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 targets 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	References
Integrate with platform password management GNOME, KDE and Mac 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)	bug 278343 bug 309807
Use native GTK Widgets for form elements On Windows the Form Widgets follow the currently selected theme (for instance luna). It should do on linux as well.	bug 39375
Follow System wide Icon theme On Linux there one can set a global icon theme. Firefox should take advantage of this and follow the system icon theme as default. (or at least optionally)
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. Even better use portland determine programs Project Portland (portland.freedesktop.org) is the solution to this problem.
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)	bug 57805 bug 257241
Download Progress in OS X Implement the download progress icon on incomplete file downloads on Mac OS X like Safari and Cyberduck.
Services Integration in OS X Firefox does not supports Mac OS X services so that all the commands available in the "Services" menu are disabled. Other OS X applications (es. Safari) allows the user to use a services when some data, like text, is selected.
Search Integration Integrate history, bookmarks, or other forms of harvested micro-formatted content with OS search platforms such as Vista Search or Spotlight in Mac OS X.
Print Integration with GNOME (and other DEs) Using Firefox for Linux with Gnome, printing options are very limited because Firefox has its own print dialog which doesn't let you change printer settings like color depth, resolution and many other useful printer-specific settings. An integration with Desktop Environment printing UI will be very appreciated (and probably not only on Linux/Gnome environment).
Emulation of IE Web Application (.HTA) support (Windows only?) It would remove one of the last barriers to replacement of IE in typical corporate/intranet environments if FF supported the .HTA file format & resulting behavior (opens the page an in 'application window' sans typical browser chrome). Ideally this would include support for the (Microsoft documented) meta tags/attributes for .HTA files, but it still would be very useful even without that. Obviously there is a potential security trade-off here; but with safe defaults (in a future FF) and given typical usage scenarios, I believe that this would still widely acceptable to users.
Emulation of IE Create (Desktop) Shortcut support (Windows only?) Use case: be able to create a double-clickable icon that can be shared with colleagues. Use case: be able to 'book mark' pages/sites of interest in a way that is: 1) ultra light-weight and 2) can leverage the visibility and spatial cues that the (Windows) desktop affords.

Browser chrome

Menus and Toolbars

Specific features	References
Tree-shaped history 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, and use an interface that allow you to branch when going forward. This proposal seems to me to be conceptually similar to proposals in the research literature for rewinding of UNDO stacks along N branches. What I recall from the literature is that this proved, in trial usage, to be complex to very problematic, particularly with respect to usability. If this proposal is implemented, then it might be wise to consider whether the Back/Forward behavior should default to the 'traditional' linear implementation and only turn on the 'branching' support on explicit user request (e.g., as a 'power user' feature). Jabbott 10:09, 16 October 2006 (PDT)	Bug number required
Back and Forward buttons 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.	Middle click on back / forward already does this, but History is not preserved. Related to: bug 18808 bug 189313 bug 246719
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 column so that you could also sort for it. Improvements for the Media tab Let the list be sorted by clicking on the headers of the list (Address, Type,...). Having selected some of the items add the command "save media to ..." Add a column "Type" that shows the "ending of the files for example "jpg, gif, png". Perhaps this could also use the content-type returned for the file. Add a column "Size" that shows the size of the file, in human terms such as 1/3 Meg or some such, but will sort on # of bytes. The list of media should be (optionally?) displayed as a list of thumbnails. Searching for a specific image in a list of cryptic URLs is tedious. Thumbnails would make that task easier, as well as providing a better visual representation of "what's on this page."	n/a
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.	bug 126718

Browser customization

Specific features	References
Flash plugin to let the Windows version of Flash run using Wine (or similar.) Since the Linux version will always be several versions behind what is used on most web sites and honestly expecting this to change is bordering on insanity, provide a way to run the Windows version under Firefox.	n/a
Mouse gestures Allow the user to use mouse gestures (like right click followed by left click for 'back' etc)...	Opera Mouse Gestures Plugins providing this functionality
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 Archive Format) which was perfect but doesn't work with newer versions of Firefox on Linux and is not improved anymore.	bug 40873
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. 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
External editing of text boxes 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. Include ability to save/restore the text box contents.	bug 103767
General tasks
Improve extension installation/management UI Unify add-ons management (extensions, themes, search engines, dictionaries, plugins) Improve interaction design around customizing browser interfaces	bug 339056 bug 338074 bug 335781
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	bug 264205

Add-ons, Extensions, Plugins

Specific features	References
Limit amount of Plugins/Addons from overwhelming the Interface. Allow Firefox to limit 2-20 lines of toolbars for real estate recovery. Have Arrow Up and Arrow Down at the start of the Toolbar rotator or use the scroll wheel (when mouseover the Plugin toolbar) to rotate between plugins. Allow us to specify which order each plugin will sit in. Extensions should have compatibility mode to allow older extensions to run when a new revision of firefix is released and extension is not available. Maybe offer a "force install" to see if an out of revision extension will work.	n/a
General tasks
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

Preferences

Specific features	References
Saved Form Information Edit/delete individual Form Manager entries, either via prefs or at form fill time. Avoid auto-saving things which look like CC numbers.	n/a
Enterprise-wide settings Possibility to read settings (like start page, proxy etc.) from Active Directory (or any other similar system) if the computer is inside it and disable editing these settings	bug 224509 bug 103545 CCK
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. 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.	OmniWeb Features:Site Preferences bug 108391 bug 123248 bug 194812
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. bug 41975
Shortcut Key Configuration Creating customized shortcuts to preferred Firefox functions using unassigned keyboard combinations. Creating shortcuts for sites/links/bookmarks UI for displaying/searching/modifying existing key combinations, displaying what does every keyboard shortcut mean in every context (much like Opera does).	bug 57805 bug 257241
General tasks
Using multiple proxies 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	bug 43429. SwitchProxy adds a status bar menu to quickly switch between proxies.
Save As... PostScript, PDF, ODF Early Netscape allowed the user to "save as" a web page as postscript, HTML, PDF, etc. These days, we seem to be only allowed to "save as" in HTML or text. 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.	bug 114376 bug 162659
Allow image placeholders to appear before the image starts being displayed (available in IE). CarlRogerson 23:52, 14 October 2006 (PDT)]
Add option to save proxy password and not bug every time the browser is open.	bug 112179

