Firefox UX Team update: Preparing for Firefox 4 feature freeze

What we’re tracking for Firefox 4 feature freeze

We’re in the final stretch of Firefox 4 development as far as features go, with the fantastic new JavaScript engine landing and lots of other infrastructure improvements making it to the nightly builds — but there’s also a comprehensive list of things we keep track of to ensure an overall good user experience. These things range from the very low-level like startup performance, memory fragmentation and window drawing, to things like visual design, colors, and minimalism — and everything in between.

The UX team keeps an updated list of what we think is important from the perspective of the user, and you can view the always-updated version of this list over at the Firefox UX Priorities page on the Mozilla wiki.

Since I know that a lot of you read this using an RSS reader of some sort, here’s a copy of the list from the wiki — have a look and see if there’s anything you think you can help out with. Firefox 4 is shaping up to be an amazing release!

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User Experience Priorities for Firefox 4

How can you help make Firefox 4 the best it can be? Here are the top priorities identified by the UX team. They are in order of project priority, and internally ranked by importance in the project.

(Some of these are still missing bug numbers, make sure you consult the original wiki page for updates)

New Theme

Owner: Stephen Horlander

• Tabs in titlebar on Windows on maximize bug 572160 (available as option on the Mac) — SoapyHamhocks is stuck, ask jimm?
• Location bar improvements:
  • Combined Stop/Go/Reload bug 544816
  • Better progress bars bug 544818, bug 578028
  • Site identity block bug 587901 — either finalize the URL representation in its various states, or put favicon back in. adw is willing to look at this, also need to talk to johnath.
  • URL-on-link-hover bug 587908
• Make Search local to the tab (at least for tabs-on-top)
• Improved visual style of AwesomeBar results: bug 587909
• Tab improvements, including Frank Yan's patches:
  • Animated dragging/detaching bug 455694
  • Improved tab ordering on open and close bug 578327
  • Tab multiselect bug 566510
  • Tab overflow improvements bug 570564
  • Animation for drag/drop of tabs bug 455694
  • Eliminate redundant text when multiple tabs have the same partial title bug 583890
• List All Tabs menu should list closed tabs/windows for undo power
  • Groups from Panorama should show in List All Tabs bug 596017
• Clean up the stop/go/reload area: bug 592909, bug 430627
• Move RSS button to secondary UI bug 578967
• Windows XP menu bar styling bug 575870
• Overall Windows XP theme progress
• Linux implementation of the Firefox menu: bug 585370
• Linux: Tab improvements
• Make find-in-page local to the tab: bug 565552
• META: Pixel polishing to get the themes closer to the mock-ups during the polish phase, Stephen has a great overview here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/New_Theme/Timeline
• Polish: Fitts' Law improvements: close buttons, tabs (when on top), maximized Firefox menu should all be clickable on the edges

Startup performance, perception of performance & papercuts

• URL autocomplete bug 566489
• Ghost out the reload button instead of ghosting the Stop button so we don't add N ms to every page load, bug 596428
• Window drawing during startup on Windows is worse than before
• Session Restore improvements (owner: zpao)
  • Restore Session on-demand at startup bug 588482
  • Loading N tabs in parallel on startup instead of all of them bug 586068
• No text in beforeUnload dialog + change to "Stay on page"/"Leave page": bug 588292
• Non-modal JS dialogs, bug 59314
• Allow abort of modal alerts: bug 61098
• Paste & Go bug 492544 (dolske volunteered to review this once ui-review is cleared up)

Under consideration:

• Memory fragmentation on OS X, use jemalloc on OS X: bug 414946
• Resource Packages: bug 529208 (owner: jlebar)

Firefox menu

• Check for Updates button in About window bug 585475
  • upgrade UI should be in About Window
  • add link to support
  • add link to privacy policy
• Making sure Work Offline is removed (ie. never stuck in offline mode)
• Put Troubleshooting item back in Help Menu

Under consideration:

• Menu cleanups for the context menu and traditional (XP, Linux) menu

Add-ons Manager

Owner: Dave Townsend Meta: bug 550048

• Disable add-ons the user didn't install + known performance ones on upgrade, ask the user to re-enable the ones they actually use
• Silent updates (works for restartless add-ons, what about non-restartless? follow up with Mossop and rs) bug 511529, partially fixed in bug 562622
• Complete visual design bug 586066 (meta)
  • Detail view implemention: bug 562902
  • List view implementation: bug 585950
• Blocking third-party extension installs bug 596343
• Removing duplicate add-ons bug 596392

• Confirmation that an add-on has been installed
• "Get Add-ons" implemented (AMO dependency, talk to Fligtar)
• Allowing backgrounds and themes to be used together: bug 520124

Under consideration:

• Blocking add-ons that are more than two versions behind, compatibility-wise (ie. an add-on that doesn't work with 3.6 nor with 4.0 shouldn't stop you from upgrading your 3.5 to 4.0)
• Centralize CSS & resources for reuse in other in-content pages (polish)

App tabs

Owner: Paul O‘Shannessy Meta: bug 551849 (dependency tree)

Updated specification: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/App_Tabs#Design_Specification — we'd still love to have these be global, since there are a lot of issues when not having them global from a UX perspective, but we realize that it might be hard, especially on the current Firefox 4.0 timeline.

