September 18th, 2010

24 bugs we’d like to see fixed for Firefox 4

And 9 theme bugs that we’d love to see resolved too

A lot of great stuff has landed in Firefox 4 on the UI front over the past few days — combined stop/go/reload buttons, in-tab progress bars, hovered URLs in location bar, theme fixes & more. The release clearly shaping up to be a great one, but there are always more things that could be improved.

Earlier this week, we posted a list of the bugs that the UX team is tracking to ensure that Firefox 4 will provide the best & most efficient web browsing experience on the planet.

We did make a very basic mistake when publishing the original list, however — as we didn’t consider our main audience, and ended up showing you the full list of what we’re tracking. While this is relevant for the UX team, it ended up being pretty hard to digest — and a bit intimidating — since we’re tracking a large number of bugs. It wasn’t very actionable.

To fix this, we sat down and transformed that list into a much more manageable overview of the top issues that aren’t receiving the attention they should right now — sorted by priority. There’s of course a lot more being worked on for Firefox 4 already, these are simply the bugs that are stuck in one way or another, or don’t have any implementers assigned to them yet. So if you want to help make Firefox 4 the best browser it can be, these are good bugs to help out with getting resolved. Some of them are small, some are larger in scope, but all of them are important as far as the UX team is concerned.

These bugs…

…do not currently have blocking status,
…are not polish bugs — of which there are many, and with the understanding that we should be able to block on polish bugs when we get to later phases, especially theme-related,
…the UX team consider to be major wins for Firefox 4,
& we’d like to see people pick up, provide fixes for — or possibly even mark as blockers.

These do not include issues from: Panorama (that team is building an equivalent list of their own), Sync (which is part of the Services team, not Firefox team), and the Add-ons Bar (which we have a hard time evaluating from a UX perspective right now). It’s not because we think these aren’t important, just that this is the list we ended up with right now.

The current version of this list is always available on the Mozilla wiki, but reproduced below for your reading convenience.

In order of priority:

Block unauthorized third-party extension installs — critical to a fast user experience, particularly for startup time.
Remove duplicate add-ons — we had this happen with the Java console, where lots of versions of the same add-on would slow down the browser, and it might be happening with other add-ons too.
Tabs in titlebar on Windows on maximize — this is expected functionality that already exists in other browsers, and makes more screen space available.
Painting of browser window slow compared to 3.6 — starting Firefox 4 on Windows looks really broken right now.
URL autocomplete should be enabled — how quickly a user can get to a site is a key part of the perceived performance, we also need to do a better job with the audience that “speaks URL.”
Support form restore for HTTPS — we should protect users from data loss, and figure out the security implications (timeout, clear on exit).
Ghost the reload button instead of ghosting the Stop button so we don’t add N ms to every page load — this makes every page load seem slower.
Display the domain in black and the path in grey — makes domains more readable and prominent, parity with other browsers.
Animated tab dragging/detaching — it’s currently hard to see immediate results when dragging and detaching tabs.
Streamline the visual appearance of the search field — there’s a lot of visual noise in the Stop/Go/reload area now, should be minimized.
Add zoom controls to the Firefox menu — having a good zoom control available is important for accessibility.
No reloading of plugins when window is re-parented — when you detach a page containing e.g. a YouTube video, the Flash player starts from the beginning, which is not a good experience.
External links from within app tabs should open in a new tab — when using app tabs, we should open off-domain links in regular tabs, so you never lose your app tab by browsing.
App tabs should be chromeless by default, option to turn it back on — one reason why app tabs are useful and better is that they make better use of available screen space.
Tab multiselect — Has a really well thought-out design spec and implementation; it’s also a feature no other browser currently has.
Non-modal JS dialogs — modal dialogs are incredibly disruptive, and we should aim to make them only affect the current tab instead of the entire window.
Move RSS button to secondary UI — this button has extremely low usage, and doesn’t justify the prominent placement it has currently been given.
Groups from Panorama should show in “List All Tabs” menu — it’s confusing that you can’t see all your tabs in this menu, we should make it work.
“List All Tabs” menu should list closed tabs/windows for more obvious undo — Tabs belong in the tab menu.
Don’t let add-ons that are not compatible with an unsupported version of Firefox stop you from upgrading — i.e. an add-on that doesn’t work with 3.6 nor with 4.0 shouldn’t stop you from upgrading your Firefox 3.5 to 4.0.
Make Search bar local to the tab — now that we have tabs on top, the search box content should not be global.
Eliminate redundant text when multiple tabs have the same partial title — this makes it easier to distinguish different pages from the same site in the tabs.
Remove “Work Offline” & make sure you can’t get stuck in offline mode — this option doesn’t have any real use anymore, but before we can remove it, we have to make sure that people can’t get stuck in offline mode, and that we never put localhost and local networks offline.
Convert notification bars to doorhangers: HTTP auth, blocked pop-ups, XPI install — all of these notification bars should use the new doorhanger notification infrastructure.

Theme bugs that are not polish-related — also see the Theme wiki page for images that illustrate these:

If you have the skills and time to work on any of these bugs, you’ll make everyone’s experience with Firefox 4 a lot better — let’s make it happen!

Limi

on the Firefox user experience
content management & Plone

24 bugs we’d like to see fixed for Firefox 4

Limi

on the Firefox user experience content management & Plone

24 bugs we’d like to see fixed for Firefox 4

on the Firefox user experience
content management & Plone