Tabs, sidebar, and windows

Specific features	References
Tabs Add Isolated Tabbed Windows: This is to ensure each tabbed windows does not leak over to another window eg: HTTPS sites. Simplest way to test, Goto your bank's website (make sure you got 2 different accounts usually your wife's account would be good to test if she is with the same bank) log into your account with one tab, log into your second account in another tab, navigate to your second account's summary view, then go back to 1 first tab and do the same. You will notice that both summaries are from the secondary account. Keyborad shortcut to toggle between tabs, similar to alt-tab'ing open application windows in MS windows. If you have A, B, C tabs in order, and you open a new tab from B (this becomes D) and then close it (D), then the active tab will be C instead of B, the last viewed. It would be also useful if a newly opened tab would appear beside the one that opened it. The close [X] button should only be shown on the open tab to prevent people from accidentally closing tabs upon selecting them. Close buttons on out-of-focus tabs should only show after a 1 second mouse-over. Allow the tab-bar relocation, probably with a simple 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 separate Thunderbird window Sunbird Tab -- Opens Sunbird within a tab rather than a separate Sunbird window Tab Grouping by Domain and Tab Grouping by Originating Page (eg. if I open a Page from Tab A then it will be in the same group as Tab A). A group maybe as simple as having a coloured border around the tabs in the same group. Alternativly, an option to have tabs open next to the current tab. This solves the problem of having all your links from different tabs open in the same place, and helps with sorting tabs, because all the links from one website are next to each other. Tab collections used to organize tabs, think Linux virtual desktops Multiple initial pages with tabs Displaying tabs over multiple rows Give the option in the preferences menu to allocate a 'unique' close tab button in the right like 1 and 1.5 versions of firefox instead of 1 close button per tab like Firefox 2---so you can choose--- Option to open default page when creating a new tab Tab drag and detach Detach Tab to new Window (mustn't be in the context, draggin the tab to the windows title would be cool) Window drag and attach as tabs Possibility to order tabs into two rows when they are a lot Possibility to change tab using mouse wheel, when mouse is over tabs Possibility to add another sidebar on the right (useful expecially with widescreen monitors) 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) [1] 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 Opera remembers which tabs were open when the user last closed the browser and opens all these tabs again upon relaunch. Firefox should do the same and should also remember each tab's browsing history; allowing the user to reopen Firefox, have all the tabs that were open available again, and be able to click back and forward for each individual tab. Have a configurable option so that when a user does "Open All In Tabs", they do NOT replace all the current tabs, but open IN ADDITION to the current tabs already open. When middle-clicking / control-clicking to open in a new tab. Both RSS Feeds and bookmarks should open in a tab "behind" the rest, and not take focus like it currently does.	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. Current problems with tabs and their probable solution by DJ Doena bug 55696 bug 281192 bug 156264 bug 102132 bug 104566
Sessions Support session savings. Enables the user to save a session where he/she has, say, 18 tabs open, to another time. Sessions/Tabs Isolation: Make sure sessions from other tabs do not leak between tabs. This is a major security hazard.	n/a
Browser Window Option to make a window / popup sticky and always-on-top (Would be nice for watching a video in a popup while surfing). this option MUST ONLY be available for the user not for scripts! 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! Text readability improvements: 1)button/keybind to automatically narrow text to a pre-configured width - text extending accross the whole width of the window is cumbersome to read - possibly configurable to multi-column mode; 2)"Visibility imprint" - on quick scroll operations (PgUP, PgDn, mousewheel...) the previously visible area should be delimited by a frame/line for a certain period of time, after which the frame disappears or fades out, so it's easier to find the last read line; and 3)Improved automatic scrolling: finer control for very slow scrolling and freeing up the mouse. Like current autoscrolling, only finer controls (the current slowest is still too fast) and the possibility to detach the mouse, for instance by re-clicking the middle button, upon which the mouse is free to move but the page continues autoscrolling. 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. (Very nice idead - i think you can make something like this with 5 lines of VB but launching firefox.exe -appmode -url http... would be cool! When the Browser runs in appmode there JS should allowed to modify the window's behavior) 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) Sessions/Tabs Isolation: Make sure sessions from other tabs do not leak between tabs. This is a major security hazard.	SessionSaver - MZKB SessionSaver - UMO SessionSaver (rewrite) - MZForum Session Manager Ext Tab Mix Plus with Session Managment
Sidebar Sidebar animation RSS animation Allow the windows from downloads,extensions,bookmarks and history to dock as sidebars. A bit like the extension All-In-One-Sidebar.\ Better handling of multiple searches in different windows (see Bug 45082)	- 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
In Firefox 1.x whe have only one X for close all tab one by one. in firefox 2.x we have a X for every tab, i think it isn't not at all the best way. I think the best idea is put a X in the end of the tab bar (like 1.x style) and a X for every tab (2.x style) because when i've to close more than one tab i've to spend time to find the X of the near tab and click it instead to press the X in the end.	Browser.tabs.closeButtons

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
Search as you type Summary: A search as you type feature like the one in Flock that drops down a "box" when you type but a lot more customizable and with more features. Details/Options: Determine the size of the box, in, pixels, % of the screen size and how many words/characters that will be shown Determine the opacity of the box Decide what search engines that will be listed in the box and how many results of each Preview of every result like the GooglePreview extension but in the box Scroll in the box with options: always, when needed, never Decide if it should be a default search engine or search results from several search engines Search features not related to the "drop down box" User defined hotkey to the search field (if it not already exists) User defined key words to search engines like: "g your search here" for search on google or "google your search here" or "g:your search here" and so on. The key word could be in two parts, search engine string and separation string, where in the last example "g" would be the search engine string and ":" the separation string so you can have a global separation string for every search engine Integrate find as a "search engine" Desktop searches as search engines Some kind of history like linux terminals have using arrow keys up and down I would like as much of this as options and not something you are forced to use so you can use the search bar as it is now, if you want.	n/a
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 Ability to highlight separate words (with different colors) from phrase being searched Allow Regular Expressions Ability to search on multiple tabs/windows Ability to use one keyword for multiple search engines, each opening in their own tab (e.g. "CD Name" gives me 5 shops in 5 tabs) 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.) Apparently there's some working code at bug report 189039.	- Visual feedback on text/link find bug 298127 bug 328613
Context Menu Right mouse click onto link which points to a RSS feed shows "Add this link to LiveBookmarks"	n/a
General tasks
Search and replace for textareas and editable iframes	n/a

Address bar

Specific features	References
Showing non-latin characters in address bar When nonlatin characters are used in address they are urlencoded. Many sites use them. Wikipedia is an example. But URL shown in an addressbar gets totally unreadable, like this one. Such URL is not an easy thing write down on paper for example. It would be nice if such URLs were shown more like this (the non-latin part could be highlighted or formatted to prevent phishing): http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Вікіпедія	n/a
Make propietary Anchor mode Many pages don't have anchors so linking to Content that is somewhere on the page can be a pain. Make possible custom anchors like this: url#custom(0,555) this would make firefox scroll 0pixel to left and 555pixel down url#custom(h1/5) this make firefox scroll to the 5th H1 element on the page and highlight it decently	n/a
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 Make autocomplete function more like a shell's tab completion in that it matches the longest common substring. See Bug #109758	- 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 How about in a tooltip?
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) bug 216667
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 - such as when one copies a large URL from a text-only shell-based e-mail program - Firefox should automatically strip line breaks and elide what is pasted as a single line URL.	n/a

