Please keep more feedback coming!

I don’t care about acid tests, I just want a quick and responsive browser able to start up as fast as possible and not feel “in the way”, kinda like Firefox used to compared to its old competitors.

My pet peeve is multiple background images. I spent hours this weeks in meetings where our team standardised our HTML practises. Almost all the points of contention were workarounds to the fact we still can’t have multiple backgrounds on a single element.

My 2 cents

1. Mobile. They must get Fennec out of the door and on more platforms, not only Maemo and Windows Mobile. They need deals with carriers to set Fennec as the default browser. Weave on Fennec would be a killer feature.

2. Acid3 – for pure marketing reasons. The missing pieces of the puzzle is SVG fonts and SMIL. I know no dev who would like to use that today, but that 100% score is seen by the masses as important, even though they have no idea what the test actually does.

3. FFox 3.7 must have a complete ECMAScript 5th edition implementation. I have high hopes it will.

4. TraceMonkey must start to trace recursion as well as iteration. DOM manipulation must be faster as well. Dromaeo must be marketed as a more relevant speed test than Sunspider (it is!)

5. Ubiquity is a power user killer feature, just like the awesomebar was.Integration into the toolbar and less resource using would be great. (Ubiquity occasionally sucks up all my CPU for 5-10 seconds.)

A few additional thoughts: Mozilla often comes 2nd in implementing some stuff, but when they do, they seem to do a much more thorough job. Case in point is quite a few of the bugs in Acid3, that Opera and Safari quickly “passed”, but Mozilla people found spec holes, edge cases, etc Another example is when Webkit implemented Canvas as background images, but Mozilla implements the use of any element as a paint server! Even Dave Hyatt thought that was neat.

Of course Opera and the Webkit teams do tons of cool and good stuff as well. I just wanted to balance the equation somewhat on a few issues.

And finally:

Personally I like having a status bar, dislike tabs on top, but think tabs on the side is a neat idea (Opera 10 option), and dislike unified location and search. A neat Ubiquity integration into the location bar might change that, though.

(Not the best written entry I’ve ever made, blame tiredness XD)

Well, profiles doesn’t exactly do what I want, as it’s mostly about having several USER profiles, and not several CONFIGURATION profiles… or at least that is my understanding of them.

Maybe I should look at them again, to see if I can make them do what I want.

Automatic login: I’d like a way for a web site to request credentials and log me in automatically (if I have authorized the site). This would be safer and easier to use than the (cookie based) “remember me” and form autocompletion. It would need a protocol that web sites should to implement, perhaps something based on OpenID.

Edit image before upload: When uploading a photo, the possibility to scale, crop and recompress the image before it is sent to the server. Useful for uploading avatar images in the correct size, and for photos to be published on a blog.

A short while back (prior to FF2.0) I entered into discussion with the development lead that there was a feature they could add which would change numerous peoples lives. I mentioned a potential text resizing feature and was assured that they were soon coming up with something better. It was zooming. The guy missed the point totally. I was actually asking for two new buttons to be placed by default in the navbar. Next to the Refresh / Stop / Home. My suggestion was + and – buttons to increase and decrease size of text. Whether they represented text resizing or zooming was immaterial.

It is fine to say View -> Zoom or CTRL + are there, however the regular web user doesn’t do browser menus or CTRL keys. I’m thinking of the types who think Google is the Internet. I Introduced the concept of text resizing to my short sighted father In-Law after he had been surfing the web for several years. He was amazed and now doesn’t suffer when going to websites where the default text size is too small. I’ve also formally taught many net newbies / older people and text resize/zoom is a great feature for lots of people. OK it’s there right now – how helping about making it easier to discover and subsequently use?

Allowing for several usage scenarios would also be helpful, mostly for developers. Say for instance that I load up Firefox with all sorts of wonderful developer extensions (Firebug, Firefinder, et al), then I have to pretty much gimp my entire setup to get the same experience as the average user sees. Allowing developers to use several “scenarios” where you can cherry pick which addons to load, would go a long way.
I suppose that this might also win back some users for using Firefox as the default browser, as it will not be slow for everyday use, when you don’t load all your developer extensions just for accessing YouTube

The UI could certainly be more polished… taking a good hard look at providing a clear progress indicator would go a long way. Maybe the little progress bar at the bottom of the window just needs to find a new place to live? I for one spend a lot of time in the address bar, and expect the progress indicator to be very close to this and obvious, but it isn’t.
XUL needs to be faster, or just compiled to native UI … when switching focus to and from Firefox on OSX you can sometimes see the background of the topbar being redrawn (Camino doesn’t have this problem).

Smaller and faster release cycles, will also help new platforms like Maemo to keep their browser fresh, instead of leaving users with a very old browser, and only updating once a year.

The chrome of Firefox has to be reduced and the handling of tabs needs to be a little slicker for me to even consider using it as a browsing tool instead of a development tool.

As a developer, what I want most is for Firebug to be an integrated tool and not an add-on. That might improve perf a little bit too.

It would surprisse me a lot if mozilla is not aware of these issues already. On the other hand I can really understand why firefox has this performence issues since chrome is pretty new and built from the ground up with performence in mind, while firefox has been around for a while and theres probably code in there from the mozilla browser days aswell.

Test Pilot is a very good initiative and it would be great if it would become funnier, easier and more rewarding to contribute to the future of the browser.

Focus more on development of things like Bugzilla and Test Pilot and be inspired by GitHub, Uservoice, Twitter etc.

Is there need for two input fields ?