Firefox/Feature Brainstorming: Difference between revisions

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(→‎Identity: Added some information on why you would want OpenID support in Firefox)
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* Support for [http://openid.net/ OpenID]
* Support for [http://openid.net/ OpenID]
** ''What does this mean? OpenID is something supported by websites...''
** ''What does this mean? OpenID is something supported by websites...''
** OpenID's are consumed by websites but users get their OpenID's from identity providers.  This is where their personal information and list of trusted sites is kept.  As OpenID becomes more prevalent, phishing for the user's password to their identity provider becomes more compelling because you could get access to all of the sites a user goes to.  Having support for OpenID baked into Firefox would allow users to fight phishing by giving them the ability to specify who their identity provider is and then warn them with blinking lights and uber pop-ups when some site tries to phish them.
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Revision as of 16:31, 13 October 2006

We are currently in the early development stage for Firefox 3, and would like to collect all the ideas for feature enhancements in a single place. Our goal is to create a single index that lists what sorts of things we're thinking of doing, with links to more detailed ideas about implementation specifics or concerns, and tagets for inclusion in the project.

Note: This is a list of feature enhancement ideas for all future Firefox releases, not just Firefox 3. Firefox 3 will include a subset of the items on this list.

How to use this page

  • If you have ideas about features listed here please create a new wiki page off of your user page that outlines your ideas (mockups welcome!) and add a link to that page in the "References" column, or link to existing pages with examples, design thoughts, interesting articles, etc.
  • If you have ideas for features not listed here please add them to the most appropriate group below. Include any references to more detailed implementation ideas.
  • If you would like to comment on features listed here please do so on the discussion page rather than in the list itself.

Browser chrome

Browser customization

Specific features References
File management
  • Improve and expand file management options (ie: "Open with")

n/a

Floating tool bars
  • Allow the user to pull all toolbars off the top of the window and create a floating toolbar. These floating bars could be overlapped, tiled, etc to save screen real-estate.

n/a

Adjustable menu and toolbar fonts
  • Allow the user to specify the font (and especially the font size) used in menues and toolbars. This is especially useful for those of us with failing eye sight or those with high resolution screens (that cause the fonts to be too small).

n/a

Add-on management
  • Version compatibility
  • Options management
  • Integration with AMO
  • Support for remote extensions (i.e. dev tools package)
  • Allow user to disable plugins via "about:plugins", Options/Prefs, or Extensions
  • Export/Import of Addons Information.
  • Make it easier to find high-quality and reliable add-ons
  • Have "Extension Packs" available for download immediately upon completing a Firefox install (also see "Installer" notes)
  • "Update All" extensions button

- FAQ on forum
- Extensions summary on TEM
- "Extension Packs" from installer idea
- Provide functionality to export and import addons-information using RDF
- Extension compatibility ideas

Optional IE theme
  • Same size and button positioning
  • Tab opening like IE7
  • Back/forward buttons under same dropdown (forward is rarely used)
  • Go/Reload button occupies same space
  • Menus hidden by default (press alt to show)

n/a

General tasks
  • Improve extension installation/management UI
  • Unify add-ons management (extensions, themes, search engines, dictionaries, plugins)
  • Improve interaction design around customizing browser interfaces

n/a

Preferences

Specific features References
List filtering
  • add filtering to the following lists (like the filtering for the Cookies list):
    • Allowed Sites - Popups
    • Exceptions - Images
    • Exceptions - Cookies
    • Allowed Sites - Add-ons Installation
    • Don't Remember Passwords by full URL
    • Remember Passwords by full URL

n/a

General tasks

When firefox is installed in a system behind a firewall and proxy needs to be set to access the web, we need to go to preferences and set the proxy. Instead we can have a popup coming up if there is no proxy setup. And we can enter the proxy details in that popup.

