Mozilla has started a wiki page that is designed to brainstorm features that people would love for Firefox to have. Right now the list is very long so only a small amount of the recommended features would be able to make it into the Firefox 3 release. I’m still in the process of reading through them all but here are a few that I thought were good ideas:
- Floating toolbars: Allow the user to pull all toolbars off the top of the window and create a floating toolbar. These floating bars could be overlapped, tiled, etc to save screen real-estate.
- Optional IE theme
- Drag tabs between windows
- Shading of tabs denoting time since it started: On the scale of white to black, white is more recent than black.
- Allow relative opening of tabs: Child tabs open next to parent tab and not at the end of tab bar.
- 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”).
- P2P support
- Improved file type handling: always download specific filetypes to a set of default or user-specified folders (defaults: Audio, Video, Images, Zipped, Executable, etc.).
- Improve profile/user management and switching
- Password-protected user profiles
- Offer to install extension packs while installing
- Private browsing: Implement a “private browsing” mode that prevents collection and recording of data.
- Ability to resize textareas
- Improve FTP support
- Be the fastest browser on the market, not only on “fat” desktops, but also on bargain desktops with only 256MB of RAM.
Those are the few things that really stood out. Surprisingly, someone mentioned a “River of News” feed reading option but no one really said anything about having a full feed reader built-in. That is probably one of my highest requests for Firefox and hopefully when they do get around to it they make it similar to what Flock has to offer.
I think all browser developers should be looking at this list because it is a real eye opener as to what people really want. It really reminds me of a few months ago when I put together an article on what features the perfect web browser would have. While my list is no where near the extent that Mozilla has it still points how which browsers implement certain features the best.
holly cow. that is some list.
).
but i think ie staff should not look at it (sorry, u missed ur chance when u stopped working on ie6
but i wonder if they should focus on surfing idea only, or also about things like p2p and such.
they should work on things 2 make migration to ff from ie. like an extension pack and ie theme.
I’m still waiting for the feature “Use your brain as a cache” what a day that would be
I’m sure that feature will come right after they implement the “export to brain” and “import from brain” functions.
Why is ‘Drag tabs between windows’ on the list? You can already do this. Heck you can even drag tabs between Firefox and Flock.
That’s pretty cool, I guess I never tried that. It looks like someone put that on the list because every other “tab draggging” feature was on there. Someone must not have tried it though.
I discovered that a while back before I found an extension which would over-ride the default size (postage stamp) of a JavaScript Pop-up window. I would drag the tab into my main Firefox window.
I didn’t even know about dragging between Flock and Firefox until I did that yesterday out of curiosity. Kinda cool since they are two unique applications.
Why do they wait so long with this? Maxthon had this “feature” since the beginning. This is one of the things that keeps me from using Firefox.
I don’t understand this…what are ‘child tabs’?
Child tab is the tab that you open form the “parrent” tab. It would be logical for it to be next to the parrent tab, but in Firefox it is not that way.
A good example of the “child tabs” is to use IE 7. Basically if you open a few tabs, go back and select the first tab, and then open another tab it should open immediately next to the first tab instead of after the last one.
Looks like an EXCELLENT list of features! All are amazingly innovative ideas I never would’ve thought of.
The one strange one, however, is the P2P support. Would this be like LimeWire within the browser? I think they should probably stick to browsing and dump that idea.
Otherwise, all look like welcome improvements. I wonder which features Mozilla will put to action?
Also, I noticed many are saying Firefox already has the ability to drag tabs between windows. Correct Firefox can drag the URL from one window into the other, as can any browser, but it can’t actually transfer the tab.
*The ability to drag tabs between windows would mean that the dragged tab would load in the 2nd window in its own tab, in the position dragged to on the tab bar, with scrolling and other tab status remaining constant, and the tab would no longer appear in the first window. If this feature were made, dragging a tab from one Fx window to another would function basically the same as re-ordering tabs.
I think this essentially refers to BitTorrent support much like Opera handles it. I have always wanted a great browser that has support for files like BitTorrent but Opera’s isn’t very good for getting fast downloads. I think you’re right and it is something that should be left alone.