Firefox 3.0 suggestions
The Firefox people, just about to release version 2.0 of the browser, have put up a wiki page asking for feature requests and suggestions for future Firefoxes. Now, that to me sounds like a great idea.
And then I looked at the list.
There are already about four hundred suggestions on the list. As far as I can tell, damned nearly every one of them is useless. Let’s examine the reasons for uselessness.
- Things that already exist
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- “I would like to see an option that would allow me to click on a link and it open in a new window or tab and not leave the page I’m on until the new window/tab has fully loaded.” That’s load-tabs-in-the-background, which I have turned on right now.
- “When a numeric portion of the URL in the address bar is highlighted, allow it to be incremented/decremented using the mouse wheel.” If you want Pornzilla, you know where to find it.
- “Or a variant that could be run from an usb stick, that you could use your personalised browser anywhere.” Portable Firefox.
- “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.” Just create a second profile and launch with it.
- “Tab Exposé”. Foxpose.
- Things that clearly belong in an extension
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- “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 [ed: as PDF, etc]and also include a new ODF “save as” option.” This sort of thing is operating system level, not Firefox level. Install CutePDF on Windows; Macs can already print to PDF; everything can already print to PostScript. I can vaguely see the use of some of these, but “I want to save this as PostScript” is such a geek edge-case anyway that doing it through Print To File is hardly a barrier.
- “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.” Interesting use-case (a synaesthete), and he says he’ll write it himself, so that’s good; it’s an extension, though. Not Firefox core.
- Things that are basically impossible to do
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- “Sessions/Tabs Isolation: Make sure sessions from other tabs do not leak between tabs. This is a major security hazard.” What this means is that every tab is an independent browser. Firefox’s memory usage would go through the roof. This goes double for people who say “one tab crashing shouldn’t crash anything else”, which means that every tab is a separate process.
- “Make the browser open faster; that is the number one reason that I have heard for people not using Firefox or switching from Firefox.” I love this. As if they could easily do this but have deliberately made it slow to annoy people.
- “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.” I assume that means “like a US Social Security number”, right? Or will you not mind if you enter what you think is a phone number and it refuses to cache it because it looks like a Russian SSN?
- Make Firefox into Internet Explorer
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- “Allow an option run a downloaded setup file (in the place of “open”) instead of saving it, like in Internet Explorer.” There is a reason it doesn’t do this. It should not be easy to click a web exe and have it run!
- “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.” This means: completely implement total compatibility with IE. As if it were made easy by saying it. Let alone that Firefox policy is generally, when faced with a choice, to do it right rather than to emulate IE.
- “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.” I’m sure it would.
- There are quite a few “turn Firefox into Opera” requests, too. Why not just use Opera if that’s what you want?
- Things that are moronic
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- “Allow us to specify which order each plugin will sit in.” Why? WHy is this even remotely useful?
- “Send Theme name and version currently in use in the HTTP headers.”
- “dual screened tabs. two tabs showing in the same window pane, almost like frames. with ability to drag and resize viewing area between the two tabs.” Just open a second window!
- “Make proprietary Anchor mode: Make possible custom anchors like this:url#custom(0,555), this would make firefox scroll 0pixel to left and 555pixel down.” Why is it a good idea to make only Firefox understand these? Did we learn nothing at all from the mid-nineties?
- “Show the MD5 Checksum of each download after its finishied.” Why? What’s the point? If you even understand the word MD5 you’re quite capable of running md5sum, and if the website doesn’t publish md5s then it’s useless information anyway!
- “Move all MPL code to GPL.” Yes! Make that suggestion to Microsoft for IE as well!
- “Rather than pop up annoying dialogs when a site has a bad security certificate, simply perform the encryption without showing the lock icon.” What do you think certificates are for? Yes, it’s a pain to see the window, and yes, the window’s not brilliantly designed, but the answer isn’t just to turn it off!
- “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.” You want JavaScript to be unrestrictedly allowed to open socket connections? Ahahaha. No.
If you strip out all of those, then you’re left with barely anything. More importantly, there’s nothing actually good left in the list; it’s all little incremental improvements. Is Firefox really so good that no-one can think of anything it might do differently? It’s the perfect execution of the web browser concept? It surely isn’t. I intend to lay out a few thoughts on what I’d like to see happen in a future post, but for now I’ll just say: can’t we do better than this?
To be honest, I’m being unfair. There are some good suggestions in the list. What disappoints me is the lack of decent solutions, the lack of vision. Most of the ones that are in my “it already exists” category above (and there are many that I didn’t highlight; the above is just a selection) are things where I happen to know that it exists but I can understand that users do not. I need to go through the Firefox list and update it with some of these complaints or pointers to existing implementation, so that people can know. The moronic suggestions, by contrast, tend to be things that fall foul of Raymond Chen’s “what would happen if it actually did this?” thought experiment.
Here is a suggestion, no new Myths! http://www.FirefoxMyths.com
30 minutes later
Despite all my best efforts I’ve been unable to pursuade Firefox to start a second copy of itself using a different profile under Windows…
42 minutes later
Senji: you need to use MOZ_NO_REMOTE, which works for me. See http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/node/3114 for discussion.
61 minutes later
I think copying (nay, cherrypicking) Opera and IE features is quite reasonable for 3.0.
Other things are just nice usability things. Like saving to PDF — Firefox could bundle everything it needs to do that, so as to provide a consistent experience. And starting faster would be nice, even though it’s obviously non-trivial. Firefox is one of the few apps that, on Windows, I would have start in the background. And yet still it isn’t exactly snappy like I’d like. I suspect in part the compromises between startup speed and runtime speed have been chosen too often in the favor of runtime speed.