Bookmarks

Specific features	References
Bookmark management Autocomplete typed URL's by performing a lookup of Bookmarks. 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 Add "Bookmarks" as an option in the Search engine with active list displayed below Search engine window to allow selection. 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. When searching for a bookmark in the Bookmarks sidebar it should be possible to also see the location (bookmark folder) of the bookmark, possibly the url, description, ... That would make it easier to remove duplicate bookmarks. When opening a group of bookmarks in tabs, allow the group of bookmarks to be updated as a unit, replacing the old tab group with the existing set of visible tabs. I need something like Powermarks bookmark manager: add tags to bookmarks. The tags should be extracted from bookmarked pages or manually added. I should be able to search bookmarks by tags. No need of folders , just a one list of bookmarks. I also need online sync. Be able to bookmark entire tab sets. This way a research project of serveral tabs can be bookmarked for future reference. This could work really well with the above suggestion for nested and hireacheal tabbing. After using middle mouse button to open bookmark, bookmark list remains open to allow opening of other bookmarks. Allow multiple keyword placeholders (%s1, %s2, ... instead of just %s) in bookmark URLs. Allow to define charset in bookmark details window in order to allow keyword placeholders (like %s) to work with special characters and umlauts.	- On Tagging bug 195031 bug 261744 bug 220049 bug 326896
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. When dragging a page (link) to a bookmark folder (to bookmark the page using drag-and-drop), if there are too many bookmarks in the folder to show them all at once, the list should scroll up/down when you hover over the little up/down arrows respectively. At the moment you have to first scroll up/down to the location in the list where you want to add the bookmark and then drag it to the folder. If you delete a bookmark (by right-clicking the bookmark and clicking "Delete") it should be nice if the folder stayed opened so you can delete more bookmarks without having to navigate to the same folder each time. The same would be handy for opening a bookmark by right-clicking it and selecting "Open in New Tab" (and maybe for some of the other actions from the context menu too). At the moment, if the name of the bookmark is too long to fit in the box, only a part of the name is shown (ending in "..."). It should be nice if more info about the bookmark would be displayed when hovering over the bookmark: its full name, maybe even the location (url of the page), its description, ... At the moment if two bookmarks have the same name or if the visible part of their names is the same there is no easy way to know the difference between them (apart from going to the bookmark manager or opening both links).	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
Allow easy export/ import of a set of bookmarks, or a subfolder (or sub-tree) of bookmarks. Allow synchronisation of sub-trees between two machines (e.g I want to synchronise my HTML bookmarks, bwteeen home and work, but not my banking or "friends" bookmarks.	- Andy Mabbett
Microsummaries Allow customized update intervals, global enabling/disabling Allow alerts for changes, open automatically in new window/tab, export to xml for RSS reader Half-periodic: Start every day/weekday/week/month (now number of this) and check until microsummary changes all xx minutes	Customizable Microsummaries
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. Store the images and scripts too - I'm happy to spend $94 on a 320GB drive to dedicate to my Mozilla History - it'd save me accumulated days over a year of searching for stuff I've previously seen (coupled with the elsewhere mentioned full-text search). The above text-only suggestion could be a "Only Store Page Text" preference on a full history (and I'm sure would be useful for a subset of users). Anyway, this is going to require a retrieval engine faster than we currently have. 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 document 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 Keep javascript engine state in memory for Ajax-heavy pages. Back button used in Ajax applications should take you back to the page as you last saw it, not as it was first requested from the server. After going back scroll document to the link/position, where user left the page	- 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 Let the user choose which details of a history entry shall be shown for browsing (e.g. show time and date or only date)	Design Composite -d- Thumbnail session history
General tasks
Revisit location bar Better management Search enhancements	n/a
History and tabs
Preserve history when ctrl-clicking to create a new tab. Essentially, let me ctrl-click to create a new tab, switch to that new tab, and then hit the 'back' button.	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 Interpret the meta tag "DownloadOptions" like Internet Explorer does 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 for a limitation of the download speed in the settings 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. Interpret a "Checksum Attribute" in HTML like <a href="file" checksum="md5:46302164391643zfa9faq65f98a"> and compare it with the generated one. 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. Simplify download pop-up. That thing hasn't been updated for ages. Maybe instead of radio buttons we have 3 buttons at the bottom: Save, Open, Cancel. Add a persistent option that allows a file to be automatically renamed if exists instead of "Do you want to replace it?", is not nice to rename a pic and use the mouse with only one hand ;) Enable support for Microsoft's ClickOnce application deployment technology. In the Download window, there shouild be a button to reactivate the main ffox window. It nags me that i can close the main ffox window while a long download occurs, and then cannot reactivate it from the Download manager window 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 bug 292481 bug 258496 bug 245567 bug 230870 bug 258027 bug 298252 bug 270736
Download manager Option to move the download manager into a tab instead of it's own window. 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 its 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. SeaMonkey's Downloadmanager is very clean and easy to use. It looks native, has no strange empty spaces like our current download manager and allows multiple selections and sorting and it has a detailed progress window. I would whish firefox had it, too...	Seamonkey's Downloadmanager
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. Allow uploading of files via Drag and Drop into the Browser window - support a file upload event - important for web-based document management systems, webmail applications (attaching files), software version control systems (eg. websvn) and the like. Allow cut & paste of binary content (eg a screenshots) in HTML files	[Interesting description of drag and drop file uploads for AJAX applications]
Integrate a better download manager, something like DownThemAll!.	n/a

