Firefox Accepting Feature Suggestions for Version 3

Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article over at Ars Technica discussing the Firefox team's call for feature suggestions. Version 3 of the software is already in the works, and the team members are looking to the community for ideas on where to go next. From the article: "The wish list is long indeed, and it provides an insight into the desires of the browser community, and a look at the open source development process. While closed-source projects often ask their user community for feedback on requested features, the process is not usually open to the public. For Firefox 3, anyone can both suggest new features and comment on other people's suggestions. The feature requests are divided into categories, such as browser customization, privacy features, security, history, download manager, and other areas. There are suggestions for features found in other competing browsers, such Safari, IE 7 beta, and Opera. IE7 seemed to be featured most prominently, with requests for "low-rights mode," as well as more cosmetic features like skins that mimic Microsoft's browser."

OS Logo?

An open source logo? :-) *duck* Au revoir, monsieur karma

Re:OS Logo?

Hello to the person who modded this down! (As overrated no less.)

The above comment is funny. In fact, it's geek humour. This being slashdot we like:

Geek humour.
Corrections to the article.
Massivly technical explanations on related subjects that enlighten us.

Things we do not like:

Moderators who are too used to Digg and mod down anything they personally don't like, even if it's factually correct and/or relevant and/or insightful humour, having the gall to cancel out the mod points of someone who, despite only getting given points every few months, still thought the comment was funny enough to mod up.

May I direct your attention to the setting which allows you to apply a penalty of -lots'o'points to anything marked as "funny" so that you personally never see anything entertaining again.

Thank you for your attention. That is all.

Re:OS Logo?

It's a reference to the trouble Debian are having with Mozilla (shall we call it the IceWeasel debacle [wikipedia.org]?) - Debian only includes Free[tm] packages and files in their distribution, the Firefox logo isn't Free. So Debian created their own logo for firefox, and use that instead. But Mozilla don't like that, and asked them to either use the firefox logo or stop calling it firefox

Re:OS Logo?

shall we call it the IceWeasel debacle?

It's Weaselgate, damnit.

Firefox needs some work on the popup front.

"How about having system prompts popping up in tha status bar instead of popup. And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top."

In keeping with my request to allow for intuitive suppression of the nasty ""do you want to remember password for this site?" popups, they should put an option on the system prompts that you can click to make them go to the status bar from then on: "Do you want future such popups on the status bar instead?"

I love how Firefox nicely diminishes popups that come from intentional design of web programmers, but the way Firefox itself throws annoying hard-to-get rid of popups needs some work.

Re:status line

And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top.

View -> Toolbars -> Customize... -> drag "bookmarks" icon to your menu bar at the top.

Keep it simple ...

Make it fast, compliant and secure. Leave everything else to extensions.

Re:Keep it simple ...

And, as an addendum to that, make extensions run in some sort of "protected memory" area so they can't take the browser down with them. If that's not possible at least make instances of the browser run seperately so a crash doesn't take down the whole lot.

Re:Keep it simple ...

Are you proposing loading up a new instance of Firefox for every open window? I regularly use both windows AND tabs, and it's not uncommon for me to have 4-5 windows open (1 window = 1 research subject, and windows have many tabs in them all relating to the same subject). Your proposal would quadruple the memory requirements on Firefox for my system.

If such a feature is included, I would like to be able to turn it off. My firefox very, very rarely crashes (once every few *months* Java or Flash bring it down). If you're having crashing problems, you should start up a new profile and re-install your extensions one by one to see which one is causing you the grief.

Re:Keep it simple ...

Good thinking. Some people agree with you, adding this to the wiki:

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.

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.

Re:Keep it simple ...

Actually, I think that firefox's reliance on extensions is rapidly becoming a problem. For so many features I'm told to "get a plugin", which often isn't being maintained to the same high standard as the rest of the browser.

I'm happy for many features to be in extensions and a lean, mean version to be provided for those who want it. I'd also like a "bloated" browser as well, full of plugins that are considered useful, carefully maintained, and also checked to make sure they all work well together.

Re:Keep it simple ...

On the contrary, include more things by default. Hunting down extensions for every little bit of functionalty is a pain in the arse.

Re:Keep it simple ...

