Firefox/Feature Brainstorming

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.

• Etiquette:
  • Please include a summary comment that describes your change so that it shows up in the page history view.
  • Please make a User page for yourself with contact information so that if we need clarification of your idea, we can get in touch with you.

Platform Integration

Specific features
Integrate the KDE certificate Management Firefox includes a lot of cryptographic code, as does KDE/Windows. This is redundant and not very user friedly. For example, when I import a certificate with Konqueror, it can automatically be used in kmail as well, this doesn't work with Firefox.
Integrate the Platform's password management KDE and OS X both provide facilities (keyring and kwallet) to store passwords. Firefox should use them so that one can use passwords originally entered in Konqueror in Firefox (or vice versa)
Port to Qt for better optical Integration Even with the gtk-qt theme, firefox still doesn't look good in KDE :(
Use the DE's settings to determine programs On Windows, this works well already (you can for example download a zip file and it'll be opened with WinZip or whatever you are using. On Linux, this doesn't quite work yet (at least not with KDE) and you often have to choose your application manually.
use a KDE-style settings dialog KDE Applications (unlike GNOME Apps) all use the same settings dialog, which is very user friendly because one doesn't have to learn how to handle yet another settings dialog.
use a KDE-style keyboard shortcut dialog Similarly to the settings dialog, KDE offers a standardized dialog to set up keyboard shortcuts. Again, this is very handy because it's in the same place for _all_ KDE applications and it behaves the same and you don't have to search for it. (nb: even if you don't use KDEs dialog (you probybly won't), at least provide _some_ user-friendly way to configure keyboard shortcuts)
Better integration of other desktops I happen to work with KDE a lot, but certainly, other Desktops provide similary interesting facilities as well
Optionally use WININET for URL fetching on Windows Occasionally (e.g. behind a firewall with centrally administered settings, or in low-resource setups) it might be helpful if Firefox could alternatively use the HTTP implementation in Windows (WININET) instead of its own, as a result also sharing the contents of the cache, cookie jar and network settings with IE. This would effectively separate Firefox-the-Browser from Firefox-the-HTTP-client, and could be a high-level choice e.g. during installation.

Browser chrome

Menus and Toolbars

Specific features
Make back button not break forward button If you are at a site (site A), and push back a bunch of times to get to (site B), are then follow a different site to get to another site (site C) it is no longer possible to use the forward button to get to site A again. This should be fixed by storing a tree of the forward and backward locations, a use an interface that allow you to brach when going forward. (This UI could be part of the UI that shows when you click the little down arrow beside the forward button.)	YES
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 much more menu flexibility in general, such as dragging buttons to precise places (possibly adding options such as the "align to grid" feature on Windows desktops), instead of having them snap into place. 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).	YES
Custom toolbars Allow the user to create custom toolbars that can be stacked or aligned to the left or right or bottom of the window. You can put any kind of icon on these toolbars including shortcuts to websites (use favicons) or external apps.	YES
Transparent Interface If this will not already be applied in Windows Vista with Aero Glass, allow the user to make the address bar/buttons/bookmark toolbar transparent, except for on scroll over. In this way the user has another inch or two of website that is just a little obscured (better than all-the-way obscured)	YES
Adjustable menu Make it much easier for users to hide items from menus. A complete list of chrome names would be a start. A configuration menu, within the Options menu should list all of the right-click menu options currently available. This would be done via a simple check mark box to either add or remove that function from the menu. A sub-option to move around the position (Either higher or lower, or possibly cascaded into other options) should be available as well.	Chrome element names and IDs - MozillaZine
Back and Forward buttons Create an html "Next Page" extension for the mouse forward button. See posting under Accessibility > General tasks. Include right click options on back/forward buttons to open the previous/next page in a new window or tab. It would need to preserve the browse history in new window/tab.	YES
View Page Info Improvements Improvements for the Links tab Let the list be sorted by clicking on the table header (name, address, type) Having selected some entries on the Links tab, add the command "open selected link(s) in new tab(s)" to the context menu. Add a column to the list from what the link has its anchor. For example text or image. In addition it would be cool if you could see which links lead offsite (and which not) in an additional colomn so that you could also sort for it. Improvements for the Media tab Having selected some of images add the command "save madia to ..." Add a column "Filetype" that shows the "ending of the files for example "jpg, gif,png". Let the list be sorted by clicking on the headers of the list (Address, Type,...).	YES
Autohide Add an option to the View menu to hide all the top toolbars and the tab bar when the mouse is not over the window header or, when in fullscreen mode, not at the top of the window. Yick Autohide is always a bad feature I vote against this	n/a

Preferences

Specific features	References
Automatic update for Driver An engine that recognize what kind of peripheral you have in your computer and automacally goes on the support site to compare the driver and eventually download it. not so hard because almost every manufacturers use unified driver for their products. ;)
Fonts and Colors needs work Fonts and colors (tools/options/content) needs totally re-worked. If you use your default colors and fonts, pages refuse to work correctly. At least they turn all white (all colors is turned off), and often, they won't render correctly at all. (This is a problem in most browsers I found.)
Opera Like Mouse Usage Allow the user to use Opera like mouse gestures (like right click followed by left click for 'back' etc)...	Opera Mouse Gestures
File management Improve and expand file management options (ie: "Open with")	n/a
Save a Website Improve saving of a Website (ie: include originating URL in the saved file - as IE does) Optionally compress additional files (usually stored in an extra directory) together with the Website to save in an archive, because it sucks having a directory with the debris of a hundred of files named e.g.: "img0,0aa1781,21aa12.gif" and the like see MAF (mozilla Arcvhive format which was perfect but doesn't work with newer versions of firebird on Linux and is not improved anymore.-	n/a
Fast Profile Switching Allow for profile switching within FireFox. This would allow two versions (Lean & Extended) to run as the user chooses.	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. Ability to store/receive plugin configuration metadata (ie. which plugins are installed and what is their configuration). With this, we could fine-tune the config of our Firefox at home, then we could have the same configuration installed at work, without remembering all the plugin names and configuration quirks. I guess this could be done at a central server. Items would be accessible with a simple username/password (without any other data and account creation hassle). This might be integrated with the Mozilla site account system, too (so a save could open an account, if the user click the relevant checkbox). NB. some plugins might store private information and that should not be stored. 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 When the plugin finder doesn't find any suitable plugin, show a description for making easier to the user to find it (show data type?) Make extensions "cleanware". Let all of their configuration lie in their own file directory instead of mashing it together with other extensions' configuration in One Big File. This reeks of Windows' "Registry Hell". Cleanly uninstalling an extension should be as simple as deleting its subdirectory. Dynamic loading/unloading of extensions. No more restarting just because an extension was installed/uninstalled/updated. Provide changelogs for extension updates (Do I really want to update?)	- 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) Avoid a blatant ripoff of IE7	n/a
External editing Allow an external editor (emacs, textpad, etc) to edit text in form text boxes Currently supported by plug-ins, but only on some platforms; should be available everywhere As more and more apps move towards web services, the ability to effectively edit large blocks of text (wikis, blogs, forums, webmail) becomes more and more critical.	n/a
Time/day sensitive home page(s) Change Home page or pages depending on the day or time of day, e.g. the first time the browser is opened the Home pages might be woot.com and some news sites. Later in the day, opening the browser or clicking on 'Home' might open slashdot and fark. Could be sensitive to time/day/date and whether the browser has already been opened today.	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
Customizable Status Bar Allow the Status Bar to be customized like the toolbars can. Any toolbar button should be able to be put on the status bar and vice/versa	n/a
Capturing pages to PDF file Capture all pages in the window (including links upto user selectable depth) directly to PDF file This is similar to ScrapBook extension with additional functionality of saving in PDF.	ScrapBook :: Mozilla Addons
elinks-style unified customization hooks elinks has an array of useful customization hooks encoded (typically) in lua that unify url shortcuts, greasmonkey-like content-rewriting, etc. it is not so much the lua integration i am highlighting (although i prefer it to javascript), but the fact that elinks does not delegate customization to disparate extensions and tools.

Allow a time set feature to open a set of specific tabs at a desired time of day.