If not completely automated, at least proxy settings should be saved in profiles, so that when changing network (more and more common with laptops and various wlan accesses) settings can be changed in a fast way

n/a

Tabs, sidebar, and windows

Specific features References
Tabs
  • Option to open default page when creating a new tab
  • Tab drag and detach
  • Window drag and attach as tabs
  • Drag tabs between windows
  • Select on close behavior
  • Tab switching via Mouse Scroll Wheel (on all Platforms)
  • Grouping of tabs (possibly by multiple tab rows)
  • Open tabs one upon the other and/or side by side in a single window
  • Shading of Tabs denoting time since it started (On the scale of white to black, white is more recent than black)
  • Recursive tabs for better tab grouping ("Open in new tab under current tab")
  • Tab expose
  • Option to view tabs in sidebar (with thumbnails)
  • Multiple tabstrips
  • Tab dock
  • Finding tabs
  • select tab from command line mozilla -remote "selecttab(http://www.mozilla.org)"
  • Improved UI for finding and reopening any one or more closed tabs (including shortcut key)
  • UI for modifying tab width (f.e. splitter between tabs that can be dragged to change the width of all tabs)
  • Tab opening + closing animation
  • Allow "open in new tab/new window/same window" settings to be set per tab. Allows use of a home page like Google or Yahoo to open links in a new tab, but other tabs links can open in the same tab.
  • Allow opening in new tab for form submits. Allows user to type several consecutive searches into a search box while opening the results in new tabs in the background.
  • Allow relative opening of Tabs, i.e. child tabs open next to parent tab in opening order (and not at the end of Tab bar)
  • Display multiple tabs in tiled panes
  • Faster tab mouseover feedback, i.e. show in status bar or set tooltip delay to 0
  • More detailed tab mouseover feedback, i.e. thumbnail image of page

- design thoughts for tabs instead of windows.
- Ben Goodger blogs about tabs.
- Whether Ctrl+W should not close the app.
- Ge.diego made some comments on Ben Godger test build that includes new tab management and gave an alternative user interface mockup proposal
- Tab Sidebar extension homepage
- Show Safari form results in new tab

Browser Window
  • Allow 'drag & drop' of links anywhere on the browser window (not just the tab bar) to open the link in a new background tab (e.g. 'drag & drop' links from Google Search Results/Google News/Digg Front Page etc. to open several background tabs)
  • Allow 'drag & drop' of selected text on a web page anywhere on the browser window to conduct search on the selected text using the default search engine and opening the search results in a new background tab
Session management
  • Ability to save and restore sessions (tabs, etc.)
  • Implement some method to deal with session sets
  • Make session restore fast and precise (save and restore DOM, or use FastBack data)
Sidebar
  • Sidebar animation

n/a

Web Page easy handling
  • Allow to put a tag on whatever place of a web page, like a gg map interface. The tag is remembered on the right side bar of the window, can be bookmarked. when the bokkmark is clicked, the window is open and focus down to the bookmark
  • Allow to do a "spreadsheet like behaviour on a web page" : you can click on th tag to say "freeze up" , and when you move the cursor down the lower part of the page is scrolling down, the upper part stay unmoved,
  • Allow to compact the web page between 2 vertical tags
  • Allow for a specific web page to apply tag rules : place tags automatically between paragraphs, to allow easy compacting of un-interesting ones , propose a default "compacted" presentation" or "fully opened" behaviour on those pages.

n/a

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Search/Find

Specific features References
Search plugins
  • Ability to organize search plugins better
  • Ability to remove search engine addons from search box
  • Associate keywords to search plugins
  • Transient assignment of search plugin to search bar

n/a

Search history
  • Browseable search history

n/a

Search bar
  • Integrate browser search with desktop search
  • Multiple searchbars and/or multiple selectable engines for search
  • Default search engine assignment
  • One-click clear searchbar
  • Highlight terms in page from searchbar
  • Spotlight-like functionality
  • Search bar should allow the user to search for a string matching only a whole word.
  • Resizable search box
    • The box may extend as needed or be set to a new static size so users can see more of the searchbar content.