Profiles

Specific features	References
Profile creation/switching Improve profile/user management and switching Make the profile manager accessible through the menu	n/a
Profile privacy Password-protected user profiles Encryption of all stored data and profiles	bug 16489 bug 19184
Profile data Profile export/import Remote profiles hosted on a server and available to multiple installations. Remote profiles able to save sessions too. Remote profiles should perhaps be versionable Remote profiles should support a plug-able backend, LDAP, WebDav, FTP, etc.. Full profile sync, including bookmarks, history, passwords, cookies, add-ons, preferences, etc. Automatic Sync/backup of profile data using same plug-able backends as remote profiles. 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. Platform-independence of remote profiles, share the same profile between installations on different operating systems	RFC 2244 - Application Configuration Access Protocol bug 31732 bug 147344
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. According to [2] Firefox binaries _are_ under the MPL. In my oppinion we gain nothing by showing an EULA, that only annoys users.	End-User License Agreement (EULA) Requirements for Firefox 2
Ability of corporatives integrations Make ability to _FORCE_ profile to be stored in some location like \\server\user_home\firefox (for windows) and /mnt/nfs/users/firefox (linux) (existing abilities for profiles storage are not useful for making corporatives defaults settings for whole groups of users - so it is impossible to switch massively users to Firefox with corporative policy and same setting for all) Make ability to make sets for multiple users at one editing of profile - changing their profiles Ability to make MAIN profile. If firefox configured to use MAIN profile, then it gets policy sets from this profile (so, user can't make "not allowed" changes, until he switch off using of MAIN profile in browser (so, needs ability for administrators to block switch off MAIN profile) ) Example: all default sets getting from MAIN profile and then firefox apply user settings, if this allowed by the MAIN profile for this group of sets)
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? RSS in the URL bar, that's basically becoming a standard between all browsers so let's keep that. Clicking on it brings you to a built-in RSS reader (a la Safari). Left-hand side of the page will have the URL of the RSS feed so you can copy it into your favorite feed reader and all the other feed icons that are available (microformats and etc.) that you can cilck on. Clicking on one of those brings up the requested feed in the internal reader the same way. Also you should be able to select which you want via the View menu for quicker access, ex: View -> hCard, they will only show up under the view menu if available. All feeds and such should appear in the internal feed reader. I'll start a new section about it. 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
Move all MPL code to GPL 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 Automatic resize-to-fit-on-paper (like febooti ieZoom or IE7 can do) and/or resize to x * y sheets of paper (like MS Excel)	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 [3]
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 Option to overwrite CSS print styles with your own print-styles. Quick edit mode for headline, p, ul, li-Tags or choose from a list of preset skins.
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
Integrate printing with the desktop environment Printing in KDE, for instance, does not integrate with the KDE print system. It would be nice to have some of KDE's virtual printers available in Firefox, such as the pdf and postscript file creation print drivers.

Installer

Specific features	References
Fix the Flash Installation on Linux One always winds up having to do a manual install. If Firefox needs root permissions to do the install ask for the root password, don't just fail out.	n/a
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 A non-install edition, which don't saves datas. That could be very useful in puplic places, where you don't have special user-right and no good browser. Or a variant that could be run from an usb stick, that you could use your personalised browser anywhere. n/a
Installation maker wizard A wizard that lets the user create his/her own installation file including the settings and extensions of his/her choice. Options: Make it some kind of auto installer were it is predefined where to install the application and so on. Including the actual application or download the latest version, stable, beta or nightly build, what ever the user chooses This would be very useful if you have several computers you want to install firefox on or if you need to reinstall firefox or some thing like that. Then you could have a ready package/installation that installs firefox (an including version or the latest downloaded) and all the extensions and settings.	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.	bug 303595
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
Tab Exposé Exposé allows a user to quickly locate an open tab without the need to click through many tabs to find a specific target.	Apple - Mac OS X - Exposé Exposé on Wikipedia Shiira Web Browser
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 immensely! 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 Arguments
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
Avoid caching sensitive data for autocomplete Use heuristics to try and avoid caching sensitive data for autocompletion. For example, if something looks like a credit card number or social security number, don't cache it. It's very disconcerting to start typing in your social security number on your bank's Web site, and realize your browser already knows it...
Editing HTML of opened page Be able to edit the HTML source of a web page that is open and then save the changed version to the local hard disc. Currently "View > Page Source" does not allow 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
Revisit default tab strip 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
Surf by IP protection Two new security options, which should be checked by default... [ ] Disallow visiting sites by IP address (IP anywhere in the URL) [ ] Allow local LAN IPs (192.168.x, etc. for getting to your home router, access-point configuration pages, or some corporate intranets) By using these security options, you will quickly kill off all the "lasy phishers" who don't setup or register a domain-name for thier false site.	n/a
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 [4] 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?") Trace window/panel with the history of form submissions and visited URLs, with the option of ask before submit everytime. 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. Please, PLEASE don't forget Intranet and Web Application usage scenarios when considering the Restricted Javascript proposal. There are countless weblications that depend on one or more of the above. If the Javascript restrictions are not (at least) configurable, and possibly defaulted to 'no restrictions' for local or LAN-accessed files, then those applications will break or mis-function. Jabbott 10:32, 16 October 2006 (PDT)	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. Have an option to automatically allow session cookies, even if I asked to ask every time, like in Internet Explorer. The main use of asking every time is to be able to allow permanent cookies only for those sites you trust, and to make every one else to last only for the session. But session cookies will do it anyway, so it's a waste of time having to opt in each one. Cookie-Editor	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
Integrated something like adblock.	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.
Cookie Sandbox The ability to put one or more tabs in a Cookie Sandbox - so that can eg stay logged into gmail in one tab, while having another tab with google searching open with a different set of cookies - so that my gmail is not able to automatically be associated with my search terms.
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 Master Password entry when viewing saved passwords. Redundant master password entry fields: If the user has opted to set a master password for their browser's stored passwords, they have to enter it twice to actually view and show the passwords (once to View Saved Passwords, and then AGAIN to actually Show Passwords of those accounts). This redundancy is unnecessary. on the Password Manager window, the Remove and Remove All buttons are right next to each other, however the Remove All button does NOT have a dialog that asks you if you are sure you want to remove all saved passwords. An accidental click on the Remove All button instantly deletes all of the user's saved accounts and passwords. 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. Just make password management EXACTLY like Opera. People have already mentioned support for multiple users, but what about automatically logging in with one click as well like Opera's wand? And make it work on ANY website like Opera (ignore the code that says "don't even ask to remember this password", people don't like entering their password every time they check their bank balance because their bank set it up that way.. that's what "never for this site" is for).
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
Green Internet Zone Analog to the Zones in the Internet Explore, Firefox should provide a "green zone". This "green zone" should only work over HTTPS and it should come without any trusted sites (no root ca at all). If Firefox is showing a page in the "green zone" he should paint the Adress bar green (or something similar). A user should manually add .cer Files of sites he trusts. Obtaining a .cer File should be the responsibility of a user. Purpose of such a zone: A user can always see if he does his homebanking (or other critical things) over exactly that site he wants to. This feature would be nice as well, if it comes with mltiple empty zones, so a user could use it for different sites.