Specific features	References
Saved Form Information It is very handy to have this information when filling out a form. But, as humans, sometimes we make a typo. Or, the entered information becomes outdated, etc. Please add the option to edit or remove individual entries in the Preferences dialog. An alternate solution for the above problem: pressing the "del" button (instead of Ctrl+Shift+Del which is not really intuitive) in a form control history dropdown control could remove that entry off the history. Another concern: saving of credit card information. When on a secure site, I can go to the credit card field, start typing in my card number, expiration date, etc and it will be in the autocomplete. Same thing with my SSN, address, phone number, etc. I would appreciate an option to disable the saving of form information on https (secure) pages. Another approach would be to include an option (not manditory), to pop up a dialog.. something like: "This appears to be a credit card (SSN, etc) number, do you want it to be saved?"	n/a
Multiple Configuration states Many customizations provide a lot of features, but also a lot of clutter. Rather than manually adjusting toolbars to fit your current activity, it would be much more efficient to store multiple customized states that can be easily selected from, by name. There are multiple state categories, such as toolbar layout, bookmarks, skins, etc. A saved configuration state could be defined to include only a subset of states. This information could be saved to/retrieved from a central server with a username/password (without any prior account creation hassle), so we could have the same environment on every Firefox installation.	n/a
"Tabbed" Toolbars Multiple toolbars could be stacked and "tabbed" similar to tabbed pages, which is a popular feature. Rather than tabs, the selection could be similar to a pull-down menu, where each entry is a toolbar. Instead of selecting a toolbar, one could also click the pulldown button, then click one button on any of the transiently displayed toolbars.	n/a
Preference Locking Make it easier to lock preferences. For example make it possible to make pref.js and bookmarks.html write protected. As of now Firefox creates lots of copies if you make those files not writeable.	n/a
List filtering add filtering to the following lists (like the filtering for the Cookies list): Allowed Sites - Popups Black list sites (this sites won't be allowed to open popups) Exceptions - Images Exceptions - Cookies Allowed Sites - Add-ons Installation Don't Remember Passwords by full URL Remember Passwords by full URL Open External Links in (by application? by param?)	n/a
Per-Site Preferences Allow the user to specify blocking of images, use of specified fonts & colors, allowance of JavaScript, etc. on a per-site basis. Similar to the above suggestion, but more fine-grained and implemented in an (IMO) easier-to-use manner. Could also store if Java and Flash is enabled on that site. Examples: current NoScript and AdBlock plugins. The features of them could be integrated. NoScript shows what rules are active on the page, without having to go into the prefs. Also, rules can be changed right there. With AdBlock, you can see what objects are accessed on the page and you can add a new blacklist rule based on this info. This could be extended with the ability to sort by extension or MIME info. Also, a possibility of whitelisting object(s) would be a good idea.	OmniWeb Features:Site Preferences
User controlled alternative style sheets. Allow the user to specify what style sheet shall be used for a page using a regular expression (regexp).	See feature request for Firefox 3.
Shortcut Key Configuration Creating customized shortcuts to preferred firefox functions using unassigned keyboard combinations. Creating shortcuts for sites/links/bookmarks UI for displayng/searching/modifying existing key combinations, displaying what does every keyboard shortcut mean in every context (much like Opera does).
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
When Netscape 4 was around it supported a users full profile being stored in LDAP. This operated in much the same way for the user as Google browser sync does now but the data was stored in an LDAP directory. This functionality should be returned to firefox probably supporting multiple backend stores, sql, ldap, webdav etc.
Early Netscape allowed the user to "save as" a web page as text, postscript, HTML,pdf, etc. These days, we seem to be only allowed to "save as" in HTML. This then means we have to use time-consuming external programs instead of it being a quick and easy drop-down selection. Please give us back our old "save as" options and also include a new ODF "save as" option. That would be a great improvement. Thanks
Allow user to add file types in addition to being able to change how firefox "manages" them. Allow FireFox to search inside text typed in textboxes (available in IE). Allow image placeholders to appear before the image starts being displayed (available in IE). Allow "View Image" to display the image right where it is (available in IE). [Last three entries by CarlRogerson 23:52, 14 October 2006 (PDT)]	n/a

Tabs, sidebar, and windows

Specific features	References
Tabs Allow the tab-bar relocation, probably with a simpe pull-down, that includes top, bottom, left and right. When left or right are selected (or perhaps all the time), provide the ability to specify a fixed width for tabs/tab-bar. When left or right are selected provide option which displays tabs in a tree based on ancestry relation ship of a tab like in Tabbrowser Extensions A right-click option to pop an existing tab out into a new window. Thunderbird Tab -- Opens Thunderbird within a tab rather than a seperate Thunderbird window Sunbird Tab -- Opens Sunbird within a tab rather than a seperate Sunbird window Tab collections used to organize tabs, think Linux virtual desktops Multiple initial pages with tabs Displaying tabs over multiple rows Option to open default page when creating a new tab Tab drag and detach Window drag and attach as tabs Drag tabs between windows Make middle-clicking/open link in new tab work for javascript links (e.g. by duplicating current page in a new tab then executing the javascript on the new tab and forcing any 'pop-up' links to stay in that new tab) "Open this tab in a new window" added to context menu (when right clicking on existing tab). Preserve history so back button works in new window just as it would on existing tab. Select on close behavior Tab switching via Mouse Scroll Wheel (on all Platforms) while mouse is on/over the tab bar Add arrows to the right and left ends of the tab bar when it gets full to unhide/allow to see all tabs 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 exposé 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 new tab when domain name is different from current page 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 (both vertical and horizontal panes, preferably mixed. Cascade tabs Allow for windowblind treatment of tabs 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 with some options on what you want to do with this page like bookmark it, reload tab, protect tab without right clicking it Multiple tab selection via Ctrl + left click on desired tabs. Feature would allow users to use the right click options on only the selected tabs. EXAMPLE: Right click on one of the selected tabs and select "Close Other Tabs" leaving only the selected tabs behind. To save a lot of space, make the favicon on each tab into the "X" on hover. Instead of the "..." in long tab titles, change to a fade to grey on the last three letters. A right click option for when highlighting plain text urls to open in new tab as opposed to having to copy then paste in a new tab address bar; available as an add-on https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1864/ Allow tabs to not be full window. If a js opened window is redirected to a tab, and the size is smaller then the window, make the tab like a little window inside the window. When a tab ask for identification, it shouldn't get on top automatically Make the current tab not shrink with the others, so is more visible. Copy the (back button) history of the current tab when a link is opened in a new tab (so that the user can go back in the new tab). Allow the user to "lock open" a tab or window to prevent accidental closure. Implement an easy way of "undoing" the last window or tab closure. Like eclipse on mouse over a tab the close button will appear Ability to change tab titles and save tab titles so that when you enter the site again you will see your own tab titles (Different from page title) Sort tab according to time opened, title, time idle Options to have no title and Icon only with 32x32 icon with a close button located bottom right of the icon Panels of tabs - by grouping of tabs you can have groups of multiple tab in a panel, like linux panels Be able to display two tabs side-by-side, very useful on widescreen monitors Tabbed source viewer Nested tabs (eg. drag tabs into a tab) and multiple rows of tabs (see this mockup: media:Nested-tabs.png). A button on the right click menu (on web pages) to open all links on this page in new tabs A button on the right click menu for back/forward to open the back or forward in a new tab	Tabbed Browsing -MZKB - 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 Tab Related Ext - TEM Tab Mix Plus - UMO Active Tab Flex at userstyles.org Two tabs side-by-side Tabbrowser Extensions has some really great ideas.
Browser Window Ability to split the browser window vertically or horizontally, similar to emacs windows, and load different urls into each. Common usage cases for this are when you want to see two different pages at once conveniently, monitoring multiple sites at once, etc. Simply allow to split the window vertically with the same page for working with long pages, as in Visual Studio .NET. UI-level Multicolumn mode, like Emacs Follow mode - split the browser window into two (or more) panes, showing the same page, the right pane leading on from the left pane. Excellent in these days of wide monitors and inexplicably narrow fixed-width web pages! 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 Scroll document with middle mouse button click-drag-release. The reverse to the familiar glove that moves the document. This behaviour maps to how scrollwheels/scrollballs work, which often also occupy middle mouse button. Open link in new window with middle mouse button. GUI-configurable option. Create a way to rotate a window in four directions to allow viewing long web pages on a laptop by rotating the laptop sideways. This is one of my favorite commands in Preview in Mac OS X. Please make sure the command to do and undo this can be made a shortcut. Open different windows each as a new browser instance so that a crash in one does not take down all other instances. "Application Mode" - allow web applications to act more like native applications. Give them the ability to have their own launcher from the Start Menu or Dock, and their own icon and process so that the OS can treat apps like gmail just like any other app. Currently such apps are labelled "Firefox" by the OS. Hide unnecessary GUI elements such as Bookmarks bar and Address bar in this mode, for more screen real estate. Better awareness of Multi-head environments. Under traditional X Windows dual head (so the two screens are two different X displays) you can't run the same firefox profile on both screens. Under Xinerama, everything appears as one very wide screen, but now it would be nice to have a "two window mode" analagous to "single window mode" although maybe this is an extensions question.	Super DragAndGo Extension allows you to drag links and words in order to surf and search User:DGolden:Follow User:Jeric
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)	SessionSaver - MZKB SessionSaver - UMO SessionSaver (rewrite) - MZForum Session Manager Ext Tab Mix Plus with Session Managment
Sidebar Sidebar animation Allow the windows from downloads,extensions,bookmarks and history to dock as sidebars. A bit like the extension All-In-One-Sidebar.	- Screenshots of All-In-One-Sidebar extension.
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. Multiple link selection Click and drag to select multiple links on a page Right click to open multiple link context menu Open multiple links in new tabs Open multiple links in new windows	n/a
General tasks
Add "Login As" option under file menu for accessing FTP sites that do not allow anonymous logins. This was available in previous versions of Internet Explorer and was handled by an automatic opening of the FTP site in Windows Explorer. Add an FTP manager, similar to Windows Explorer tracking of previously accessed FTP sites.	n/a