5 hours later
Actually, -np as a commandline switch rather than an environment variable exists, it’s just that it’s named -no-remote, which isn’t in -help (and good luck seeing -help on Windows, anyway: you have to do something convoluted like “firefox.exe -help > foo.txt | type foo.txt”).
5 hours later
Ian: I think I wasn’t reacting so much to the idea of Firefox implementing an existing IE or Opera feature as I was reacting to the tone in which the demands were phrased: “IE does this! How can you even consider not doing it!”
I don’t agree on the saving-to-PDF thing, though. Your OS should do that. The Mac OS *does* do that. On speed: I can’t think of any time ever when I’d sacrifice runtime speed for startup speed. I only start up the browser once a day; I pay any runtime speed penalty thirty times an hour.
Phil: I had no idea you could do -no-remote. Amazing.
11 hours later
Yes Firefox 2 is simply awesome, i wish they’d let me stack tabs instead of having a scrolling bar because i like to know whats loaded in and what hasnt when i bulk open my daily favourites. I do wish that theyd include better download support as native and that they would provide pagerank indication as part of the search…
30 hours later
The really hard part of design is not contriving features, but rather contriving features that denecessitate other features.
My suggestion for firefox is to conservatively try advancing the stock configuration so that it enables a few of the power-user behaviors by default. Open new tab in background is a good example. Casual users tend to lag in their adoption of extremely useful features, largely because they’re too scared or uninformed to seek greater functionality themselves (though they all seem to be obsessed with skinning, which has always been a generally awful idea).
I don’t think the “two tabs side-by-side is moronic”, as firefox isn’t good yet at moving tabs between windows and the OS’s “tile window’s vertically” requires too much work to get right (you have to minimize all the windows you dont’ want to see), and once you get two windows side-by-side, you can’t adjust their respective sizes by just dragging a single border between them.
My biggest useability problem with browsing and with windows in general is that I just have too many windows/tabs open at once. Currently I have three plug-ins just to make tabbing better: superT, for multi-line tabs, colorful tabs, and tab preview. A more integrated version of foxpose could replace all of that, if not replace the use of tabs entirely.
2 days later
Hi there
I have a question about your nicetitles javascript .. could you email me so i could ask you about it please.
3 days later
I disagree on quite a few points.
* Pornzilla does not yet have an extension that lets you change numbers in a URL using the mousewheel in the address bar. That’s a great idea, though; I wonder how hard it would be to implement.
* You respond to the “Tab Expose” idea by mentioning that an extension exists. I think it’s a useful-enough feature to be in the browser itself; the IE team certainly seems to think so.
* A socket API restricted in roughly the same way as XMLHttpRequest (same domain only, restricted to certain ports) would be nice for applications that don’t want all the overhead of HTTP for sending little bits of information back and forth frequently — consider a collaborate text editor, for example.
* Improving the UI for executable downloads would improve security, not weaken it. As it is, executable downloads and media file downloads look the same in both Firefox and Windows Explorer, so a porn site could easily slip an executable where I was expecting a video clip.
* Isolating session cookies and http auth logins to “connected” tabs and windows would not require as much overhead as you think. The reason we don’t do it is that it would be confusing, annoying, and more or less pointless.
* Likewise, fixing the “one tab crashing shouldn’t crash anything else” issue would not require making each window and tab(!) a separate process. An alternate approach is to just eliminate all the crashes. (Ok, maybe not.)
13 days later
Jesse: My point about pornzilla was that I suspect that looking at porn is the reason that the punter requested that function in Firefox in the first place. The fact that Pornzilla doesn’t actually do the mousewheel thing is merely evidence that you are falling down on the job and should get on with it ;-)
Is there some policy against bundling extensions with the browser? If “tab expose” is useful enough to be in the browser, why not just ship foxpose with firefox?
On the executable thing, they’re not talking about “improving the UI”, they’re saying “it is such a pain to have to save an executable to the filesystem and then click it to run it; what I want is to click a link and have it run”. That’s a bad idea. I certainly agree that improving the UI might help (although the definition of an “executable” is pretty malleable in a world where you can add macros to WMV files), but that’s not what the request was.
OK on the tab session isolation; I figured that’d be hard, so I was wrong there.
13 days later
> dual screened tabs. two tabs showing in the same window pane, almost like frames. with ability to drag and resize viewing area between the two tabs.” Just open a second window!
You’ve never cycled back and forth between two different tabs, comparing them or copying information from one to the other?
Opening a new window doesn’t cut it. It would, if the host window manager were natively good at tiling, but I don’t know of any that are (besides dedicated things like Ion).
Doing this in Windows would be a royal pain, for instance. Try it: Open two documents in two tabs. Then open a second window, move one document into that window, minimize all other windows, select “Tile windows horizontally” from the task bar. Now make one window take up a smaller percentage of the screen while enlarging the other. Now put the two documents back into regular tab view.
I’d much rather see the ability to view tabs as tiles built-in. It should be something you can toggle on and off in one operation, not twelve.
11 weeks later
“Move all MPL code to GPL.”
Your explanation about that has no sense. please try again.
12 weeks later
i mean that why do you think that is moronic and what firefox has to do with IE.
12 weeks later
The Mozilla project have good reasons for using the Mozilla Public Licence. They’re not going to shift just because you ask them to. In fact, then shifting is about as likely as IE shifting to the GPL, hence the comment.
12 weeks later
I just posted here:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Firefox/Feature_Brainstorming#Master_Password_and_password_security
do you think this is an acceptable suggestion?
15 weeks later
Greg Raiz, a UI designer and consultant from Boston, made some incredible suggestions as part of his 3-part series on improving the UI in Firefox. You can find the first part of the series here: http://www.raizlabs.com/blog/?p=
34 weeks later