- Search for whole words only

Find
  • Pre-populate ctrl-F with searchbox contents
  • Pre-populate ctrl-F with selected text
  • Tab-modal find bar
  • Find integration points for web applications
  • Improve highlighting behaviour
    • Allow user to configure highlight color
    • Highlight color is chosen to be in contrast to the page background
  • Add checkbox for "Match whole word"
    • If a user does a find for "plant", "Transplant" will not be considered a match

- Visual feedback on text/link find

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Address bar

Specific features References
Search
  • When typing in the URL bar, have an option in the auto-complete menu to search for the entered text at the user's choice of Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, etc. Note: this feature already exists in the Mozilla SeaMonkey browser. If the code is compatible it could just be copied.

n/a

Autocomplete
  • middle of word
  • local filenames
  • user's bookmarks
  • using history frequency for relevance
  • Further refinement (and strengthening of match) could be made by offering a list of likely alternatives, selectable via arrow keys in a drop-down menu

- Similar to AppRocket on Windows and Quicksilver for OS X
- remarks from bur

take over Statusbar

The only thing I really need the Statusbar for is to preview the target address of links before clicking them. Most of the time the statusbar is just taking away screen space without providing any useful information.
If it would be possible to display the target location in the Address Bar (it really is the right part to show an address...), perhaps in another color (or perhaps only showing the changed part of the URL in a different color) then the statusbar would not be needed any more.

Terrible idea, says Gerv

Contextual menu

On right click, adding also a "paste & go" item

Like in Opera browser
- Middle click already does this if you turn it on (and it's on by default on Linux)

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Bookmarks

Specific features References
Bookmark management
  • Autodetect duplicates
  • Bookmark manager assistance/validation/cleanup
  • Frequently visited links automarking
  • Favicon management
  • Smart bookmark folders
  • Saved searches as smart bookmark folders
  • Category suggest for bookmarks via social web service
  • Virtual bookmark autofile view based upon most likely suggestions from a social web service
  • Remote bookmarks
  • Syncing bookmarks
  • Make it easier to directly add a keyword when saving bookmarks (i.e. you should see a keyword field when you press ctrl+D to bookmark a page)
  • Relevance based filtering
  • Leverage power of DB-based history/bookmarks
  • Auto-linking/smart tagging
  • Preserving DOM state
  • Baysian training/pruning
  • Option to open bookmarks in same tab, new tab, or new window

- On Tagging

In-page bookmarking
  • Easily-accessible, actual book-style bookmarks for long documents, where you can:
    • Preserve your position in the page
    • Move, rather than create new/delete old, the bookmark. This is useful when reading through e.g. the archives of an on-line comic, an e-book, or catching up after vacation on a blog like slashdot,
  • Allow the user to store the full text and images of bookmarked pages, just in case they go away (see discussion about archiving in "History" section)

- Provide in-page content-highlighting and saving page-state while bookmarking

Bookmark toolbars
  • Revisit bookmark toolbars
  • Bookmark dock
    • A "bookmark dock" is conceptualized as a bookmark toolbar that allows a user to specify icons instead of text, and that could optionally be placed at the top, left, right, or bottom of the browser window.
  • Bookmark bar which allows to span multiple rows (to provide more one-click-to-go shortcuts)

n/a

Bookmarks in other parts of browser chrome
  • Let individual bookmarks live on the status and menu bars, and provide UI for putting them there (f.e. support for dragging and dropping bookmarks from the bookmarks sidebar and the bookmarks toolbar to the status and menu bars)

n/a

Page change notification
  • Enable a system where the browser can check if a page has changed, without relying on Web feeds (any bookmark can be "live")

The Suite used to have this; research why it was dropped before implementing it again