Search/Find

Specific features	References
Search plugins Ability to change search engine/plugin via keyboard Ability to organize search plugins better Ability to remove search engine addons from search box easily Associate keywords to search plugins Transient assignment of search plugin to search bar To the extent reasonable, unify search plugin interface with bookmark interface: they both do many of the same things No longer require an extension to add/remove search engines. This should be accomplished by simply copying the appropriate URL to a list like done in Galeon and AcidSearch for Safari. Ability to highlight text and from the right click context menu send the text to any of the search engines you have installed (bug 248173 has been WONTFIX'd; hoping it can be revisited.) Ability of search engine configuration saving to/restoring from a central server	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 Ability to remove the magnifier-glass-icon from the searchbox The box may extend as needed or be set to a new static size so users can see more of the searchbar content. Keybindings: While the cursor is active and in the search bar <UP> moves the cursor to the start of the search string, and <DOWN> moves the cursor to the end.	- Search for whole words only
Find Pre-populate ctrl-F with searchbox contents (Bug 264123) Pre-populate ctrl-F with selected text (Bug 250910) Tab-modal find bar Find integration points for web applications Add marker (+, -, <, etc) to scroll bar to emphasize location of found text 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 Give user ability to choose whether to display Find bar at the bottom (near the status bar) or at the top (above the page content). (Bug 254687) Add a button next to the Find bar marked flash that flashes the highlighted text whcn clicked. Give user ability to show all results for a search or find in a sidebar list. Allow user to show/hide sidebar when performing find. Allow the user to change the default behavior (show/hide sidebar) in options Allow Regular Expressions Ability to search on multiple tabs/windows Ability to use one keyword for mutiple search engines, opening in own tab (e.g. "CD Name" gives me 5 shops in own tab) Allow searches of bookmarks Concordance style search results for whole search scope, sortable by relevance Make it possible to search in the contents of all the pages you visited last x hours/days/months/years. Allow Find in the content of textareas. (Anyone who tries to edit this very page will know why this is useful.)	- Visual feedback on text/link find
Context Menu Right mouse click onto link which points to a RSS feed shows "Add this link to LiveBookmarks"	n/a
General tasks
n/a	n/a

Address bar

Specific features	References
Auto-paging When a numeric portion of the URL in the address bar is highlighted, allow it to be incremented/decremented using the mouse wheel, PgUp/PgDn, scroll arrows, or some other method. E.g., ; highlight '1' and scroll to view photo2.jpg, etc.	n/a
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
RSS Feeds Right-clicking on the RSS Feed icon should give you the following tasks: Copy RSS Feed URL Open with default RSS application (like FeedDeamon etc.)	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 using addresses for which a password is known, or are otherwise marked as 'trusted' (marked as allow script, allow cookie, allow xpi install, etc) all of above make autocomplete still useful after clearing private data or migrating from IE	- Similar to AppRocket on Windows and Quicksilver for OS X - remarks from bur - Autocomplete Manager extension provides some of this
Remove single item from history/recent visit list For when you entered a typo and got one of those squatter sites. Would be great to be able to remove that crappy address from the history so it doesn't keeps coming up.	Can be done already: Control-Shift-Delete over a highlighted address bar history item will remove it.
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 Could be workeable, says Mgsloan
provide basic site navigation from address bar When I use news aggregation sites like slashdot and digg that provide deep links to stories on other sites, I invariably find myself wanting to look at the home page or perhaps even parent of the current URL. It would be a very useful feature to provide hotkeys that manipulate the URL in the addressbar. At least 2 operations spring to mind: get server URL get parent URL
Selective Autohide of Menus, Address, Bookmarks, Extensions I'd like to be able to set my menubars, bookmark bar, and (as an example) the Google toolbar to autohide. By this, I mean like the windows taskbar. This way I would be able to use that extra space for viewing, but wouldn't have to turn the bars on and off manually, or switch from the fullscreen mode. This idea could present a problem with being able to trigger the right bar for display, but I think if someone worked out the UI specifics for that, it would be a neat feature.
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)
Keybindings Ability to customise what happens when ctrl-enter is pressed (command-enter for Macs) in the address bar and search bar. Some users want ctrl-enter to open a new tab. This will make the "ctrl == new tab" concept more pervasive. Currently, control-clicking on a link in a web page causes it to open a new tab. Also, most tabbed browsers open up a new tab upon ctrl-enter anyway, including older versions of Firefox itself. Whatever the default setting may be, it would be nice if the user could configure this. Also, some users want ctrl-enter behave just like plain enter. These users usually wanted to type ctr-v, enter, but accidentally held ctrl down too long, hence it gets registered ast ctrl-v, ctrl-enter. Also, same thing goes for option-enter (alt-enter(?) on Windows). The "option == download url" concept has existed in older versions of Firefox as well as other tabbed browsers. While option-click still allows download of links, it's hard to remember what the keybinding is for downloading from the url bar anymore since there is no longer a consistent concept behind it and not compatible with other browsers.
General tasks
Keybindings: When the cursor is active and in the address bar <UP> will move the cursor to the start of the address string, and <DOWN> will move the cursor to the end of the string. Multi-line paste of URLs: When pasting a multi-line URL&#151;such as when one copies a large URL from a text-only shell-based e-mail program&#151;Firefox should automatically strip line breaks and elide what is pasted as a single line URL.	n/a

Bookmarks

Specific features	References
Bookmark management Bookmark thumbnails. Ability to view thumbnails of bookmarked pages. Size of thumbnails should be customizable. Thumbnails can be "live" updated. Ability to associate automatically the favicon or manually any pictures to a bookmark. integrated html presentation of the bookmarks using something like about:bookmarks for instance Integration with address book. When contact has URL specified, it should be put into special bookmark folder automatically. Give bookmark manager a decent database format, add tagging and tag cloud to interface, some way to support roaming, unlimited capacity. Boolean searching of any field. Let user define fields. When clicking "Bookmarks" and all the bookmarks drop down (Bookmark This Page..., Bookmark All Tabs..., Manage Bookmarks...) should remain fixed and not scroll with the rest of the bookmarks. Provide API for social bookmarking sites. When using "Bookmark All Tabs..." it should let you choose an existing folder if you want instead of always creating a new one 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 Import favorites from IE, Opera, AOL, Netscape, Avant, Konqueror... Bayesian training/pruning Option to open bookmarks in same tab, new tab, or new window Allow user to search the bookmark list by fields other than Title, including URL. Allow user to search bookmarked pages via a search engine, eg Google, so that the search performed will be for the bookmark('s/s') domain(s). show/sort time and date of when bookmark was added show/sort time and date of when bookmark was last-visited toggle to indicate that site in bookmark no longer active (detect 404) Bookmark filters - i.e. pages from domain X go in folder Y, pages with FOO in the title go in folder BAR When deleting a bookmark from the bookmark menu (using the right click), bookmark menu should remain open, not close immediately.--CarlRogerson 00:44, 14 October 2006 (PDT) Add option to rename bookmarks directly from the menu itself, not necessarily by going through the bookmark manager.--CarlRogerson 00:44, 14 October 2006 (PDT) Ctrl+D should bookmark a page directly. The "Add Bookmark" dialogue/option box should be restricted to clicking on the Bookmarks menu and then choosing "Bookmark This Page" (this would imply that Ctrl+D and "Bookmark This Page" be separated).--CarlRogerson 00:44, 14 October 2006 (PDT) Allow live bookmarks to be turned off and on. A simple bookmark subscription function like was available on IE 4 where the browser scans for changes to bookmarked sites and presents a separate list marking ones have changed. When creating a bookmark by drag and drop, firefox should pop a dialog so you can shorten most pages incredibly verbose titles to something you want to see in your bookmark list. Timed bookmarks. The ability to set an experation on a bookmark that automatically deletes it. Many times I want to bookmark an article to read later but if I forget to read it, I don't want it cluttering up my bookmarks. Display folder hierarchy when displaying results of bookmark search in sidebar and also include folder names in search. Online bookmarks. Users can save bookmarks to bookmark services like google bookmark. There are firefox add-ons that do similar job, but they are not reliable and secure enough since user account information could be disclosed.	- 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) Allow to set an expiration date for a bookmark, like Tark This is particularly useful for time constraint web pages such as auction items status, flight information, order status, track confimation, etc which are irrelevant after a short while.	- 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) Visually emphasize favorite bookmarks within a folder on the bookmark toolbar Ease selection of favorite, most frequently visited bookmarks by displaying them in a larger font and/or with a larger icon than less regularly loaded bookmarks Have the ability to use custom favicons/icons on bookmark folders added to the 'Bookmarks Toolbar Folder'instead of the default yellow folder. As per bug 63295 (almost 6 years old), menus should auto-scroll if you hover above/below them. Fix bug 186532: wrong favicon displayed when page is switched while old page is loading.	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
Bookmarks Timestamp and hide Inactive Bookmarks Add a Date Timestamp to the properties of a bookmark Keep track when last time was clicked on a bookmark Add a option to hide Bookmarks that you haven't clicked on for more the 30, 60 or 120 days Add a command to archive unused bookmarks into an "archived_bookmarks.html"	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
Erasing bookmark links Find broken bookmark links: Automatically check for links that return 404s or other broken link behaviours. Erasing links shouldn't erase it forever (aka "trash can", "recycle bin"). "Trash" could retain links for nn days or retain last nn deleted links. Search and highlight duplicate entries. Then, user can erase manually those duplicate entries (...chosing were to place each duplicate entry or leaving them unchanged)	n/a
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
Bookmark Appearance Let live bookmarks expand in a tool tip like way to view whole title Let live bookmarks expand in a tool tip like way to view the associated text (usually the article's first paragraph) in the rss feed. If text bookmarks are to stay, allow for the text size to be user-editable, so more bookmarks can fit onto the bookmarks toolbar (as an alternative to the icon idea above) Display Separator text in Bookmark menu, if set. Firefox allows setting a Name(via Property) for a Separator. Bookmarks in the menu does not display this text, but just Separator. Display Text with Separator in Bookmark Menu, if set, like in Bookmark manager. e.g. "-- News ------" instead of "------------" allow user to disable the text display, via a checkbox. allow user to right-click on Separator in Bookmark menu, to set/update property value.	n/a
Dynamic Firefox Bookmark Menu Allow "organizing bookmarks" functionality from firefox without opening Bookmarks Manager Allow drag-and-drop to move bookmarks, folders, separators around in bookmarks menu Allow right click to cut/copy/paste or delete bookmarks in bookmark menu Allow right click to make new folder or separator	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 Allow firefox to create its own microsummaries (bug 356440)	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. Ability not to add broken links (404) to the history Ability to delete a page by rightclicking on the URL in the Location Bar dropdown Ability to put a page on a blacklist (i.e. never show it in the history) 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	Design Composite -d-
History browsing Global history navigation & presentation Session history navigation & presentation (handling iframes & modern DOM tricks) Spatial history navigation. http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Browser_20History_20Diagram (links down left hand side) Full screen utilization for history browsing Integrated Bookmarking Integrated use of social bookmarking rankings to show page popularity Sort history by time the page was closed, rather than opened. As such, if the browser crashes, everything that was open will automatically be at the top of the history. Likewise, if I close a page I opened last week, it will still be near the top of my history. Right click context menu for new tab on list of previous sites from back button icon. Right click for new tab on home button icon. History accessible via calendar views (day, week, month, year) and navigation-tree view	Design Composite -d- Thumbnail session history
General tasks
Revisit location bar Better management Search enhancements	n/a

