
<li> Do not load all plugins at start-up. Surely, some plugins really need to start at once, but some do not. Add a bool-value for plugin developers to enable/disable start-up at once.</li> | |||
</ul> | |||
Feel free to add other ideas! | |||
== Tab Focus Stack == | |||
This is a pretty simple feature to implement, but I think it would be very useful. Currently when a tab is closed, the tab to the right of it in the window is brought to focus by default. This is usually not a helpful behavior. If Firefox implements a stack of Tab-IDs so that whenever a tab is detached, closed, crashes, etc... it is popped off the stack and the focus returns the next tab at the top of the stack, we can save numerous keystrokes for us multitaskers. | |||
EXAMPLE: | |||
Right now, you have 5 tabs open in the current window. You are focused on the right-most tab of the window. But you want to pop the left-most tab into another/(or its own) window (imagine you are playing a game in one window and reading a guide in the other, or writing code and following a doc page, or sending out event invitations while looking at the address/telephone/amenities of the venue). Right now, if you simply drag the left-most tab to detach it, focus is brought to the new left-most tab of your original window, rather than the tab you most recently had focus on. | |||
What I would like to happen is that once I detach the leftmost tab, the rightmost tab (on which I was most recently focused) would be the tab that pops back into focus. | |||
Implementation issues: | |||
We don't want to slow down the browser by maintaining a potentially very deep list of focus. So what we can do is create a fixed-depth stack that only stores (at most) the N most recent tabs with focus. There are many acceptable ways to implement this, but the most lightweight would probably be to use an array with an index that is incremented/modulo-N. When we pop off an tab id, we can set the slot in the array corresponding to the current index to a null or -1 and then decrement our index. | |||
Realistically, however, even a very deep stack of integers will not be a bottleneck. | |||
==Android Brainstorming== | |||
I searched through the Wiki but couldn't find a proper section about mobile (smartphone and tablet) brainstorming. | |||
As Android is the most important platform (until Firefox OS is successfully enough) and Firefox 15 Beta is much better than the previous versions, I would propose a dedicated section "Android (smartphone/tablet)" to gather ideas. | |||
I suppose that Android users are even less technical than desktop users, so a [[Firefox/Feature Brainstorming]] wiki section should attract more ideas than bugzilla tickets. | |||
[http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Thailand-distributes-800-000-Android-tablets-to-students-1648542.html Thailand distributes 800,000 free Android tablets to students] | |||
==Ubuntu for Android== | |||
Now that the biggest online games company [http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE0MTY Valve is embracing Linux] and [http://blog.canonical.com/2012/07/19/introducing-ubuntu-web-apps-setting-the-web-free-of-the-browser/ Ubuntu is integrating webapps into the desktop], I would suggest improving [http://soltesza.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/why-ubuntu-for-android-is-the-most-important-linux-project-today/ Ubuntu for Android is the most important Linux project] besides Firefox OS. | |||
Please help to generalize the [http://developer.ubuntu.com/api/ubuntu-12.04/javascript/index.html Unity Web API] into a freedesktop standard and build a Firefox version optimized for low-cost Linux (ARM) devices (especially while [http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2012/05/firefox-on-windows-o.html Microsoft bans Firefox on ARM-based Windows]). | |||
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/15/punjab_ubuntu_free_laptops_students/ Pakistan provides 500,000 free Ubuntu laptops to students] | |||