By default, build in functionality to hunt down every little extension that covers all that extra functionality.

Re:Keep it simple ...

By default, build in functionality to hunt down every little extension that covers all that extra functionality.

By default, include the functionality... as extensions. That way you can disable or uninstall a feature you don't want. Maybe the installer (in Custom mode) could even ask which of these features you want installed initially.

Re:Keep it simple ...

Make it fast, compliant and secure. Offer two versions for download:
- Barebones, browser only, users must install their own extensions. Most geeks will want this one.
- Some common and supported extensions preinstalled to support features included in competing browsers. Most people will want this one.

Re:Keep it simple ...

The solution seems simple to me. Move all the extra features to extensions, bundle those extensions with the browser, and turn them on in a "default" installation. Won't confuse your average user and would make the lean-and-meaners happy. Those of us with a bit more knowledge can disable the extensions we don't use, providing a benefit for people like me (and I suspect most others) who don't like to whine about Firefox bloat, but still think no more bloat than necessary is a good idea.

Stability.

With extensions, Firefox does pretty much anything that anyone could want in a browser. I'd like only two things from Firefox 3:

1. More stability and less memory usage. On both Windows and OS X, Firefox can swallow all your system resources if you leave it running long enough and do enough browsing. On my machines, the program also crashes, infrequently but regularly, most often when a page it's loading is corrupted by a network error. Spend the effort on finding memory leaks and bugs instead of adding gewgaws.

2. Without changing the functionality of the interface or its basic elements, make it prettier. The buttons look big, garish, and way too colorful; look at Safari for one example of a better way. (I use a skin to make my Firefox installs look much like Safari, but I think a more professional/more beautiful interface could inspire more people to switch.)

supress password popups with one click.

All I want is a simple option on the "Do you want to remember passwords for this site?" popups that says "no, and never ask EVER for ANY site". The only way to get rid of these worthless annoyances is some obscure setting buried in a menu. While it would be even better not to ever have been asked this in the first place, an option to get rid of all of these on the popup should not be too much to ask for. Other than that, no complaints. Nice clean UI, especially compared to IE7 !!!

Re:supress password popups with one click.

Did you file a bug?

I doubt they will do this though. The password popup window already contains too many buttons: [Yes], [No] and [Never for this site]. End-users are already instantly paralyzed when they see a window with three buttons, like a deer in the headlights of an onrushing car. Adding a fourth button will make their brains melt out of their ears. :)

More focus on easy to use security will be nice

Especially integration with things like GPG for automatically authenticating posts in web forms and web mail. Has anyone found an extension to do that? There's a encryption plugin for gmail I believe but no general extension for all web forms.

It could seriously kick off use of GPG amongst the non-geeks for authentication (mostly) and encryption (past a critical mass). I don't believe it would be that difficult to explain to normal IT literate (ie, already uses Firefox or Opera) the benefit of signatures in evading blame and establishing trust.

Semi-on-topic, on the security front Firefox 2 fixes [revis.co.uk] the bug with tab icon handling that allows fingerprinting of Firefox 1.5 [revis.co.uk] by tracking isolated .ico file requests.

Webmail?

Check out Freenigma [freenigma.com].

No need to thank me, it was a Slashdot post that tipped me off. ;-)

History: When I closed a window

I'd like to be able to browse my history by when I closed, rather than opened, a page.

I can't count the number of times I've closed a tab and then wanted it back later in the day, but been unable to find the url because I've actually had it open on my desktop for several days (so it's not in yesterday's history.) Being able to sort history by "close time" as well as "open time" would be really useful.

Maybe this could be a firefox extention. Hmm.

Why are we even bothering...

...now that we can run IE6 on Linux? [tatanka.com.br]

It even supports active X! Active X! None of the true internet experience will be lost to you now.

Less = More

Firefox is a great browser - the extensions and skins available let me make it work exactly like I want it to.

They're feeling the heat from IE7, and loaded v2 up with many of the features I already had using some extensions. But not everyone wants the extras...