Downloads

Specific features	References
Download control Allow an option run a downloaded setup file (in the place of "open") instead of saving it, like in Internet Explorer Ability to select a custom program ("other") to handle the download of an unknown file type (see bug 352142 Ability to download all links Ability to easily pass the url to third-party download manager to do the downloading instead of using firefox's built-in download manager 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) Allow connection timeouts to pause the download instead of closing it. This will help people with slow or unreliable connections like tor to continue downloading even if their connection fails on them. Download Tagging. On a page where you wish to download from many links, it might be helpful to be able to to tag links for download. When you've finished tagging all the links you want, you could start a dedicated Download Manager session which would download all the links you've tagged to a specified folder, and even, perhaps, run certain actions on them like re-naming and unzipping, and other prcedures. Such features would put Firefox way ahead of the competition. Example: Scrolling through a site where you need to download a bunch of documents. You could download them normally, or you could tag them to be downloaded. Once you'd tagge everything you needed, you start the tagged Downloading Applet and it downloads all the files, one by one to the folder you specified, re-naming them according to a scheme you choose.This would be a very handy feature, especially for people who use image sites, or who need to download dependencies for open source projects. Initially, you could tag links from the same page, but eventually it might be feasible to keep a cross-site tag list. This would also be useful for people on dial up connections who need to download many large files, as it would allow them to tage the downloads during the day, and then download them at night, when they are less likely to need to use the phone. Show the MD5 Checksum of each download after its finishied. Be able to save the download history to a file. On Unix, where just about all of your programs are in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin it's really clumsy to have to use a file selector GUI to choose a program to open a download. There's no option to just type in the path, so I have to wait while a listing of my /usr/bin is populated and then find the program whose name I already know in an alphabetical list. Highly inefficient. There should be a text field as well as a "Browse..." button so I can just type in obvious names like /usr/bin/xpdf or /usr/bin/xv. Even better would be if it searched $PATH so I could just type "xpdf". And once you're in the browse dialog you should be able to type the program's name once you're in the right directory. Fix webBrowserPersist to save @import-ed stylesheets and backgrounds referenced in stylesheets. See Save Complete for my work on an extension to fix this. Firefox 1.5.0.7 (tested on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) has the following issues with the Download window. These should be fixed in Firefox 3: I recently started several larger downloads in Firefox and had to reboot my router while downloading. After this, I got to see several Firefox inadequacies or bugs, which I'll tell you about here: 0: After the temporary network connectivity disruption, my downloads were left in limbo, with Firefox only giving me the option to Pause or Cancel; with the progress bar still showing, but not increasing, and the numbers (rate of transfer, ETA) not showing. At this point I could not get Firefox to resume the downloads, not even by clicking Pause and Resume. However, looking at the Desktop, I could see that the partial files where there. I then found that I could resume the downloads with wget -c <URL> from the command line. If I can resume from the command line, why can't I resume from Firefox? 1: Upon now clicking Cancel in Firefox after the files were fully downloaded via wget, Firefox deleted the files. Also, where I resumed the download via wget and then clicked Cancel in Firefox, wget seemed to complete the download, but then threw an error message as the file was now nonexistant. I consider the fact that Firefox deleted the files upon clicking Cancel a bug. After all, after clicking Cancel, the download is still listed in Firefox' Download window. If anything, Firefox should delete the file upon clicking Remove. Which brings me to the next point. 2: The user should be able to trigger the following three actions (and others, which are not the issue here) in the Firefox Download window: Cancel -- this should cancel a current download, but not remove the file. Remove -- this should remove the download item from the Download window list, but NOT remove the file. Remove from disk -- this should remove the item from the Download window list and delete the file from the hard drive. Alternatively, there could be just one Remove link that prompts the user whether they wish to remove the item listing only or also wish to delete the file; or this could be made a user preference. 3: When clicking retry and a partially completed file of the same name already exists on the Desktop (e.g. because the user made a copy before clicking Cancel and then moved that copy back before clicking retry (cf. above broken Cancel behaviour), that file should be resumed. Instead Firefox currently attempts a new download from scratch and names it filename(2).ext. Firefox should resume the existing file, or give the user a choice.	- metalink (file distribution standard with mirrors and checksums) - 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 sort/display time and date (addtional column) of when files were downloaded be able to sort/display by filetype (additional column) of downloaded files Implement Categories, each category will have his own folder, so the downloads will be saved there. Allow the user to select a Category for each download. More control over clutter in the download history. Specifically, the abilities to select multiple completed downloads at once and remove them all with one button, remove all history items that point to files that are deleted or moved, or automatically remove history items older than X days, like with browsing history. Show the Filesize on a finished Download e.g. Extras->Downloads->RMB->Properties->Filesize.	n/a
General tasks
Download history UI improvements Content-disposition fixes Option for turning computer off after downloads finish	n/a
Upload Improvements
Allow Upload Functionality Similar to the Download Manager (especially: show, how much has been uploaded already, not only a progress bar) Should allow for Upload Resume You should be able to Upload a Folder, rather than a single file at a time.	n/a

Profiles

I'm trying to contribute to the Downloads section:
But I keep getting Profiles in the textarea !!