Bookmarks backend
  • Flexible bookmarks API
  • Smarter handling of bookmarking redirects
  • Ability to bookmark a POST response
  • Ability to bookmark a session (i.e. when bookmarking a single tab, the ability to bookmark the whole session in that tab rather than just the specific page; when bookmarking multiple tabs, the ability to bookmark the sessions in those tabs rather than just the specific pages)
  • Rich-text (i.e. HTML) microsummary bookmarks
  • Live titles extracted from feeds

n/a

General tasks
  • Completely rework bookmark manager
  • Toolbar enhancements
    • Allow user to move toolbars
  • Investigate the concept of bookmark data mining
  • Improve installation and management of microsummary generators

n/a

History

Specific features References
History management
  • Ability to add annotations
  • Ability to automatically or manually tag history
  • Ability to automatically or manually archive contents in history in a variety of ways
    • Option to store all text from all pages (possibly excluding https and preset sites) ever visited -- this would let you revisit pages that disappeared off the internet, and also do very good search through history. At 100 pages per day, and a very generous 10k per page (storing text-only, not scripts and images), this would be about a third of a gig annually, so manageable storage requirements by modern standards.
  • Maintain form state in history
    • You fill out a long form, click Submit, and an error occurs. You click Back and sometimes all of your form data is gone. I think it has to do with the page having a short TTL so it is re-requested from the server and re-rendered with a blank form.
    • Allow users to go back through history and see exactly what was entered in the forms on pages.
    • Never save password fields except through existing functionality
    • Allow user to enable/disable feature

- On Tagging

History search
  • Full-text indexing of history
  • Search using metadata / full page text from cache

n/a

History browsing
  • Global history navigation & presentation
  • Session history navigation & presentation (handling iframes & modern DOM tricks)

Thumbnail session history

General tasks
  • Revisit location bar
  • Better management
  • Search enhancements

n/a

Downloads

Specific features References
Download control
  • Ability to download all links
  • Ability to download selected links
  • Ability to create download queues so a user can add several links to a queue then fire off a batch download session
  • Fix download resume so it works reliably and as expected (for ex. by stopping download on Firefox exit, and restart it next time Firefox is launched, maybe with popup notice)
  • Integrate download status into the main browsing window
    • Display UI for each download somewhere in the window (in a sidebar, on a "downloads bar" either at the top or the bottom of the browsing window, etc.) so users can see the progress of their downloads without having to go to a different window
    • Alternately (or perhaps in conjunction), display a single UI element (like an icon or a throbber) that shows the status of the user's downloads (f.e. it might throb to indicate downloads in progress and display a number to indicate the number of downloads still in progress)
  • Schedule downloads
  • Ability to 'Add' file to be downloaded via URL
  • Make many connections (to different or same server)
  • p2p support (locating/participating)
  • Ability to restrict download bandwidth (aggregate or per stream)

- Ability to Add file through URL

Download manager
  • Improved file type handling - ie: always download specific filetypes to a set of default or user-specified folders (defaults: Audio, Video, Images, Zipped, Executable, etc.)
  • Speedy choice of downloading behaviour: sometimes I like to listen to an mp3 stream (clicking link), sometimes I want to download and save it without having to edit the settings (shift-clicking link, as it was in Mozilla)
  • Make the download manager take multiple download progress listeners so extensions can more easily present downloads in different ways

n/a

General tasks
  • Download history UI improvements
  • Content-disposition fixes

n/a

Profiles

Specific features References
Profile creation/switching
  • Improve profile/user management and switching
    • Make the profile manager accessible through the menu

n/a

Profile privacy
  • Password-protected user profiles
  • Encryption of all stored data and profiles

n/a

Profile data
  • Profile export/import
  • Remote profiles hosted on a server and available to multiple installations
  • Full profile sync, including bookmarks, history, passwords, cookies, add-ons, preferences, etc.
  • Encrypted during sync/transmission
  • Preference for where profile data is saved including settings, bookmarks, add-ons, passwords, etc.

n/a

First run of new profile
  • Display EULA (required for distribution opportunities)
    • This is probably not required for distribution opportunities, and is indeed probably a bad idea (reduces usability, no benefit). This is only required for programs having license clauses stronger than copyright law (e.g. no reverse engineering), and not for GPL/MPL/NPL-style licenses.
    • Firefox binaries are not under the GPL/MPL or NPL, they are under the (linked) EULA, which has clauses unrelated to copyright law (e.g. trademarks).