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 Add configuration for PKI to use eToken or similar devices for SSO or WSO 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 Aladdin eToken (SSO / WSO)
Support for Windows users with restricted accounts sharing a common inbox Ability to access the same inbox (and other folders) from more than one windows user account This maybe possible today, but it is not evident for beginners how to set up Firefox accordingly.
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 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 There should be 2 parts to the internal RSS reader: a sidebar on the left and the main content area. Sidebar: Include the URL of the feed so it can be copied easily to the user's favorite RSS reader (the URL bar should also display the feed URL) Buttons for other available feeds such as an hCard feed, OPML feed, or whatever Calendar so you can select a day to see all items on that day Some way of selecting a date range that's not a blatant rip-off of Safari? Content: Completely extendable: anyone can add their own way of rendering XML as simply as adding a search engine to the search box. That way Firefox can easily keep up with newer Microformats and such. Themeable List view and extended view, similar to Google Reader Allow user to choose between loading the item Description or the actual URL in the content pane.	- On Web Feeds - TechCrunch article about IE7 - Google Reader
General tasks
n/a	n/a

Microformat Handling

Specific features	References
Microformat Detection Detect micro-formated content or implicit/latent micro-formats such as FedEx tracking numbers, AIM screen names, etc. The detectors themselves could be plug-able, so that users may replace the default detectors or add new detectors for specific content types. Thus, research, innovation, and communities could form around creating the highest quality and most accurate content detectors.
Microformat Actions Allow users to easily take action on detected data elements. For example, contextual menu actions for hCards could include "add to address book," "email contact," "dial number with Skype," etc. Additionally, services such as LinkedIn or Plaxo could develop their own contextual menu add-ons to allow users to do things like add detected hCards to their accounts. Microformat actions could be plug-able so that users may replace the default actions or add new actions for specific content types. An open and extensible system would allow users to associate content types to their choice of desktop applications or online services, similar to how Firefox 2 handles feeds.
Microformat Collection and Storage Once data elements are detected, they could then be normalized to a universal schema and added to a local data store. User preferences or rules engines for web content could control how information is collected and saved. For example, a rule could allow a user to do things like save detected hCards found within a particular domain, etc. Distinctions would need to be made between data that is cached or explicitly saved. Additionally, metadata such as timestamp, source, subject, annotations, tags, user context, etc. could also be captured, perhaps within some type of metadata index. Thus, the utility and value of collected data increases as information assets increase over time.
Microformat Visualization Provide mechanisms to search, browse, and visualize micro-formated content that has been cached or saved, similar to history and bookmarks. Firefox could ship with a set of default views, but developers could also create add-on views that range from simple data look-ups to data mining and analysis capabilities. By treating data elements as simple building blocks, visualizations could occur in ways the original content providers didn't expect. Similar to how data service providers (Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, Google) are enabling server-side data mash-ups through defined APIs, a platform for microformat visualizations could allow for client-side mash-ups from the local data store.	- Piggy Bank
Microformat Sharing Once data elements have been found within a view, there should be an easy way to share data with others. Since email is the most ubiquitous, scalable, and widespread communications vehicle in use, why not leverage this as an initial sharing platform? For example, a user could select individual data elements or an entire result set within a view, input an email address (perhaps from the hCard store!), and simply click a send button.
Microformat Backup and Synchronization Provide mechanisms to back-up the local data store (perhaps only information that is explicitly saved), or sync these data stores across Firefox installations. Firefox could also interface with existing services such as .mac, Windows Live, Google Browser Sync, etc.
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 - Mute Functionality - Audio Controls
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. Ability to save text boxes (See defunct Scribe extension) Ability to enter a <tab> by some common short key	- Scribe
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. Make shortcut keys and mouse scollwheel work when the cursor hovers over a plugin area on Linux - this is an extremely irritating long-standing bug (no. 78414)	- nspluginwrapper - See bug 156493 - "Browser should tolerate plug-in (plugin) malfunctions, like with a separate (own) process" - See bug 78414 - "Application shortcut keys (keyboard commands such as f11, ctrl+t, ctrl+r) fail to operate when plug-in (flash, acrobat, quicktime) has focus"
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. Provide a centralized UI for dynamically charting how much CPU and memory is used by each tab. As many tabs being opened, it gets hard for none script avid users to hunt down wich tab is causing firefox to drain up system resource. With a centralized UI, every user would be able to find out which tab/site is causing resource drainage	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

Remote Control

Specific features	References
Link navigation using arrow keys Using shift+arrowKey, the selection "hovers" to the nearest link in that direction With this feature remote controls can be configured to navigate pages Same as Opera feature	n/a
Support for Red/Green/Yellow/Blue remote control buttons The ability to configure keyboard shortcuts to select HTML elements that have the accesskey attribute in the format: accesskey="{red}" | accesskey="{green}" | accesskey="{yellow}" | accesskey="{blue}" e.g. configure Alt-F1 to select the element with accesskey="{red}", Alt-F2 selects element with accesskey="{green}" etc With this feature the RGYB buttons of remote controls can be configured to select links This would make Firefox compatible with the Netgem iPlayer facility	n/a

Browser Interaction

Scripting

Browser Automation	References
Scripting Implement a possibility to record short macros/scripts in order to automate task done on homepages, e.g. login and print a specific table, etc.	http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
Patching display Let the user configure the display of their page and 'patch' them. For exemple, change some image, text disposition or even the whole design of the page using regular expression. (Maybe witch a WYGIWYS editor-like to be more user friendly ?) (I used a while ago an adblock proxy who do that, but it's really slow, whith something directly coded in firefox, this will be great ! No more forum witch crap animated smilets if we can change them on client side) I think about a way that users can themselfs modify a whole page, and submit their 'patchs' to a centralized server. When an other user navigate on the page, he can use a button on the navigation page to switch beetwin the different patchs submited by other people and vote for them. So for one site, we will probably had a lot of version : Ad-free, Alternative design ... (Sorry for my bad english, if you can reformulate my proposition more clearly, don't hesitate)

ActiveX

ActiveX controls	References
ActiveX Implement full ActiveX support

Web services integration

Web mail integration

References

Following Firefox 2 support for online web feed readers, it could be extended to web mail services like Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail at least. Users should be able to select one or more web mail providers and set a default or just keep the default stand alone email client. The idea is not to develop a complete email client but to provide minimum integration: New mail notification through an alert a la "Downloads complete" mailto: handling File/Send link... overlay More providers can be added with preferences for compose URL and new mail XPath

Explorer files integrated

FILES EXPLORER	References
Firefox 3.0 should integrate a files explorer of your system, by having the sames carasteristics: Tab, mouse gestures, bookmarks. etc.

