Firefox Accepting Feature Suggestions for Version 3 422
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."
Keep it simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stability. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, pick two, I know...
Per site Shockwave Flash disabling!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Different password handling (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Less = More (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that basically the only real market share out there for grabs, is people who don't know anything more than "I click in the internet icon". If you give them the bare-bones, they'll go back to IE7.
The solution would seem to be to have official plugins shipped with the browser installer, which power users could deactivate (during installation) or replace.
Though personally I feel some things should just be built in (remembering tabs on restart for instance)
Re:supress password popups with one click. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Stability. (Score:3, Insightful)
JavaScript links (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:number 1 request (Score:3, Insightful)
In FF3 I'd like to see integrated
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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:my suggestions (Score:2, Insightful)
But for the love of God, don't standardize on a user-coddler like GNOME. I used GNOME for three years, with ever-increasing annoyance and frustration, until finally I said to hell with it and tried KDE.
KDE lets me do what I want to do. I'm never going back.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Less = More (Score:2, Insightful)
better "bookmark this page!!!" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stability. (Score:3, Insightful)
After reading the current list on the Mozilla feature brainstorming page, if even a few of these features get built into Fx 3 is going to be too heavy to be practical. I am already concerned about Fx 2.0. Such things as built in spellchecker is fine in an extension, but I have no need of it (screw you grammar nazis, spelling isn't standardised between countries and hasn't been standardised at all for much more than a century). I have not yet upgraded to the RC, and not entirely sure if I should.
I have a big fast powerful machine, and run only a few extensions. For me, there has been a profound drop off in performance from my first steps with version 0.8something and 1.5.
But I adore Firefox and want to keep it. I just wish it was leaner and faster.
It seems to me that the true beauty of OSS is that it does not need to pander to the marketing twats. There is absolutely no need for free software to pack in yet more features every version.
When speed, efficiency and stability are perfected, then by all means consider new features. Otherwise, that is why extensions were created, and why Seamonkey was created.
Re:Moving forward, not standing still (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the task of the web developer/designer to make the site pretty. The browser shouldn't try to second-guess them by modifying images to disobey what the image spec specifies. Not by default anyway. I have no beef with this feature being an extension.
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:3, Insightful)
https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?app=firefox
1,880 extensions is waaaay to much for any computer n00blet to wade through.
Even if you assume that 75% are dupes, 470 is still a lot of discreet options to wade through.
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
My suggestions (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:number 1 request (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:supress password popups with one click. (Score:2, Insightful)
(The second checkbox only becomes active when the first is ticked)
This presents the user with less choices and the additional options make sense.
make the search box easier to extend (Score:4, Insightful)
Completely unacceptable, and worst of all, I don't even understand how they even thought that their approach was even remotely necessary.
Re:Keep it simple ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone should add "If the plugin search can't find the plugin, can you PLEASE have it tell me what MIME type it was so I can get it myself?"
I'm getting tired of having to hunt through the source code to find what I'm missing, since firefox doesn't appear to know about any of the linux plugins.
Better Tab Docking (Score:3, Insightful)
-----
|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.