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 (remote profiles) hosted on a server and available to multiple installations. Being able to sync sessions would be fantastic too. Full profile sync, including bookmarks, history, passwords, cookies, add-ons, preferences, etc. Built-in AutoFill, which allows users to save their web passwords with Fiefox (like Avant Browser) Encrypted during sync/transmission Preference for where profile data is saved including settings, bookmarks, add-ons, passwords, etc.	RFC 2244 - Application Configuration Access Protocol
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). Such things need no EULA. Trademarks, patents, and trade secrets are protected be default. No EULA is required to protect them. (What, you think GPL/MPL/NPL suddenly gives up your trademark rights??? Where is that?) It's like the lame statements that I can't export to North Korea: your EULA makes no difference, because I can't do that anyway.	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 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) see this proposal for a service for exposing metadata 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 Printing-related web standards support, e.g., page-break-after	Firefox:Printing_and_Page_Setup Print It! - MozAdd-ons Print - MozAdd-ons Nuke Anything Enh Adblock - MozAdd-ons Aardvark Firefox Extension Greasemonkey - MozAdd-ons W3 - Paged Media
Selective printing Print selected without requiring add-ons "Print image" and "Print page" in context menu Add Tab-related "Print Range" options to the Print Dialog, along the lines of "Print Active Tab" and "Print Selected Tabs". Requires ability to select multiple open tabs at once	Firefox:Printing_and_Page_Setup Print Image - MozAdd-ons
Settings management Ability to set printing options (portrait/landscape, zoom, &c) so that they always return to the same desired settings each time the browser is closed (or each time it's started), rather than staying on the last-used setting. Multiple saved settings
Backgrounds Add an HTML DOM attribute that specifies whether a div's background image should be printed or not (since div background images are used frequently as "foreground images") Add an option to include background images and/or background colors. Ultimately the print should look like a screenshot of the site.	You can print backgrounds now; see File->Page Setup->Print Background.
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
MSI Installer MSI installation package for corporate deployment	Frontmotion MSI packages
Extensions Offer to install extension packs while installing Extension package manager (similar in concept to an Apt front end, searchable)	n/a
Internationalization Improve internationalization support in Installer	n/a
Editions Create several Editions for example standard edition, web developer edition, low memory edition or even google edition	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. Make automatic updates work on Windows without need for logging in as administrator — automatic updates service or scheduler task. Make the automatic updates feature optional at build time. Some users would prefer their system's package manager to handle software updates.	n/a
Manual updates Regarding the "Help" -> "Check for updates" function: When no updates are available, Firefox tells the user that it may check periodically for new updates without giving any clues or functions on how the user can tune this functionality. I suggest to implement a UI regarding the setup of the update policy here so that the user right there in the dialogue box can tune the update policy without needing to open the Options dialogue box.	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
Text link recognition Double click on a text link (like: www.somesite.com/here.html or http://www.somesite.com/here.html) recognizes it and opens it like a regular link, a very simple feature.
Synesthetic Surfing Synesthesia, or the cross-linking of senses, has been long known to be a powerful nmonic for anyone with the ability to tap it. Richard Feynman often thought of complex physics equations in colors, and these powerful associations can be used to assist in surfing the web. I am a synesthetic of a few different flavors, one of which is letter/number to color associations. Whole words have color averages usually dominated by the first letter. The word "Web" for example, is orange with some blue hues at the end. I found a plug-in for Firefox that colored your tabs, but it was random. I would like to see user-picked colors for specific domains. For example, www.google.com would be a yellowish-orange color on the tab. I would select the specific hue I wanted and the tab would be colored so. That way, if I have a many tabs open at the same time, I will know which one is google at a glance. The ability to associate tonal sounds with the tabs as a mouse-over function or click function would also be very helpful. Those who are more inclined to audio cues would benifit from this immensley! I love designing GUIs, so don't worry, if you don't code this, I will ;) -NeuralZen P.S. Check out wikipedia's write up on synesthesia for more info...
Browser Loading Time Make the browser open faster; that is the number one reason that I have heard for people not using Firefox or switching from Firefox
Alternate UI modes Togglable kiosk mode More efficient layout for widescreen laptops Minimal UI mode Show and hide navigation/bookmark/menu bar via a right-click menu everywhere (optional) full screen (or "resize to fit all content" ...a la Mac OS X) mode without toolbars, icons, navigation bar, etc	- details & discussion
Choice of UI rendering mode choice between displaying page when fully rendered (mozilla way) or display as it renders (firefox way).
Rationalize and reorganize browser and context menus Remove some menu items Move other menu items	Reasoning and Arguements
Context Menu Show an open url in new tab or open url option in the context menu when the user right-clicks on a plaintext url (text that is recognizably a url, but has no <a> tags).
Display keyboard shortcuts when hovering over objects When hovering over an object in the navigation toolbar the respective keyboard shortcut should be displayed as a tool tip. It could considerably improve the usage of keyboard shortcuts for new Firefox users that are not used to work with keyboard shortcuts (like old people). This should be a default-on feature with the option to turn off in Options -> Advanced -> General -> Accessibility
Reconsider the idea of Home Page Home Page and Home button have been with us since forever. However, I have a strong feeling they are no longer relevant and no one uses them as they did in the old times of "web portals". I propose to create a task-oriented "start" pane - basically a question of "what do you want to do". It should have: urlbar: "I want to go to that page". history: "I want to go to the page I've been to recently" web search: "I want to search" a button that restores session from just-closed window: "I want to continue" bookmarks and feeds, or otherwise Places I consider Thunderbird's start pane to be a good example of what I'm talking about.
OS X widgets Use OS X's provided widget set, especially for textarea, button, radio, checkbox and select elements. Native widgets feature spell check among other niceties. This would go a long way towards making Firefox feel more like a "real" OS X application. The current UI does not follow many of the common idioms on the Mac which causes confusion when switching between it and other Apple apps. This could greatly impact adoption on OS X, particularly among less savvy users who don't understand why it's different.	Apple Mac OS X Safari Browser Apple Human Interface Guidelines Hacking Aqua Widgets into Firefox
Page Zoom Instead of only increasing and decreasing the current page's font size, allow for the entire page to be zoomed in/out, like Opera. Make the zoom keys customizable. Also, like Opera, make sure that all elements zoom, such as Flash.
Better autocomplete in form fields Autocomplete list should be editable (like cookie-list) or erasable otherwise it will contain a lot of trash after some time and it is also a mild security risk because sometimes people demonstrate their actions and it is not nice previous entries pop-up; perhaps some toggle can help to disable/enable the feature Also, Emacs-style autocomplete ("dynamic expansion") of words will increase input speed dramatically in input and textarea fields It could go even further by having abbrev-list in a meta rel fashion (the same fashion as favicon is specifyed or other related documents) If implemented, this proposal can boost productivity for web-application users with technically simple (and known from many text-processors/editors) UI add-on	Emacs Dynamic Abbrevs Discussion
Editing HTML of opened page Be able to edit the HTML source of a webpage that is open and then save the changed version to the local hard disc. Currently "View > Page Source" does not alow editing for a web based page. Make this editable and then give the ability to save the entire page with images etc, using the modified source to the local hard disc.	n/a
Color of visited links depending on time of last visit Color of visited links should range from VLINK to LINK according to time passed. I'd like that the color of visited links could range from the the color defined for visited links to the color of _un_visited links in proportion to the time passed since last visit. This feature was present in early Mosaic, but I haven't seen it again in any browser.	Bug 211531
General tasks
Revist default tabstrip Re-evaluate toolbar buttons Re-evaluate status bar Re-evaluate menus and context menus Ensure shortcut consistency Remove Truncation of Title and Alt Tags	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 Consider intergration with something like PhishTank [1] Multi-provider support for local list checking (depending upon provider demand)	n/a
Safer Browsing Like anti-phishing, but with a list of sites that are known or suspected of being a source of malware (virii, spyware, etc)	See bug 347849
Script execution Integrate script execution whitelisting Allow cross-site scripting between whitelisted sites (for mashups)	NoScript
Pop-ups Implement one-click viewing of blocked pop-ups Make printing popup windows possible Implement a way to block every pop-up window, regardless of the way it was requested.	- More on printing pop-ups
Restricted Javascript Prevent window resizing Prevent hiding toolbar/controls Prevent capturing mouse events (overriding clicks, and obnoxious mouse-tracking scripts) Prevent floaters (or have some way to hide these layers) Prevent automatic form submission (or "Did you really want to submit this?") Provide a way to prevent a browser window from being locked up by a Javascript loop which repeatedly produces a Javascript dialog, e.g. a "Stop script" button in Javascript dialogs. Per-site javascript settings, i.e. allow users to choose to enable "move/resize window", "replace context menu" etc, on a per-site basis, instead of just a single global option.	n/a
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.2 "Supercookies" Never accept cookies associated with invisuble images: single, pixel GIFs and so forth Extensions like "Extended Cookie Manager" allow you to enable or disable cookies for the current site. However, it is common that sites use redirection, and a different site for actual authentication. Something like login.google.com when browsing www.google.com. So, simple "enable cookies for this site" features are not effective. The "ask every time" cookie dialog box should have another checkbox: "Don't ask again". This is so you can deny a cookie, and not have many more dialogs pop up to deny. This would complement a "One-click block/allow cookies" feature. More granular cookie controls - allowing regex definitions of what cookies should be accepted or declined. Not just based on the source site but also on the contents of the cookie. E.g. I don't care what site it is from, I never want to accept a cookie that contains the string AD_ID, even if I accept other cookies from a site.	1 Like "CookieCuller" 2 Like "CookiePie"
Exploit Mitigation Please consider splitting all page rendering code into a seperate process running with reduced permissions, either using ACL on Windows, or as a seperate low-privilege user on Unix-style systems. Use IPC mechanisms to handle network interaction and requests to save files in non-sandboxed directories. Assume that a network deliverable attack will exist, please ensure that the worse that happens is that the rendering engine must be restarted. To secure a process on Linux, simply write to the /proc/self/seccomp file. The process will then only be able to communicate via existing file descriptors (be sure to close the X11 one) and existing shared memory regions. Only about four system calls are allowed for a process in secure mode: read, write, exit, and signal handler return. To secure a process on a domain/type enforcement system like SE Linux, use a separate executable for handling untrusted content. A separate executable is required so that the security system can wall it off, permitting only communication with the other components of the browser. (components being: separate UI, network, config file access, cookie access, cache access, other disk access)
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 Intergrate a sandboxing feature automatically. (Like Sandboxie -http://www.sandboxie.com/) 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 (see the Sandboxing above) See Exploit Mitigation comment above.	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 Add some indication of which site produced a Javascript dialog, to prevent dialogs appearing to come from another site in a tabbed session. Check digital signature of a web page based on some extended DNS records. That way if a site is defaced, it will be obvious. Note that SSL does not guard against defacement, but this will.	1 PassPet 2 details & discussion
New technology support Extended Validation Certificate support Integrated PGP/GPG to sign/encrypt/authenticate text (eg Web Mail)	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
Keychain support for MAC OS X / KDE / Gnome Save passwords in the OS-level Keychain on OS X, so that passwords can be shared between Safari / FIrefox / Camino / etc. Ability to switch to external password manager like kwallet etc. and to disable firefox standard password manager	n/a
General tasks
Improve user notification of insecure browsing situations Rather than pop up annoying dialogs when a site has a bad security certificate, simply perform the encryption without showing the lock icon. (make the https site happy without bothering or misleading the user) 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
Eliminate image based user tracking. Do not load *any* invisible images. This includes single pixel and smaller pictures. It also includes images that are the same color as the background. Those can't be detected preload, but perhaps cookies could be refused to them.
Public Terminal Version. The person installing the firefox can enter a password protected option which automatically converts the browser into a public terminal version where no passwords are stored and everything is cleared on exit. The only way to override is when the user specifies a directory to store all ALL collected data (see suggested feature below) where the specified directory is on removable media. This setting will expire when the browser is closed or after 1 hour of use.
User specified directory to store ALL collected data. Have one directory, where all history, cookies, bookmarks, and any other data that could be potentially used maliciously to be stored. And give the user the option of putting it elsewhere. Be it on a dongle, or an encrypted area/partition (like using TrueCrypt)
Private browsing Implement a "private browsing" mode that prevents collection and recording of data. When privacy mode turned off previous history should be preserved.
Privacy preferences Add the option to suppress referrer information while browsing Import/export passwords and/or privacy settings	1 bug 285790 already exists for form history
Password management Improve password management - allowing multiple passwords (like opera, also see Myk's post) Ability to edit saved usernames and their respective passwords via the Privacy > Passwords > View Saved Passwords dialog Search Saved Passwords - Add search feature to the saved passwords list. Enable users to search by specific field (URL, username, or password) or perform a general search. Add date added/modified field to records in the password list Don't just save passwords, create them like Chris Zarate's Password Generator bookmarklet. It generates a hex-encoded MD5 hash of your master password and the domain name of the website you are visiting, and shortens it to the desired length. This allows users to remember just one master password, but use a unique strong password for every website (so your blackhat.com password is not the same as your bank.com password). Add preference to prompt user to update stored password after the next page loads when the user submits a password that does not match the password stored for the form/username combo. This would greatly smooth out the currently clunky common task of updating stored passwords without having to dig through the preferences. Wait until the password has been accepted before offering to save it. Modeless handling of new passwords. To avoid the intrusive dialog box popping up to ask users if they want to save passwords, you could signal this on the status bar or with a modeless pop-over, like Windows uses for warning about unused desktop icons. That way, it's a lot easier to just ignore this feature if you're in a hurry, or using someone else's computer, where you typically just want to get wherever you're going. Instead of "Never for this site" blocking of password storage, have a "never for this password" feature. For example, I might have a general use email account, and a super-secret private email account, both on the same webmail system. I'd like the regular account password remembered, but not the super-secret one. To implement this, take the [domain+username+password+salt] as a long string and SHA1 hash it, and store the hash - and nothing else. That can be safely (verify this carefully!) stored in user preferences without revealing anything, and still block rememberence of that password. Instead of requiring another click on every form submit "Do you want to remember...." have a button which gives the option to remember the password, and otherwise do not offer to remember passwords.
Secure Storage and Clearing of Private Data Optional password Protection for all Private Data including cookies, browsing and form history, cache, etc. using strong cryptography. could use same master password as password manager Integrate a feature to securely "wipe" saved browser information using various data overwriting algorithms such as Peter Gutmann's 35-pass wipe and U.S. DoD 7-pass specification 5220.22-M. This is obsolete. Useful levels of protection are: delete the file -- protects against non-admin users zero the file -- protects against nearly everyone outside of foreign intelligence agencies melt, dissolve, or powderize the hardware -- protects against everyone Multiple overwrite is not stronger than merely zeroing the file. It is an attempt to beat the rare case of somebody who can examine the disk surface, but it fails because modern disks will commonly write to different locations. Disks do sector/track substitution and they have write heads that wander a bit.
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. Detect if Master Password required dialog box is open. If it is open, and a link is clicked instead of opening another instance (which opens another Master Password dialog box) focus the existing dialog box and open the page in the original window instead of a new window. Only open one Master Password dialog box when there are two extensions that auto-login to accounts upon launch instead of two separate Master Password boxes for the same window.
General tasks
Improve overall Privacy UI Improve "clear private data" UI and options Fix this bug in the password manager: Password manager silently overwrites form-supplied values	N/A
The password dialog "Do you want Firefox to remember this password?" This Prevents the "enter password" form action page from loading so that the user must answer the question *before* he/she actually knows whether the username/password is correct. Ideally the password dialog would not block the page from loading and close automatically when the user leaves the "password accepted" page. Add a "Never Remember Passwords" button. Novice users may never realize this feature can be disabled in the Privacy section of the Options menu, and may become annoyed that they can never "really turn it off."
Option to clear Cache exit on window close/program exit This option is a blatent ripoff of IE with its Empty Temporary Internet Files on Exit. This option would be seperate from the Clear Private Data as to not interfere with the settings there. This will allow the user to clear the Cache on exit but not other items leaving them availible for execution when in the Clear Private Data option is invoked. This has been requested for some time and some work has been done on it.	BugZilla for Auto Cache Clear Potential Patch previously submitted for feature
Enhanced Certificate Management This should enable users to preselect certificates for certficate enabled sites (if they have more than one certificate available for the site) One-click editing and temporary dis- / enabling certificates via a better certificate-gui

