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Nov 17

Mozilla Starts Brainstorming Features For Firefox 3 And Beyond

This article was written on October 13, 2006 by CyberNet.

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.

A Look Back at Firefox in 2006

Firefox 2 Is Now *Officially* Released And Has A Redesigned Homepage

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.5 Candidate Builds Available

That Firefox 3 Bug "Rumor"