Opening Links

Link Activation	References
Link Activation Allow popup windows (ones that don't currently work in tabs) to appear in tabs. Add option to pre-process Javascript (and Flash?) links - enable MMB/CTRL-click to open these in new tab, by tracking the target before obeying the command 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. Boss key, hot key combo that minimizes and removes from task bar, same combination brings it back. if a link links to an image an preview of that image after 1 second of hovering over that link would be nice. The picture should have some kind of [X] to close it (or clicking somewhere else) and a resizer of that preview image would be nice too. if I mark a text which contains a URL that does is not clickable it would be nice to have a right click option to open that link (marked text need to be parsed. if a collection of links is in that marked text a chooser would be nice (seen in opera) + "open all links in tabs" would be nice too an option to parse all links in a website for dead ends. example: software collection of a 5 month old website. with an option to check (behind the scenes) all links for working results would be nice. If a link returns a "not found" or so, FF could darken that link (or alter an tiny image in front of the link - sad skull - or so. When downloading a pdf (non HTML file) with target="othertarget" in link check mime type first before opening another (empty) tab and download / process the file directly. An integrated prefetching mechanism (use free bandwith to load in background all the static pages linked from the page) - similar to Fasterfox plugin. After i click Shift + click of link i open a link in other window. Now Gecko focuses a loaded window after loading but it's very bad! I suggest to do not focus loaded windows after a loading page through "Shit + click of link". It puts off from browsing :(
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. Shift-click, alt-click or whatever on any graphical object (animated gif, flash etc.) hides the object Opera has a nifty feature with it's Mouse Gestures when you visit an Apache Directory Index or a Gallery site, and a few other sites. When you are on the index, you can just "go forward" in an imaginary history and it will start with the first link. Continuing going forward, will result in the second link, third link, etc... And when you've seen them all - you're back at the Index page.
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.	See bug 55696
Tab Interaction	References
Tab Refresh Allow to refresh Tabs automatically by a counter

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. Duplicates Ctrl-Home / Ctrl-End functionality. Would an extra icon to do this be useful?

Uploading Files

Browser Automation	References
Auto-zip multiple files in upload dialog Implement multiple file selections in the upload dialog that automatically generates a archive (.zip) for easy transmissions of many files. After selecting multiple files a dialog shall appear that asks for the file name of the archive (to be transmitted, auto-naming already included) and confirms the archive type (.zip/.tar.gz/whatsoever)	n/a
Support drag and drop files from OS into a text box / text area Dragging a file icon from an OS file browser window should drop the name of the file in the target text box. Main use would be for uploading files, but it can be convenient for any other case when a file name and path must be used. It would be a must-have for web-based Document Management Systems, like eGroupWare's DMS.	See bug 50660 and bug 347178 A comment on Slashdot that gives a nice example of the problem

Dynamic Font Support

Dynamic font (embedding font into web page)	References
Dynamic font support dynamic font such as prf, eot or svg	this blog

Compatibility

Web standards compatibility

Specific features	References
WPF/XBAP Support I know that this is going to be a hot-button topic, but WPF and XBAP is coming whether we like it or not. It would be sad if cool WPF/XBAP applications were only available on IE.	Introducing Windows Presentation Foundation
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 or TinySVG 1.2	W3C SVG1.1
Content-editable Add support for content-editable	tinysvg w3c
CSS Make "display: inline-block" work correctly Support text-shadow (like Konqueror/Safari does) Support printing-related properties such as page-break-before and page-break-after	Bug 9458 (inline-block) Bug 24000 (page-break) Bug 10713 (text-shadow)
XForms XForms supported and built-in.	Bug 326372
XHTML 2.0 Add support for current XHTML 2.0 draft	Bug 161463, XHTML2 Working Draft
new DNS like system Having a mapping between domain names (evt. as a RegEx) and IP. The idea is to be able to edit site that don't have a DNS entry, when we develop a new version that is not on the "real" site. It's like to change this file: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts but included in firefox.	n/a
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) Support for embedded managed code objects (ie .NET Windows Forms or platform independant MONO assemblies)	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% compatible (IE has an exchuse but I'm not going to bash companies here :) What's wrong with aiming for full CSS3 support? This is FF 3.0 we're talking about. Surely CSS 2.1 support is a given, and 3.0 is achievable in the timescale we're talking about.	Browser standard comparison
iCab-Smiley analogue This nice feature will promote standard-compliancy of the web.	iCab wikipedia page
MHT / MHTML Support Saveing / Reading of MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML	RFC 2557 BUG 18764 BUG 40873
SMIL support	REC SMIL 2.0
XInclude Support Including XML files or fragments.	Bug 201754 Bug 232378 XInclude 1.0
Library Compatibility
KDE compatibility A Qt based firefox to remove dependencies on GTK.	n/a
General tasks
Improve overall standards support	n/a
Improve interoperability of XML languages HTML and MathML in SVG foreignObject elements SMIL to animate web pages interface for plugins to handle mixed XML languages. Final goal: FF + plugins should be able to handle a SMIL + XHTML + MusicML + SVG + ... document	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) When a third party plug-in is installed (eg. for Windows codecs), Firefox should spoof websites that return a "get plug-in" message so that it fools the website into thinking the official plug-in is installed. This way you will not keep getting the "get the plug-in" redirect message even when Mplayer with the necessary Windows Media codecs is already installed. If no plug-in is installed, Firefox should redirect to a Firefox plug-in site which will lead the user to the correct plug-in, rather than waste time on a website which only has Windows or IE plug-ins.	n/a
FTP Support FTP like IE so users will be able to upload files to their servers.	See bug 208385
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 Support Askemos compliant replication3 Ogg4 WMV Open Document Format XBEL SVG via img tag JPEG2000 ANG MNG JNG DJVU 5 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 & Askemos 4 Firefox Ogg Support 5 Djvu support library
Flash
When a Flash media file is loaded, CTRL+T (open new tab) does not work. Flash must be stealing the keystroke.	See bug 78414

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). Render embedded buttons with native Aqua widget	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.
Improving bidi text editing. Sometimes it crashes in textarea, which is very annoying in wikis (suppose you're writing an article for wikipedia).	bug#315748

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.	n/a
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?)	You can actually make a 'next' link on a page using the <link>-element.. maybe firefox support for all navigation-related "rel"-attributs in <link> would make more sense here

Developer-facing elements

Developer-facing UI

Specific features	References
Developer tools Some easy and transparent way say a button or a checkbox in options to toggle development state of the browser. In this state mainly all caching is turned off and errors in formatting and scripts are somehow highlighted.	n/a
Developer tools Interface, to call JavaScript functions from XSLT (You can take a look at msxsl:script)	n/a
DOM inspector make the DOM Inspector an add-on, to save complete reinstallation for those who missed it during setup. If Flock can do it, surely FF can improved functionality: automatcially refreshes when the page is refreshed ability to edit attributes, CSS properties, etc and see live results Some way to get feedback on XMLHttpRequest dispatches (which would otherwise be invisible)	n/a
Current Add-ons such as Live HTTPHeaders, Web developer toolbar, Firebug to remain as add-ons, NOT bloating the core browser as previously proposed	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
DesignMode - MIDAS Get all the bugs ironed out of the current Design Mode implementation. FireFox / Mozilla and IE are about neck and neck with features vs. issues and bugs. Haven't tried Opera's solution yet. It would be a great opportunity to really shine in this area. Extend DesignMode, make it something really usefull.	http://www.mozilla.org/editor/midasdemo/
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. allow extensions to expose individual buttons instead of toolbars, and allow buttons to be placed using "Customize Toolbar". This would allow individual features from different extensions (I.E. Google PageRank and Web Developer toolbar cache disabling) to be used without using the entire toolbar. allow extensions access to content displayed by plugins. For example, I'd like to be able to mark up PDF files with the ScrapBook extension. 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). Javascript Immediate Window Add an Immediate Window to the Javascript Console (similar to the immediate window in Microsoft Visual Studio), that will allow you to dynamically view and change all javascript variables currently dimensioned on the page. Possibly a list of functions and/or methods that you can double-click to execute (and if it returns a value, it could present it in a messagebox or tab or something...) Also, if you could inject html and/or javascript method/functions into the page, it could be very useful for obvious debugging purposes. Maybe a right-click + "Insert HTML here" contextual menu item.
Netscape Plugins There should be a possibility to control the volume of Plugins such as flash or java. There are few things that are more annying than flash animations that make noises which you don't want them to make.
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
JavaScript Frame Sandbox Have a way to mark the security level of a frame, for example - say you're writing a web app and you have a frame where you need to display a user uploaded web page - it would be great if you could prevent that frame from accessing it's parent, the cookie, etc. This would make it a lot easier to write a secure web app. AFAIK, the only way to do this is to give that frame a different subdomain - not always a convenient thing to do. Not sure exactly how to accomplish this while sticking to html standards ... any ideas?
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