End-User License Agreement (EULA) Requirements for Firefox 2

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Notification tools

Specific features References
Page content notification
  • Some sort of unified system for informing users of all the various types of available content on a page, including Web feeds, Microformats, Microsummaries, and what-have-you. How could this information be best communicated to users through the browser?
    • Currently, when a Web feed is detected on a page, a Feed icon feed-icon-16x16.png is displayed in the Location bar. If a page has multiple content types available, however (web feed, microformat(s), microsummary, etc), putting all those icons in the Location bar may not be feasible. What are the possible alternatives?
  • API and default UI for taking action on a notification (ie: subscribe to feed, import uFormat)
  • Implement a framework for pluggable back-ends for nsIAlertService, to use native desktop notification systems such as Galago, or 3rd party tools such as Growl, Snarl.

n/a

New notification types
  • tab-modal alerts, more file formats, microformats, microsummaries
Omnibus "Status" area
  • download status
  • popup/cookie/XPI blocker status
  • security/trustworthiness status

n/a

Modified page warning
  • Warn User before closing page with modified form

- Form Dirty Bit

Backend changes
  • Get nsIAlertService working for Mac.

n/a

General tasks
  • Improve error messages and the information they convey
  • Full language pass on error messages

n/a

Printing

Specific features References
Full page print preview/control
  • Better print preview
  • Print cropping
  • Custom margins (ideally adjustable in print preview)
  • User-controllable print scaling
  • Fully editable document within print preview utilizing simple text editor
  • Print documents last-page to first-page for printers that stack face up

Firefox:Printing_and_Page_Setup
Print It! - MozAdd-ons
Print - MozAdd-ons
Nuke Anything Enh
Adblock - MozAdd-ons
Aardvark Firefox Extension
Greasemonkey - MozAdd-ons

Selective printing
  • Print selected without requiring add-ons
  • "Print image" and "Print page" in context menu

Firefox:Printing_and_Page_Setup
Print Image - MozAdd-ons

Unix/Linux
  • Duplex printing (printing on both sides of the paper)
  • N-Up printing (multiple pages on the same sheet)
  • Get available paper sizes from the printing backend (e.g. CUPS)
  • Support PAPI
  • Autodetect printers when printing through lpr and lp

Firefox:Printing_and_Page_Setup
LinuxPrinting.org
OpenPrinting PAPI
Xprint in Mozilla
PostScript Module - MZKB
Plugin Printing on Unix - MZKB
bug 135695 (lpr printer detection)
bug 306122 (lp printer detection)

General tasks
  • Improve Print UI and handling
  • Improve FLASH printing

Firefox:Printing_and_Page_Setup
Page Setup & Printing UI

Installer

Specific features References
Extensions
  • Offer to install extension packs while installing

n/a

Internationalization
  • Improve internationalization support in Installer

n/a

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Software update

Specific features References
Automatic updates
  • For those who opt out of auto-update, provide a "remind me later" feature
  • Allow users to select type of updates they want (security? feature?)
  • Allow users to revert to previous version
  • Better background downloading support (i.e. background downloads using idle bandwidth, easy on Windows with native pieces, harder elsewhere afaik)
  • Enable users to "bundle" extensions, bookmarks and other profile preferences into a package which can be deployed on multiple systems easily.

n/a

Manual updates
  • ?

n/a

General tasks
  • Improve UE for automatic updates so it is less instrusive/shocking
  • Improve UI for updates so it's easier to understand what you will be getting
  • Clean up major/incompat update UI

n/a

Default browser UI

Specific features References
Alternate UI modes
  • Togglable kiosk mode
  • Minimal UI mode
    • Show and hide navigation/bookmark/menu bar via a right-click menu everywhere

- details & discussion

General tasks
  • Revist default tabstrip
  • Re-evaluate toolbar buttons
  • Re-evaluate status bar
  • Re-evaluate menus and context menus
  • Ensure shortcut consistency

n/a

Security

Specific features References
Security preferences
  • Automated user preference auditing with user notification of potentially problematic preference settings.

n/a

Phishing protection
  • Make it easier to report phishing sites
  • Implement a phishing filter that learns automatically
  • Multi-provider support for local list checking (depending upon provider demand)

n/a

Script execution
  • Integrate script execution whitelisting

n/a

Pop-ups
  • Implement one-click viewing of blocked pop-ups
  • Make printing popup windows possible