So I say on to FF devs:

Less equals more, remove the bloat and bring back our lightweight, secure browser and let us customize it how we want it to be.

my suggestions

-- better Gnome desktop integration (currently, Firefox feels like it is trying to force Windows conventions down Linux users' throats), including better support for cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop of HTML, images, and other content

-- figure out some way of supporting drag-and-drop file uploads better

-- better editors for textareas (maybe support Mozex officially and find some way of letting users embed their favorite editors right in the page)

-- integrate better with Thunderbird and other Mozilla applications

-- replace the cumbersome XPCOM programming model (IDL compiler and all that) with something that's more like the Objective C object model and runtime

An automatic porn suggester

much like what Pandora did for music, I want firefox to do for porn. If I allow it, it can read the porn sites I frequent and suggest new sites that I might enjoy.

Per site Shockwave Flash disabling!!!

Preferrably with control on the main panel to disable those sites with annoying float over ads that obstruct the view of the article you are trying to read. This is important since the Shockwave Flash positions itself as a mechanism for advertizers to bypass browser controls. Shockwave needs to be seriously slapped down.

Per-plugin memory accounting

Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.

Different password handling

Number one on my list:

Wait until the password has been accepted before offering to save it.

Other than that. Slim it down to the bare minimum and let people customize it with extensions.

4 things

1. A fix for this javascript DoS attack:
for(;;) alert("Please restart your browser.");

2. Make hotkeys work everywhere, all the time. (You know when you hit CTRL+L and nothing happens)

3. Make it possible to open javascript links in new tabs.

4. Support for soft hypens [unicode.org].

Re:4 things

A fix for this javascript DoS attack:
for(;;) alert("Please restart your browser.");

What would be nice is to have those pesky dialogs part of the window they belong to, in their own little UI. So they don't block me from changing anything in the address bar, looking at other tabs etc.

Moving forward, not standing still

OK, given that IE7 will be here soon, Firefox needs to move forward substantially to maintain its interest for the general public, so here's my list:

• Full SVG support, integrated and sorted (should have been done before)
• X3D built in (getting 3D content working is the obvious next step)
• Interpolated image resize (smooth the damn images)
• Antialias all text & transparent GIFs (obvious, surely)
• Whole page zoom (particularly useful when your display size and the designers expectation don't match)
• Startup Tabs (you usually go to the same round of sites when you turn on in the morning, so...)
• Task based bookmark histories and easy note taking (keep research in order and reproducable)

Re:Moving forward, not standing still

Startup Tabs (you usually go to the same round of sites when you turn on in the morning, so...)

1. Open up all the tabs you want to open on startup.
2. Go to Options and click "Use current pages" in the Home Page Location setting.

You can also enter them by hand in this field by separating tabs with a |.

JavaScript links

I've yet to find an extension for this, so if there is one, please let me know.

It's all too often when I middle-click a link to open in a new tab, only to get the tab being "Untitled" and the URL starts with "javascript:". Is it too much to ask that Firefox detect a javascript link and prevent it from opening in a new tab (or window, but usually I catch those), and merely run the javascript?

Lasers, people!

Can't I get a shark with freakin' lasers? Is that too much to ask?

better "bookmark this page!!!"

While I know that you can right click to access a menu to add a pare as a bookmark, I really really hate the fact that in the bookmark menu the add bookmarks and manage bookmark controls scroll with the rest of the bookmarks. I can't tell how many times I've been at the end of a long list of bookmarks and had to scroll all the way back up to the top of the list to access the "bookmark this page!" In IE6 the manage and add "favorites" menu items stay put. That's teh ONLY thing that IE does better than Firefox!

Active X Support

Untill Firefox supports 'Active X' components it will never achive the market penetration that it requires to displace IE. Supporting 'Active X' components, a Microsoft web standard, will also make it more acceptable to corporate IT departments since lagacy web services will not have to be re-written in order to run in its non Microsoft standard environment resulting in a lower cost of conversion.

My suggestions

1.Improve the memory usage.
2.Better ways to find extentions that are leaking resources.
3.If a URL being displayed results in "host not found", "cant contact server" or an error such as 404, it should not be added to the history. Also, URLs should only be added to the history once they get past that step and actually recieve a "200 ok" reply from the server with a piece of data or something. (i.e. if I press escape to cancel loading before it actually loads, it shouldnt go in the history)
4.Bring back MNG support.
5.Better security features. I want to see a world where (once a small amount of initial setup is taken care of), encrypting and/or signing an email is as simple as clicking a button on the email compose form with the program doing the rest. (although this feature is probobly more a thunderbird feature than a firefox feature)

Apparently

only from people who are willing to register and login at their wiki, not from 'the public'.