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 Use RDF and/or a Microformat to define Fields for Username, Password, E-Mail, and the like. Filling a form tagged with a microformat can then be archived ie. by Drag&Drop a kind of vcards from a specific sidebar. Make it possible to hash the Password using the Domainname by default.	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 The Sage extension is a good model for updated RSS handling Add Live Boomark directly from feed link	- 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 Sound blocking, aka Mute Button. Turned off by default, when turned on blocks all sound (flash sound too) and warns the user that the webpage is trying to make sounds (with the ability to allow sounds just this once, for this domain, etc. Like the popup blocker). Plugins that lack mute support should be paused if possible, or terminated if necessary. Frozen mode. Stops all animated GIFs, videos, Flash, script-driven tickers and anything else that moves, flashes, or otherwise annoys. Pages can be frozen and unfrozen at any time, and the browser can be set to freeze all pages on load. Opera had a great button whereby you could stop the downloads of not only graphics, but many other elements like Javascript, Java and the like. Lets now add Shockwave/flash to this as well. After the page loaded, you could then download graphics and such by another click. But I want to add, that if graphics are blocked, then a placeholder should be put on the page, in order to make it render right. Not jumbled all around. Ability to filter scripts which disable browser functionality, such as scripts to hide the address bar or 'no right-click allowed' scripts. Firefox has no obligation to respect functionality-breaking scripts.	- 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 ability to lock the page scroll. I may sound bizarre but I will explain how it is usefull. Imagine you are editing a blog. Generaly you work inside a text area. So, you use your mouse scroller to scroll inside that text area. When you reach the end, the browser always scrolls the page, so, you lost the text area out of sight and have to scroll it again to put the text area visible. ability to copy text from tables; ability to insert checkboxes on anything, to use as marks. Imagine you are copying data from a page where everyline is a record. So, you go forward and back, from your program and the browser, copying each line... won't be wonderful if you can mark the lines you just have processed? ability to delete text from page. Wonderful for when you are copying texts or other stuff from pages. ability to enlarge form fields; ability to take notes on screen. I mean arrows you can point to elements and write notes, post it, etc. ability to make a slideshow of all images on a page. This could be based on image's size, so the user could adjust to block, for example, icons to be on the slideshow; ability to navigate at the same time with other person on another place of the web; 'Filter chains'. There may be several plugins attempting to change or access the page content at any given time, sometimes conflicting with one another, other times it is not clear what will be 'executed' first. The user should be able to implement a processing hierarchy (filter/extraction stages) that process the page according to a fixed set of rules. (i.e. adblock -> extensionFoo -> XML extraction -> Greasemonkey -> Display) 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). Facilitation of console manipulation tools. It would be nice to be able to bring up a console in Firefox and use various tools to manipulate the page 'on the fly'. More precisely, it would be good if developers were able to easily write interfaces for doing this. For example, it would be nice if it was easy for someone to write a console tool that manipulates the DOM with Hpricot or BeautifulSoup. (Make it easy/feasible to write Chickenfoot like extensions). Scaling of images as well as text when zooming (an Opera-like feature) -- Kelly Price 08:01, 14 October 2006 (PDT) Sort table columns or rows by right clicking the topmost or leftmost sortable element and selecting sort criteria. Randomly 01:42, 15 October 2006 (PDT)	n/a TargetAlert & LinkAlert will do this n/a n/a
Forms Ability to resize textareas Textareas should act more "dungeon style" like most text editors - when you use the up or down arrow to move to another row, the cursor should remain in the same column or as far to the right as text allows.	n/a
Parental control features Implement a set of parental control features Something like a password protected version of the Greasemonkey script Invisibility Cloak would be very useful	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. Run plugins as a independent process, so that when they leak memory, that memory will be freed when the tab or window is closed. Run plugins as a independent process, so that when a plugin refuses to shut down (like acroread), the browser can forcibly kill it. Tighten down the plugin API so that plugins have no direct access to any kind of system calls (i.e. the symbol table for plugins is carefully controlled). (X.org does this to DDX modules.) This way, things like memory management and such can be "wrapped" by Firefox to ensure that plugins are well-behaved.	- nspluginwrapper
Fix broken images Add "Reload Image" right-click option on broken image placeholders, or "Reload all broken images" right-click on page option, when network problem creates broken images. Current behavior requires a full page refresh to load 1 broken image.	n/a
Stability and resource-utilization improvements Put each document into an independent process (not thread: separate forked process) so that: When a document causes Firefox to crash, the whole browser won't be taken with it. When a bug in Firefox stomps on memory it doesn't own, other documents in memory are not corrupted. When a document causes Firefox to leak massive amounts of memory, closing that tab or window will free up the wasted memory. When a bug in Firefox or a script on the page locks up (infinite loop or whatnot), the whole browser will not hang up, just the one document. Closing the tab or window kills the aberrant process. This is also an issue for DNS lookup; the browser always freezes completely during DNS lookup. Make this affect only the document being loaded. Obviously, this also means that the Firefox main UI should also be in a separate process, and you should use IPC and sharing of window-system resource IDs and handles to communicate between UI and document processes. When the UI crashes, restarting the UI can sweep up documents that find themselves unattached and re-present them undisturbed. Cross-site scripting and buffer overflow exploits have a much harder time hacking into information for other documents, because they are inaccessible in separate processes. To secure a process on Linux, simply write to the /proc/self/seccomp file. The process will then only be able to communicate via existing file descriptors (be sure to close the X11 one) and existing shared memory regions. Only about four system calls are allowed for a process in secure mode: read, write, exit, and signal handler return. Provide an about:top view that gives an accounting of which documents and plugins are using how much memory and CPU time.	n/a
Per-tab sound level control Each tab can have a sound level knob next to the "x" button that will allow users to regulate the sound output level from the page on that specific tab. extremely useful when multiple pages are playing sound and are difficult to regulate seperately due to bad coding. Also useful for very loud (or very quiet) pages which need adjustment.	n/a
General tasks
n/a	n/a

Browser Interaction

Opening Links

Link Activation	References
Link Activation Allow popup windows (ones that don't currently work in tabs) to appear in tabs. When hovering over a link, show its target in status bar (e.g. "Open http://example.com/ in a new tab") as in Safari. Allow the user to draw a box on the webpage that launches all links within the box bounds, as new tabs User key for this could be MMB, Drag or a modifier key with LMB, Drag. if a large number of links are selected, a confirmation box could ask weather this was the users intention. A simple example of where this would be useful is opening a number of items in a list of links, including the results of a search engine. Text highlighted that starts with http:// can be opened in a new tab by dragging the selected text upward. Any link will open in a new tab if dragged in any direction rather than being clicked.
Link Context Menu Add a command to open selected text in a new tab/window. Allow to customise the links context menu. I for example have never clicked on the "Send Link", "Bookmark This Link" on purpose and i hate it when it starts my outlook or opens up the bookmark dialog.	https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1472/
Additional Mouse Interactivity Whitespace grabs within the document act as grabbing the icon in the address bar. Draging links to whitespace opens the link in new tab or window Highlighting text causes it to be treated as a link in all of it's functionality, including the I'm feeling lucky Google search.
Javascript Links When ctrl+click or middle clicking a void() + onclick link browser opens current page in a new tab or window then performs a click on the requested link.