- More on printing pop-ups

Cookies
  • Add cookie whitelist funcitonality
  • One-click block/allow cookies1
  • Allow cookies from sites (on request) remain persistant even after the browser has been restarted
  • Allow session cookies per window/tab so that multiple logins can be had to services such as gmail/hotmail simultaneously.
  • "Supercookies"

1 Like "CookieCuller"

Extension installation
  • One-click to permanently add site to whitelist
  • One-click to temporarily add site to whitelist for this session
  • Third-party signing and authentication by Mozilla

Extension Blacklisting UI Spec

Virus/Malware protection
  • Integrate virus scanning and malware protection for retrieved content/files
  • Integrated support for 3rd party Anti-virus scanners
  • Firefox to run in a "Protected mode" like IE7/Vista

n/a

Spoofing
  • Employ some shared-secret anti-spoofing techniques1
  • Prevent content and scripts from being able to spoof or mimic protected chrome
  • SSL auth required for send password
    • This is an optional, but strongly recommended feature suggested during install
    • Sending password with FORM.send or Javascript.Send check if the page is SSL encrypted and will display an error message if there's no valid SSL certificate.
    • Do not allow adding "*" to FORM.edit field from Javascript (avoid spoof)
    • This way a user will get warning when tries to log in to an unsafe service, like phishing sites. All sites with authentication should have valid SSL certificate or should be added to "safe to login" list.2

1 PassPet
2 details & discussion

New technology support
  • Extended Validation Certificate support

n/a

HTTP authentication improvements
  • Support for logging out of basic or digest HTTP authentication (RFC 2617 style)
  • Implement a somewhat secure HTTP shared-secret authentication scheme based on SRP. The RFC2617 schemes are both very vulnerable to phishing.
  • Show content of 401-unauthorized pages, and add widgets to login via forms instead of modal dialogs

See bug 355319

General tasks
  • Improve user notification of insecure browsing situations
  • Improve handling of digital certificates
  • Improve phishing protection UI
  • Improve overall security UI
  • Improve pop-up blocking UI and options

n/a

Privacy

Specific features References
Private browsing
  • Implement a "private browsing" mode that prevents collection and recording of data
Privacy preferences
  • Add the option to suppress referrer information while browsing
  • Password Protection for all Private Data
    • password protect browser and form history1, cookies, and all private data
    • could use same master password as password manager

1 bug 285790 already exists for form history

Password management
  • Improve password management (like opera, also see Myk's post)
  • Ability to edit saved usernames and their respective passwords via the Privacy > Passwords > View Saved Passwords dialog
Password Protect the Browser
  • Require a password to launch a new instance of the browser in order to allow users to allow the browser to save passwords for websites, but still protect them from guest users of the PC.
General tasks
  • Improve overall Privacy UI
  • Improve "clear private data" UI and options

n/a

Identity

Specific features References
Identity management
  • Add identity management
  • Ability to fill in common form fields using 1..n identities
  • Enable some sort of single sign-on capability

Identity 2.0 at OSCON

New technology support
  • Support for Microsoft's CardSpace (nee: InfoCard) protocol
  • Support for SXIP protocol
  • Support for OpenID
    • What does this mean? OpenID is something supported by websites...
    • OpenID's are consumed by websites but users get their OpenID's from identity providers. This is where their personal information and list of trusted sites is kept. As OpenID becomes more prevalent, phishing for the user's password to their identity provider becomes more compelling because you could get access to all of the sites a user goes to. Having support for OpenID baked into Firefox would allow users to fight phishing by giving them the ability to specify who their identity provider is and then warn them with blinking lights and uber pop-ups when some site tries to phish them.

n/a

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Feeds and Microformat handling

Specific features References
Web feeds
  • Mark entries as read
  • Notification of feed update
  • Set refresh rates per feed
  • Set expiry options per feed
  • Set notification options per feed
  • Show # unread items in a feed
  • Enhanced Feed Preview rendering
  • Build Home Page from subscribed feeds
  • Show feed entry summaries & content
  • Remember 1..n system feed readers
  • Enable a "River of News" feed viewing option