• Global presence across windows bug 587873 (is postponed unless we can find an owner)
  • No reloading of plugins when window is re-parented bug 449734
• Chromeless by default, option to opt for it on bug 585445
• External links from within app tabs should open in new tabs bug 575561
• Focus color change when tab has dialog or changes title or snippet addition on Home tab bug 577096
• Faaborg to add "Enable notifications on changes" bug for App tab menu

Locally hosted Firefox Start page

Owner: Marco Bonardo

Firefox/Projects/Firefox_Start

• Basic version of the start page as about:home bug 563723
• Snippets capability for upgrade messaging etc.
• Ability to async update the home page code
• Visual design by Stephen

Panorama

Owner: Ian Gilman

Tracked here: http://azarask.in/projects/tabcandy/#todo

• Combined Panorama + List All Tabs button — this assumes that we can get Panorama groups into the menu — bug 596017

Sync

Owners: Mike Connor, Philipp von Weitershausen

• Email address as user name bug 589979
• Generate Sync Key bug 591118
• Change flow of setup wizard bug 591120
• New style for setup wizard bug 591122
• Design physical Sync Key artifact bug 591533
  • Finalize the Sync key text + print artifact (Faaborg to ask Sofa about availability)
• Primary UI element for Sync bug 589981

Notification improvements

Owners: Neil Deakin (platform, arrow panels), Stephen Horlander (visuals), Justin Dolske (converting notifications and dialogs to new format, tab modal panels), Gavin Sharp (geolocation)

• Doorhangers
  • Needs to land with specified visual style, especially the anchor marker ("diamond" edge) and split buttons bug 577927
• Cleaning up doorhanger notification use + appearance: bug 554937
• High priority notification bars/dialogs that need transfer to the new design:
  • Geolocation (complete)
  • Password manager - remember bug 567814
  • Password manager - change bug 588309
  • httpauth bug 567804
  • Popups blocked bug 588317
  • XPI install bug 588266
• High priority Home Tab snippets:
  • Ability to glow to draw attention when not focused bug 588589
  • "Know your rights" bug 571584
  • Firefox update available bug 588227
• High priority tab modal panels:
  • JS alert/confirm/prompt bug 562258 (Frank has WIP, some missing back-end pieces, at risk)

Extension Bar

Owner: Dietrich Ayala

Project page: Firefox/Projects/AddonUI

Status bar removal dependencies are listed in bug 574688

• Remove status bar entirely (not just hidden by default)
• Visual design: glass on Windows, gradient gray on the Mac
• Don't display if no extensions exist
• Display when modified
• Needs to be a toolbar, so you can drag things to/from it (though the customize palette won't support this release).
• API that inserts icons in earlier status bar now end up in extension bar, change ID of navigation bar and redirect that API to Extension toolbar too
• Opportunistic: Extension panels for existing toolbars, with "pin" option, give sidebars an icon to display or entry in extensions

String freeze related

• Rename Open in new Window to Move to new Window bug 593646

Other

• Tracking search bar vs URL bar vs start page searches separately for metrics, bug 596439
• Mac installer improvements, bug 516362

Priorities for releases after Firefox 4.0

Not in prioritized order, parked here until we have shipped 4.0. Most of these were things that didn't make the deadline for 4.0.

Also see the Firefox/UX index for other things we're looking at.

Home tab

Tracked in bug 544819

Details:

• Upgrade experience
• Have to be in all windows, and not be moved around
• Needs its own icon
• What happens with home pages that != Firefox Start
• Locally hosted home page with chrome privileges
  • Show bookmarks bar on home page?
  • Links that open Bookmarks, Downloads, History, Add-ons, Options, windows
    • Session Restore opt-in link (see below)
    • Standalone XUL location bar

Various

• Prefs reorganization and move to in-content pages
• Improved Download Manager, bug 564934 & bug 564900 (being worked on by community member, has patches, needs guidance & review love)
• Improved Sharing, bug 588508 (owner: margaret)
• Privacy & Site-specific Preferences
  • Site-specific preference panel, bug 573176
  • Information in the Site menu (Larry?) about cookies and domains involved
• Updated visual design of in-content pages
• Tab opening behavior bug 533232
• Paper Cuts, especially:
  • Focus fixes, tracked in bug 565510 (plugins in particular)
  • When creating a new tab or returning to one, always keep focus in the URL or search box bug 565575
  • Web sites shouldn't be allowed to resize main window
  • Web sites shouldn't be allowed to fake pop-unders using focus
  • Remove 3-second delay from AMO installs
  • Click-to-enable for certain plugins (Java, etc), allow same setting for Flash
  • "Don't ask me to install this plugin again"
  • Cmd/Ctrl-L doesn't bring up the AwesomeBar when location bar is hidden
• Visually distinguish visible tabs in List All Tabs menu
• Find in page improvements (move to top, overlay, tab-specific)