Specific features	References
Make it possible to have firefox started as a new process with a switch (firefox.exe -np) to be able to have two instances running in case you are testing something that crashes the browser often while you are in some deep and nested back-end at the same time. it is very annoying that when it crashes all is lost. Yes - i could use another browser for the back-end stuff but why would i?	Like you can have multiple instances of IE running
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.	n/a
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.	n/a
Integrate a FF Preloader into the program. Currently the Preloader for Firefox 1.0 doesn't work for 2.0. A preloader option within FF that allows the user to choose whether to preload certain parts of FF could improve the boot time dramatically.	n/a
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.	n/a
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.	n/a
Hardware accelerated graphics (perhaps use the Vista/Mac OS X/AIXGL/XGL engines to do the acceleration for us)	n/a
Make the javascript engine less cpu hungry.	n/a
Do more caching of the DOM. E.g. stacking several PNG-Images with alpha channel slows down the browser dramatically, even for unrelated DOM changes.	n/a
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.	n/a
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.	n/a
Include a language-neutral VM for a back-end for javascript. The benefits are quite significant, and include: JIT compling, with caches of compiled code (done when the VM is not busy); a better sandboxing model for compile-time overruns and exception handling; better threading model for managing multiple windows and tabs; language-neutral interface for extending or replacing the runtime language (i.e. changing it from something like "javascript-1.7" to "moz-cli-1.0", so that languages like Ruby and Python could be compiled into the cli); easier to add libraries of code to the base distribution or from external sources (code libraries that people could download to their computers and use for certain sites); the introduction of a unified object/exception/type model. Perhaps less important reasons include: businesses might be a little happier because their code wouldn't be completely "transparent" as it travels across the net if it's possible to send it already compiled to a person's computer; it might make it possible to add extensions, like signed code or an abstract threading model.	n/a
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.	n/a
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.	n/a
Remove memory leaks (e.g. try using Firefox on the Typo3 Backend - you'll have to restart FF about once per hour, if you seriously use it)	n/a
Make Firefox more crash resistant. I don't really know if it is the FF core which causes the crashes or one of the Extensions I run. Additional idea: Let Extensions run in a sandbox so they can't crash Firefox any more. Maybe that sandbox could also guard against unsafe Extensions which may try to compromise your computer.	n/a
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.	n/a
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.	n/a

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
firefox mini/mobile cellphone browser using JAVA(like opera mini), supporting XUL and extensions.	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

Long term target

On a long term basis Mozilla has come to a cross-road. The current XUL technology can't be used on a PAD/Smart phone nor on an OLPC. Yet there's a need for such a browser/mailer and it's just a matter of time somebody starts such a project. But I'm sure if such a browser/mailer gets built, it will be ported to the ordinary desktops slowly starting to replace Mozilla. And since switching technologies isn't a task done in a few weeks this subject has to be taken care of ASAP.

IMO it's important for Mozilla to start a task force now to think about the long term future. The PDA/Smart phones are already on the market almost exclusively using IE/Outlook and the OLPC and other embedded devices is just on the brink. So the pressure of this task, to prevent Mozilla from lagging behind again, is imminent.

Task force about technologies

Specific features	References
Evaluating the future of XUL It's essential to first evaluate XUL in the light of new requirements, especially about new devices ranging from the OLPC to embedded devices.	n/a
Evaluating evaluating possible alternatives Alternatives should be based on the cornerstone "runs anywhere". Possible is IMO only wxWidgets yet others like Java or .Net/Mono should be rated against XUL as well.	n/a

More vs. Less

Well it seems like we could devide the users wishes into two overall categories: While the ones can�t get enough features, want more of them and through that keep pushing new technologies and conveniences for the user, the other fraction just want a quick and stable browser, supporting all the W3 standards.

I belong the other category, I want a quick and stable browser with a lot of Extensions and at least 5 distinct good looking skins. Still, I've got to admit, that without the more-and-more fraction, I still would not use the Mouse Gestures. So on the one hand, I am by all means interessted in the ideas of the other users, on the other side, I got to admit that I am _saturated_. The new features in version 2.0, I do not want them. Honestly. Yeah. That's it. So, unlike most of the users who posted here, I simply do not have any _new_ ideas thus I would prefer to vote uppon the most wanted features. [[5]]

Instead, you could focus on Sunbird. And of course some of the more interessting extension could some help to improve faster. I do not want to tell anybody how to spent his or her time, but if I am asked, this is my answer.

Specific features

References

Packaging Distribute a single, lightweight feature-wise version of Firefox WITH a set of Mozilla Firefox developed and branded extensions in a specific extension pack (se the matching suggestion above). With this solution you will have: A Firefox "Core" with just essential features (based upon XULRunner...) A Firefox "More" with many features, released WITH Firefox as Extensions, by the Mozilla Firefox development team, and updated in sync with Firefox "Core". Marketing wise, it could be like now a SINGLE installer, with an optional flag to be turned off during install. Still, after the setup, you could remove the extensions and you'll be "light" again.

n/a

I fully support the idea of a minimal firefox with official extensions from the devs and unofficial extensions from the communitiy. Firefox is getting too big. The first time I used Firefox (around 0.5 ?), I used it, because it was small and fast! Now it just takes too long to load. This also helps the core team to do it's core stuff, and the extensions people to work on thier extensions separatly. If they want to update a feature or remove some bug, only the new extension has to be upgraded and not the full Firefox package. Official extensions would also allow the devs to adopt community extensions, if they are deemed usefull for (nearly) everyone, and add them to the offical Firefox extensions.