- On Web Feeds
- TechCrunch article about IE7

Microformats and other web data
  • Automatically harvesting web data like mailto: link addresses, atom/RSS feed links, dates + events, other info…?
  • Web data manager for browsing/searching/using auto-harvested data and microformats
  • Web data preferences - What would be nice is a rules interface for web content similar to mail. "if any of the following conditions are met, perform the following actions..." So for example, if hcards are detected within % mozilla.com AND they're LIKE %@mozilla.com, add to address book, etc.

- Piggy Bank

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Content filtering, manipulation, and control

Specific features References
Content filtering
  • Ability to filter ads
    • Also, block links around ads. The whole pages shouldn't be a danger zone -- if I click somewhere blank on a web page to give my browser focus, I shouldn't be taken to the advertiser's web site.
  • Ability to filter Flash movies
  • Ability to filter plugin content generally (Flash movies, Java applets; basically anything included in the page via an object, applet, or embed element)
  • Ability to filter content which is positioned outside of the normal flow (i.e. where the CSS "position" property is set to "absolute", "fixed", or possibly "relative"), so users can filter CSS-based popups
  • Ability to filter content generally (f.e. a interface that enables users to select and persistently hide portions of a page)
  • All filtering should enable one-click to view blocked
  • Should be very easy to add items to white/blacklists
  • Better control over image blocking (f.e. a small button that appears in the corners of images you hover over which invokes the "block images from this server" operation when pressed)
  • Volume/Mute for any audio content
  • Ability to set a charset for a site
  • Text-only mode
    • You have the option to switch a tab between "Text Only" and "Graphical" modes, with faster downloads/rendering if browsing in text only mode

- Flashblock remarks from bur
- A couple things from Max.e
- Text Only Mode

Content filtering preferences
  • Ability to set persistent global, per-site, and per-page preferences
    • We might create a "web control" panel/sidebar that displays common preferences such as font size and charset
    • We should make such a panel extensible, so extensions can add additional controls to it

n/a

Content manipulation
  • Option to show an icon next to (and/or in the status bar) hyperlinks which open in a new window/tab (e.g. the icon next to external links on Wikipedia, etc).

n/a

Forms
  • Ability to resize textareas

n/a

Parental control features
  • Implement a set of parental control features

n/a

Plugins
  • Run plugins as a independent process, that talks with firefox via a socket or something like this. If a plugin crash it doesn't take firefox with it. It also allow one to kill a locked or high load plugins and keep surfing.

- http://www.gibix.net/projects/nspluginwrapper/

General tasks

n/a

n/a

Compatibility

Web standards compatibility

Specific features References
ACID 2 test
  • Make sure Firefox passes it

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Content-editable
  • Add support for content-editable

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inline-block
  • Make "display: inline-block" work correctly

Bug 9458

XForms
  • XForms supported and built-in.

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General tasks
  • Improve overall standards support

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Protocol and media support

Specific features References
Improvements
  • Improve PDF support and handling (including the ability to save pages as PDF)
  • Improve Java support
  • Improve FTP support

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New technology support
  • Open Document Format
  • BitTorrent
  • OGG1
  • XBEL
  • Jabber/XMPP
  • SIP
  • IPTV
  • IM
  • Integrated radio livestream
  • WMV
  • Microformat detection/notification with metadata
  • Scriptable ZeroConf (Bonjour/Rendezvous)
  • OBEX (Bluetooth, etc)
  • SyncML
  • SVG via img tag
  • JPEG2000
  • ANG
  • MNG

1 Firefox Ogg Support

General tasks

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Global community

Internationalization

Specific features References
Language support
  • Improve complex glyph rendering
  • Support more complex languages (Hebrew, Arabic, pangool, all Indian dialects)

n/a

General tasks

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Accessibility

Specific features References
Zooming
  • Add smooth zooming
  • Implement full page zoom, including images (sub: have browser optionally store this setting per-page, per-site, or globally)
  • Zooming, panning, scaling for images
  • Add "Fit to width" option (like Opera)
  • Implement user-definable zoom levels
  • Make zoom levels settable preferences per page, per site, or globally
  • Menu entries for them in the view menu in a possible page zoom submenu and text zoom submenu
  • Also putting this in Tools > Options > Content > Page Zoom % and Text Zoom %

See bug #4821.