Quick Top of page/Bottom of page

Quick Top of page/Bottom of page	References
Get back to top quickly. Perhaps a Goto Top and Goto Bottom button in the Find bar at the bottom of the browser. This would be faster than using the scrollwheel, which many mice don't have.

Compatibility

Web standards compatibility

Specific features	References
ACID 2 test Make sure Firefox passes it	Bug 289480
Full SVG 1.1 support Add full support (not a non-standard subset of it) of SVG 1.1	W3C SVG1.1
Content-editable Add support for content-editable	tinysvg w3c
CSS Make "display: inline-block" work correctly Support printing-related properties such as page-break-before and page-break-after	Bug 9458 (inline-block) Bug 24000 (page-break)
XForms XForms supported and built-in.	Bug 326372
XHTML 2.0 Add support for current XHTML 2.0 draft	Bug 161463, XHTML2 Working Draft
XHTML ruby annotation Ruby annotation has been included in XHTML spec since 2001, and there has been a great extension to implement it. Now, let's make it in Fx 3.	Bug 33339 - XHTML ruby support, XUL Apps > XHTML Ruby Support
shy Add full support for soft hypens.	Bug 9101
IE Compatibility Answer to below suggestion: Integrate IE tab into firefox by default. Add fallback mode to support non-standards based rendering when "IE only" features are present in a web page so that the page will render correctly. Allow feature to be turned on and off. Could be made into a plug-in instead of putting feature directly into Firefox. This feature would allow more people to convert to Firefox and leave IE behind forever. Agreed with the above statement. I have companies that insist I use MSIE, even if I'm in linux. I believe Opera has the feature whereby it uses the MSIE engine, but I haven't tested it on these sites. This needs to fix the problem of a) a site refusing to even load, if your using anything but MSIE, b) allowing uploads of files even with FF (over IE)	n/a
XSLT 2.0 W3C Candidate Recommendation 8 June 2006	XSLT Candidate Recommendation
Full HTML 4.01, and CSS 2.1 compatibility. Increase the standard bar in HTML, and CSS standard. Firefox should work hand-in-hand with the W3, to be 100% compabiable with the current CSS/HTML/XHTML standards, so we web site writers can write our sites with FF in mind, and let IE, and others play catch-up. Also, FF should be updated quickly in order to be current with the next versions of such. We've wanted CSS, and such for years, and now we get it, it's the browsers that stop us from accually using it fully. There is no really good reason why at least FF shouldn't be 100% compatable (IE has an exchuse but I'm not going to bash companies here :)	Browser standard comparison
iCab-Smiley analogue This nice feature will promote standard-compliancy of the web.	iCab wikipedia page
General tasks
Improve overall standards support	n/a

Protocol and media support

Specific features	References
Improvements Improve PDF support and handling (Built in PDF viewer with support for more exotic features like forms, javascript, etc.) Save page as PDF Improve Java support Improve FTP support Add support for SFTP and FISH (SSH2)	n/a
Desktop experience Support X11 session management	X11 session manager
New technology support IPTV IM Integrated radio livestream Open Document Format BitTorrent Magnet links eDonkey links SCTP 1 Jabber/XMPP OBEX (Bluetooth, etc) SyncML SIP Scriptable ZeroConf (Bonjour/Rendezvous) WML. Would be grat if firefox could interpret WAP pages. WebDAV and Secure WebDAV SMIL 2.0 Microformat detection/notification with metadata metalink (mirrors & checksums for downloads)2 Ogg3 WMV Open Document Format XBEL SVG via img tag JPEG2000 ANG MNG JNG DJVU 4 Save page as image, this should save a complete page as an image just like a screenshot does. Optionally attach the image directly to a new e-mail.	1 SCTP patch 2 metalink 3 Firefox Ogg Support 4 Djvu support library
General tasks
n/a	n/a

UI compatibility

Specific features	References
Linux
Render embedded buttons with native GTK2 widgets Make keyboard shortcuts work with non-Latin keyboard layouts in GTK2 (currently, GTK1 builds work as they are supposed to, as well as GTK2 under GNOME. But wth, not all people use GNOME!) Make sure GTK2 builds do not screw up the keyboard focus: focus is periodically placed to the improper widgets which effectively disables keyboard shortcuts until mouse click inside browser.	See bug #232553. See bug #340944, bug #69230, bug #295614.
Mac OS X
Support Command-Option-F to select search toolbar (standard for Mac applications).	n/a

Global community

Internationalization

Specific features	References
Language support Improve complex glyph rendering Support more complex languages (Hebrew, Arabic, pangool, all Indian dialects) Multilingual browser, to allow single binary for multilingual systems Being able to switch user-interface language without restarting the browser Localisation Times are converted local times Units such as currency, weight, distance are converted or highlighted, and allow for right click interactions	See bug #240914. (David Baron said: I expect this will be fixed for Gecko 1.9 (i.e., Firefox 3.0...) See bug #356184.
General tasks
Ability to highlight text/tables in a webpage and then right click and "Export to OpenOffice.org Calc/Writer or Microsoft Excel/Word" depending on users preference and operating system.	Many people I have shown Mozilla Firefox to have missed such a feature as it is in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Accessibility

Why? To obtain accurate page output, PDF export would be more effective.

Specific features	References
Font deltas Remember a users font delta for each site. If a user goes back to that site in another session, they should not have to re-adjust the font size every time they visit.
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 % Prettier image resizing & scaling (Bilinear, Bicubic, anything better than Nearest Neighbor)	See bug #4821. See bug #98971. See bug #276166.
Scrolling Add smooth scrolling	How is this different to Preferences | Advanced | General tab | Use smooth scrolling? "Maybe refers to the Mac version, like how Safari allows scrolling 1 pixel at a time using a touchpad" "The built in smooth scrolling in Firefox is very 'rough' compared to the way Opera seems to handle it."
Voice navigation Add Support for Macintosh VoiceOver screenreader
General tasks
Create an html "Next Page" extension where, if there is no forward page to go to, it goes to the "next" page just by clicking the mouse "forward" button. Very useful for going through pages and pages of results just by clicking the forward mouse button instead of scrolling down, finding and clicking the "next page" link on the bottom of every page over and over again. This might have to be coded into webpages but it needs to be supported by the browser so it can start being used. This might need to be submitted as a W3C Open Standard. Simplify process for creating accessible themes (dev? docs?)	n/a

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?) Some way to get feedback on XMLHttpRequest dispatches (which would otherwise be invisible)	n/a
Developer tools Asynch-Panel to replace javascript div-update implementations It would be great to have mechanism to define a panel, where data may be send to a server and its response is rendered into a certain area like: <asynch-panel refpanel="myPanel" refid="test" /> <asynch-panel name="myPanel" target="http://blabla.de/bsp.jsp"> <input type="text" id="test" value="<%="blabla"%>" /> <input type="submit" /> </asynch-panel> Of course such panels would allow nested panels and form elements to have maximum control. I know that such an extension would be only usable for Firefox users, but it would speed up asynch development at leat in closed user groups with certain system requirements.	n/a
Developer tools FAST! VM for client side scripting with extension API to add additional languages other than javascript	n/a
CSS Enhancements anti-aliased rounded corners gradient filled background (check out "HTMLayout CSS support map", they have done gradient filled backgrounds very effectively)	n/a
Simplified Drag and Drop Support I know it might be heretical, but it would make life easier for some of us Ajaxy types if Firefox bit the bullet and supported IE style drag and drop.	n/a
'Official Generic' code release Offer a 'generic' Firefox tree without trademarked elements or non-free plugins.	n/a
General tasks
Create a "unified set of modern web developer tools" Add a .NET/Mono-Wrapper to host both the web browser and the WYSIWYG editor (if such a tool exists, I'm not sure about it) in my own .NET Windows Forms applications. Do this in a highly customizable way to control most aspects of how the browser appears. Uwe Keim	n/a