My two biggest requests would be

1. An option to enable an *ABSOLUTE* restriction on new content windows. Even with the 'pop up blocker' fully enabled some sites still manage to open new windows. I would like these FORCED into new tabs, always, NEVER permitting additional content windows to open (dialogs for FF itself, preferences, etc would still be acceptable)

2. An interative javascript debugger, that includes the ability to run scripts in a 'step mode', override/block the execution of specific js statements (or force conditional branches), and change the contents of variables.

3. An ability to prevent detection of the absence of specific plugins, enabling the user to take control back of media served by websites (eg, "Sorry, you dont have Microsoft DRM-enforcing plugin X, so we wont serve this media to you" - the ability to force the site to just give the URI to the browser, and let the *USER* decide how to retrieve it and what to do with it from there)

DragDrop and Proper Focus/Blur Please!!

Firefox does not provide any reference to a dragdrop file from the users FileSystem.
This is a HUGE issue as it prevents Drag and Drop file uploads for AJAX applications.
Sure, there is a FF Extension to solve this, but requires the user to install for such a behavior to work.

This should be a native solution. Can Firefox please reconsider their stance on this issue?
For years, drag and dropping of files into application windows has been EXPECTED behavior.
Firefox should allow AJAX applications the same sort of functionality.
As it stands, Firefox is the only browser I can not create a strictly script based solution for.

Below is an example. As we can see, the dragdrop event is useless except for preventing the dragdrop event from continuing propagation after we capture it.

<html>
    <head>
        <title>dragdroptest</title>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            function doOnDragDrop(event)
            {
                var t,ta;
                var str = "Dumping Event Data:\r\r";
                var d = document.getElementById("out");
                var o = event;
 
                for (var itm in o) { str += itm+": "+o[itm]+"\r"; }
 
                t = document.createTextNode( str );
                ta = document.createElement("TEXTAREA");
                ta.setAttribute("style", "{height:100%; width:100%;}");
                ta.appendChild(t);
                d.appendChild(ta);
                event.stopPropagation();
            }
 
            window.captureEvents(Event.DRAGDROP);
            window.addEventListener("dragdrop", doOnDragDrop, true);
        </script>
    </head>
 
    <body>
        <h4>Drag and Drop Files Onto Page</h4>
        <div id="out"/>
    </body>
</html>

Also, firefox (on Mac at least) does not properly recognize an onBlur when I click on a non-firefox application window.
onBlur only happens when we click on a 2nd Firefox browser window - bad bad bad.
This and the above dragdrop issue means that Firefox is not properly supporting OS integration.
Addressing these issues would be huge in more robust user experience and application capabilities for AJAX developers.

TIA for your consideration of these points.

V

make the search box easier to extend

It's absurd that I have to code up basically an extension to add a new search engine to the search box. Galeon [sourceforge.net] has had the ability to add a new "smart bookmark" by just copying and pasting the appropriate URL for years. AcidSearch [pozytron.com] for Safari, will automatically find and add the appropriate search URL for you if you want. Firefox on the other hand is makes it incredibly difficult, or causes you to resort to those ugly Rollyo pages.

Completely unacceptable, and worst of all, I don't even understand how they even thought that their approach was even remotely necessary.

Better Tab Docking

With Eclipse, a Java IDE, you can position tabs in any logical assortment you see fit by just dragging the tab, e.g.:

-----
|1| |
|-|2|
|3| |
-----

is a perfectly valid tab configuration. Here, 1 & 3 take up the upper-left quarter and the lower-left quarter of the window respectively. 2 takes the entire right half. With larger monitors becomming the norm, this would be a great enhancement for those who would like to make better use of their horizontal space.

How to turn PDFs into pop-ups

When I click on a link that opens a PDF or other document, by default that should open in a separate popup.

To solve this issue, remove the Adobe Reader plug-in from your Firefox plug-ins folder. This will cause Adobe Reader to launch in a separate process with its own window. Or just ditch Adobe Reader and install Foxit Reader, the PDF viewer with less bloat.