Scrolling
  • Add smooth scrolling

- How is this different to Preferences | Advanced | General tab | Use smooth scrolling?

Accesskeys
  • Ensure there are no conflicts between web page and browser shortcuts
  • Implement some method to view AccessKeys for the current page

- AccessKeys_solution

General tasks
  • Simplify process for creating accessible themes (dev? docs?)

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Developer-facing elements

Developer-facing UI

Specific features References
Developer tools
  • Unified DOM/JS debugger with advanced logging
  • Live HTTPHeaders
  • Web developer toolbar
  • AJAXy stuff etc. (What does this mean?)

n/a

General tasks
  • Create a "unified set of modern web developer tools"

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Add-ons/Platform development

Specific features References
Extensions
  • Make it easier to write extensions (new sandbox for extensions, extension platform?)
  • Provide a simpler API for functionality extensions commonly use, including:
    • accessing preferences
    • filesystem operations (f.e. rginda's file utils library)
    • observing onLocationChange (i.e. getting notified whenever the page changes)
  • Provide support for hierarchical extension dependencies
  • Extension preferences export, soft of like an OPML for extensions that can get slurped in to another FF seat

n/a

APIs
  • Add a metadata handler extension API
General tasks
  • Improve RDF support, or develop a better general-purpose data model
  • Improve support for multithreading
  • Implement more consistent data types ("Instead of JS + variant, mozStorage, RDF, etc. have universal data types (string, integer, decimal, date, blob) that are used everywhere")
  • Improve support for advanced UI features like notification icons, alert bubbles, shell integration

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Performance

Specific features References

Be the fastest browser on the market, not only on "fat" desktops, but also on bargain desktops with only 256MB of RAM.

Mark Wilton-Jones' browser speed benchmarks

Try to implement an internal memory manager. It should, for example, pre-allocate about 10% of ram memory and try to operate within that memory. All calls to "free()" should release memory to this global memory pool and all calls to "malloc()" must allocate memory from this memory pool. If properly implemented, we can even reduce the overheads that may arise due to such an implementation.

General tasks
  • Develop new features as extensions (enabled in the default install) so that they can be disabled if un-needed. We MUST avoid bloat to stay in the lead, and forcing new features on people that just want a clean experience is not in our best interest.

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Mobile and Enterprise support

Mobile device integration/support

Specific features References
Send content to device
  • Bluetooth support

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General tasks

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Enterprise deployment

Specific features References
Support w32 Group Policies
  • Allowed extensions
  • Basic customizations (eg. company homepage)
  • Requires that controls become disabled if overridden by policy. Use the normal Windows UI for editing the policy itself. See bug 267888.

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Better automatic proxy configuration
  • Allow async (or in another thread) DNS resolution in proxy.pac so that isInNet doesn't lock ALL browser in a slow DNS query (see bug #208287)
  • Automatically discover proxy turn on by default (check if there is a wpad.dat in the install, turn on if true ?)

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General tasks

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User support and Testing

Help documentation

Specific features References
In-browser
  • Integrate in-product help and first-run/updated pages with online help.

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Website
  • Move the majority of Firefox Help online, except for a minimal set of "in-product" help pages. This online help system should include the ability for community to post comments, corrections, updates, etc.
  • Integrate instant IM chat and newsgroup search with help

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Intro/Tutorial mode
  • host it on mozilla.com as movies
  • have some UI hooks in the product

- thoughts from FunnyMan3595

General tasks

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User-testing

Specific features References
User testing extensions
  • Create extension to allow for remote user testing

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Development build UI changes
  • Add "send feedback" buttons to dialogs in development builds

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General tasks

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Other resources