---

How about a extension 'mode' pack or something? This could be a bunch of plugins grouped under a certain name like 'Standard','Ultra Fast','WebDeveloper','Kiosk' etc... and then have a simple drop down where one could select the 'mode' and only plugins for that mode would be loaded. This way we get the fast version, and the features packed versions for those who want it (and we can easily switch). Ofcourse let the user modify the mode pack if they wish, but this can be hidden somewhere so beginners don't stumble upon it by mistake and mess things up.

It really is not a 'fast mode' vs 'feature packed mode' only, as it depends very much on what features a user wants and what they are doing at the time. By creating a couple of common usage mode packs it will make it easy to customize without having to individually download and install each plugin (though one could still do this). Maybe this is what a 'profile' is all about, but then again I still like to share bookmarks no matter how I'm browsing.

I for one sometimes like the browser to be very fast, at other times I prefer all the web developer options, and at other times when browsing for personal use I'd like other plugins loaded.

This way the core can stay small but first time users still get the cool behaviours they like without having to understand this whole plugin install business.(so a standard download and a core download without the mode packs for example)

The use case I see is that first time users will want all the whiz bang toys to atleast match other browsers, and don't want to go through and figure out what extensions are and how to install, they just want to click go and off they go. Experienced users on the other hand may want other features or a slimmed down feature set. I think this approach solves both issues.

---

I love the idea of official extensions! And I'd definately like the ability to strip down firefox to the core. This method of development and packageing gets my vote!

Perhaps the installer could be a bit more than just Core & More. You could for example have a check box for extra features, and another for web development tools. Each check box could be expanded to get individual extensions like no-script.

And of course the defaults will be well chosen

fast & slim - Quo vadis, FF

---

The more functionality you add, the more words and submenus have to be created. And both is confusing for beginners and older folks. What is the difference between words, that seem to mean the same thing at first glance ? Do I have to understand "all these new words" like "javascript", "PlugIn" ? Keep in mind, not all of the users are like the Techies who develop !

What the hell is the difference between an "extension" or a "plugin" ? What do I have to search for, to find the function I need ?

And if I click on a menu iten, just hoping it will do what it says, what do I have to select, if a submenu opens up ???

These are two examples for problems for a "once a while" user. So please keep it simple and easy. Let all the folks who like add extensions and other stuff.

Or offer a lean, easy to understand firefox (as it was in the first days, and these were woderful days, thanks for the "just-browse" browsers :-)).

Or offer an easy to use selection whilst installation saying "I don't understand all that technical stuff and don't want so use special functions" and set defaults and that's it !

Firefox already has all the necessary stuff. There must always be an easy way for "lightweight-users" to use firefox without getting confused about words, large submenus or confusing questions.

The more functions, the more words, the more confusion. Please, always offer an easy way for the non-techie user ... !

---

I agree that a much smaller (memory) footprint is needed (even on desktop systems), and love the extension pack idea. I'd like to also strongly suggest looking at the reason for the memory size with the current feature set - 225 MB with just 3 tabs open just seems like too much.

My suggestions for top priorities - before ANY new feature(s) (just my $ .02, for what it's worth): 1) Ensure that extensions don't break on each release, 2) MUCH slimmer footprint - 225 MB with 3 tabs is too much IMHO.

1) Fix the extension compatibility scheme. I do understand the intent of the existing system, and the responsibly of extension developers in it, however it simply isn't working well. A better solution (or use of the existing solution) is needed. As evidence, I offer the flurry of user problems/activity after every release when many if not the majority of the extensions no longer work.

2) A MUCH slimmer footprint - with today's basic features. 225 MB with just 3 tabs open is simply too much imho.

These are by FAR the top priorities in my mind, above and before any additional features. Without these being resolved, FF's growth will likely stall/regress (imho of course :-).

After that,

3) The ability for each user to create, save, install, and manage "feature (extension) sets".

--- The subject of More vs. Less is quite interesting. A good starting point might be to ask "what recent features are being used?". In that vein, maybe one of the "pre-release" versions could be "instrumented" to count the features used and (with the permission of the user, of course) report back those. Another way might be to do a web crawl, and see what features are used by various "popular" web sites. As with ANY feature set, one should realize that "growing featureism" is a very slippery slope. I suspect that many web users would be content with the features of an older browser (say back to 1999) to do their work. Remember that each added "feature" involves code, and with any new code comes both bugs and vulnerabilities. The user community wants neither.

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

Rich Internet Applications

There is an opportunity here to lead the way in supporting the growing number of DHTML- and Ajax-heavy applications and to provide the browser support needed to eliminate some of the drawbacks of these apps. In all cases a security model will be necessary, probably including some automated safeguards and some user confirmations.

Specific features	References
Local filesystem access Allow pages to request access to the local filesystem or some subset thereof (for example, a user's home directory, desktop, or docs folder) for reading and/or writing.	n/a
Access to global UI elements (menubar, taskbar, panels...) Allow a page to request access to major OS-level global UI elements like a first-class application. Such elements include the Mac menubar, Windows taskbar, GNOME/KDE panels, Mac Dock, etc. Some are more important than others; for example, being able to write menus to the global menubar is far more important on the Mac platform than Dock access. However, Dock access on the Mac is probably more important than taskbar access on Windows because Windows will already have an entry for each browser window (though being able to define that window's icon would be nice so users can distinguish between "regular" browser windows and in-browser apps).	n/a
Enhanced clipboard integration Provide APIs to allow non-text apps to manipulate the system clipboard/pasteboard more.	n/a
More robust file uploads Provide single- and multi-select access to standard OS Open dialogs for opening/uploading files. Include an upload manager for asynchronous uploads. Include functionality to resume interrupted uploads. For apps that store data, combine with local filesystem access to allow easy setup of sites that keep local and remote data seamlessly synchronized.	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
Enabeling new Top-Level-Domains on browser basis Top-Level-Domains for regions, cities and others Top-Level-Domains with IDN characters	New Top-Level-Domains
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".	n/a
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!).	n/a
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.	n/a
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!	n/a
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.)	n/a
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.	n/a
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.)	n/a
I think the possibility to setup and use a socket connection for client-server communications would be a great improvement for Firefox to use it in Web2.0 / intranet-webapplications. I know it's already 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 flash player 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.	n/a
HTTP Sniffer. Have a HTTP Sniffer, where you see what exactly is transmitted, which POST / GET parameter, cookies, loading times etc. Something like httpwatch, see link. That's why I have to start IE in regular intverals.	http://www.httpwatch.com/ http://tamperdata.mozdev.org/
Security I see many attacks upcoming, which manipulate the DOM-tree inside the browser, altering transactions in banking-systems a.s.o. What i wish for Firefox is, to have ONLY signed extensions! I want a default block of all extensions to manipulate SSL-protected sites. This security-feature will be a boost for the usage of Firefox, because all banks will promote FF.
Flexible table element selection and copy for example, select and copy a column (or columns) from a html table

• Firefox Features - MZForums
• Gecko 1.9 Feature List