Add-ons/Platform development

Specific features	References
Extensions Finally codify and document all existing interfaces: chrome, DOM, XPCOM before inventing new ones. Make it easier to write extensions (new sandbox for extensions, extension platform?) Allow for limited types of sandboxes that bypass security by strongly limiting extension abilities. Simple toolbar and toolbar button extensions which can only do anything when clicked and only do a limited number of things (make some HTTP request, change the location, open a window or tab, etc.) and can't do anything otherwise. Similar menu operations Extensions that auto-install and then show a permissions dialog. Enable/Disable reading or writing clipboard Enable/Disable reading or writing current DOM etc. Most important, you could install these without trusting the sources. Special link elements or HTTP headers could even associate pages with special extensions to autoinstall and enable just while at the given page. 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, sort of like an OPML for extensions that can get slurped in to another FF seat Include Thunderbird in Firefox, like Sunbird was added to Thunderbird. ( guess you should use SeaMonkey !) add a system to be able to choose what handle what in firefox (firefox built-in svg instead of an external SVG plugin for instance) add a generic plugin like plugger so you are able to choose depending on a mime/type or file extension a program to handle it inside an html page. If Firefox and Thunderbird are integrated, please keep standalone versions of each available to download. Then users who only require one of the programs can still use it without wasting resources. Better yet, keep them separate. Platform A useable security model for remote XUL. Currently the restrictions on remote XUL cripple many possible uses for the platform, and there is no easy way to elevate the permissions for a remote application or domain.	n/a
* A loader within the tray icon area which keeps the Firefox code loaded so it does'nt has to be reloaded all the time after you closed all windows of Firefox. An implementation is quiet easy: You just need to create another window like the download manager and drop it out of sight so Firefox is still open but invisible. This isn't wasting too much memory but saving a lot of time in starting Firefox again because its still loaded. A normal click on the tray-icon or another double click on the desktop will be handled the same way as now if Firefox is already running	FrenzyM6
APIs Add a metadata handler extension API SHA-2 hashes and AES-256 or other strong crypto in JavaScript (operate over base64 or binhex). Good for AJAX securty.
Pages with wrong/unknown mime type Often I will find a page that firefox can't display. Nearly always, such pages are plain ASCII text with a weird mime type. For example, firefox doesn't know how to display typical source code. (C, FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal...) I get a dialog asking me to save the file to disk or choose an app for displaying the file. One particularly desirable display choice is missing: the browser itself!!! Come on now, it's plain ASCII text. Surely the browser can handle this. Firefox can determine the mime type of a local file. (by magic or extension I suppose) For remote files, it always blindly trusts the server. Nearly always, the server just looks at the file magic or extension. This ought to not matter, but it does. Servers often lack a complete and modern mapping from extension/magic to mime type because people don't often install lots of multimedia apps on servers. Such servers will substitute a generic mime type. IE tolerates this just fine because IE determines mime type from the file extension alone. Firefox acts weird: if you "save link as..." and then view the local file, firefox will use a different (inconsistant) mime type. At the very least, IE-like behavior should be an option, and should always be used when the server-provided mime type is clearly useless. If firefox must pop up a dialog to ask the user about viewer apps, the default needs to be that of the file extension. Probably it is better to just bury this server-knows-best relic of the past though, standard or not.
Javascript improvements Library improvements Put atleast one of the most commonly used Javascript libraries in the browser (scriptaculous, etc) so users don't have to keep downloading them. Throw in the Ruby interpreter and use its rich libraries. Interpreter improvements Include a step-through javascript debugger (or possibly include this in the Javascript Console).
Architecture Firefox should become a minimal browser All features are provided by the plugin architecture Even basic functions like bookmark manager or history should be provided as extensions to become exchangable Extensions can be installed/uninstalled without restarting the browser Per-machine extensions, Per-user extensions Search plugins are provided as extensions Even the rendering engine becomes exchangable and configurable Support for Gecko, Opera, KHTML, (IE) per-site configurable which engine to use Developer focus should not be on features, but on architecture Firefox should be distributed as package including the core browser plus a set of selected basic extensions like history and bookmark manager
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	n/a

Performance

Consider implementing IEView and IETab extensions funcitonality in FF itself. Many web pages (e.g. some online e-mail access services) still require the user to be running IE so a way for FF users to view those pages wityhout having to find out and install those extensions would be extremely useful.

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.
Improve browser launch time on both Windows and Mac OS X. Currently IE and Safari launch much more efficiently, making it more sensible to open one of those browsers when quickly looking something up. Enduring the sluggish launch time again and again makes for an irritating experience.
At the very least, bring up a UI as quickly as possible. Show the splashscreen while loading. Often I find I don't know whether Firefox has started up and start up multiple copies.
Bring speed up to par with Safari/Opera on the Mac platform. Perhaps bring project into XCode/Objective-C/Cocoa? The Cocoa API is much more feature complete than the Carbon API, since the latter is more of a carry over from MacOS 9. With Cocoa, things like integerated spell checking would come 'free', since they are associated with the widgets being used.
Hardware accelerated graphics (perhaps use the Vista/Mac OS X/AIXGL/XGL engines to do the acceleration for us)
Make the javascript engine less cpu hungry.
Make the textarea performance better. Often, even on fast machines, I can type faster than the text appears. This doesn't happen all the time, but does often enough. As it catches up to me, I see all of the text in the textarea being cleared and flashing up for each character typed.
It is very annoying to be typing into a text box and have the browser go unresponsive for a few seconds while in the middle of typing. This is caused by Javascript in other windows (like gmail) waking up and using the network. Threading needs work to fix this.
JITted Javascript engine using Mono or JVM
Now multi-core CPUs are becomming standard it makes sense to improve multi-threading. Javascript or rendering on one tab should not lock up other tabs, for example. Even within a tab, image decoding, scripting, plugins and HTML rendering could all be separated.
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.
Develop a set of Official Extensions such that most of these new features (and some of the old features) can be made optional for the basic user. Firefox's strength is that it is a low weight (rather than a kitchen sink+) browser. Creating Official Extensions which expand the useful feature set, but are optional, will keep Firefox lean and mean.

Mobile and Enterprise support

Mobile device integration/support

Specific features	References
Send content to device Bluetooth support	n/a
General tasks
Support non-PC platforms (e.g. Palm OS)	n/a

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.	n/a
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 ?)	n/a
Updating Implement a -update commandline switch which starts Firefox in an automated update mode (core+extensions). Further user interaction shouldn't be necessary	n/a
General tasks
n/a	n/a

User support and Testing

Help documentation

Specific features	References
In-browser Integrate in-product help and first-run/updated pages with online help.	n/a
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	n/a
Intro/Tutorial mode host it on mozilla.com as movies have some UI hooks in the product	- thoughts from FunnyMan3595
General tasks
n/a	n/a

User-testing

Specific features	References
User testing extensions Create extension to allow for remote user testing	n/a
Development build UI changes Add "send feedback" buttons to dialogs in development builds	n/a
Improve Talkback User Experience and Robustness Talkback (and its report queue) should be more invisible to the user. Plus Talkback rarely seems to work for me. My Talkback report queue often ends up with 3-4 reports that never seem to get through to the Talkback server.	n/a
General tasks
n/a	n/a

Other resources

Misc Thoughts	References
An alternative view of the web browser Firefox as a new kind of desktop manager. Active front end.	Some thoughts
Decentralized/distributed browsing: in case a website has been slashdotted, Firefox should still be able to reach to its data by using the offline website data which is stored locally at other Firefox users, who were able to connect to it, their disk. Firefox should act as a kind of a torrent client. Of course, there might be some security issues. Https websites should be denied and the user itself should be able to disable this "torrent functionality".
Please focus more on stability, robustness, and security than on adding fun features. New features are nice, and fixing bugs isn't so much fun, but I find Firefox to be more of a memory hog and less stable than IE, and that's pretty sad. Stop competing against other browsers because you're afraid of losing market-share. The only way Firefox will ever be truly great if it's designed to be great from the ground up. Focus on changes that are less glitzy and more on changes that are fundamental to making a good browser platform. When something needs to be re-architected, re-architect it. Don't assume that bugs will ultimately get fixed; so far, Firefox has added features faster than bug fixes. Rather, focus on design principles that minimize the chances that problems will happen and minimize the consequences when they DO happen (and they will!).
I agree with the above. Firefox also has a reputation for being fast and relatively slim and there already is a plugin system for those who want a feature laden browser, so the focus should be on essential improvements that will have an impact on usability for the majority of users. A lot of the proposals here go way beyond what a dedicated browser should be able to do (more or less why Firefox was created from the Mozilla suite in the first place, no?) and would just add a lot of bloat.
I concur with the above two requests. Fix all the memory leaks! Firefox leaks memory like a sieve. I hate having to restart it periodically in order to get it all reclaimed. A web browser shouldn't be using nearly 150 MB of ram. That's 15 MB for each of my open tabs! - stefie10
I don't know where this would go, but how about a really easy off-line browsing agent? Here's an example of what I do. Every morning I pull up about a dozen web pages in tabs, as a sort of 'newspaper' I read specific articles that catch my eye, or have an interest, like say the North Korea problem. I then go to the next article. (just like a newspaper.) I'd like to be able to click a 'offline this link' (or something like that), where it downloads just that article, as deep as it needs to go, with all the stuff that goes with it) then save it. I can then take this on my laptop and read it at work, in the car or such if/when I don't have internet connections. The off-line browsers I've used want to download the entire site(s), and are so hard to configure I give up on them. Also it should handle login sites too (like bank sites) but it'd be ok, if you have to input the login/password manually.)
I have no idea if this is possible, but if Thunderbird is installed it would be cool to have the option of opening Thunderbird as a tab.
Two buttons for favorites that open as many tabs as there are links in a special folder: One for daily checked pages (e.g. news paper, special forum a.s.o) and one for pages you check only sometimes (e.g. homepages of former friends or employers, news of your hometown a.s.o.)
I think the possiblity to setup and use a socketconnection for client-server communicationes would be a great improvement for Firefox to use it in Web2.0 / intranet-webapplications. I know it's allready possible, but it requires 'signed/secure javascript' through a plugin to deploy the possibilities, but it would (and should) be a lot easier if a could just setup a javascript object (eg: mySocket = new SocketClient("tcp://domain.com/application"); mySocket.onData = processReponse(); mySocket.connect(); ) If you look at the flashplayer for example, it is used a lot in all kinds of applications, not just gaming or chatting, but it's also penetrating the intranet-applications business.

• Firefox Features - MZForums
• Gecko 1.9 Feature List

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