Introducing the Concept Series; Call for Participation

Laboratories are places where science and creativity meet to develop, research and explore new ideas. Mozilla Labs embraces this great tradition as a virtual lab where people come together online to create, experiment and play with Web innovations for the public benefit.

Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.

You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.

We’re hoping to lower the barrier to participation by providing a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts. Our goal is to bring even more people to the table and provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

Concepts may take the form of Ideas, Mockups or Prototypes.

• Ideas
  It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.
• Mockups
  Turn your idea (or someone else’s) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.
• Prototypes
  A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren’t always fully functional or pretty, but they’re more than a static image or two. They’re a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.

We only ask that all concepts and related source materials be freely redistributable and remixable under either a Creative Commons license (for Ideas and Mockups) or the Mozilla Public License (for Prototypes) so that we can all effectively collaborate on the exploration. Again, the intent is not for these concepts to evolve directly into new products but rather to provoke thought, facilitate discussion and provide inspiration.

Be bold. Be radical. The crazier, the better. Let’s explore the future together.

Inaugural Concepts

Aurora Concept (Part 1)
by Adaptive Path

Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios. Learn More

Bookmarking & History Concept
by Wei Zhou

An investigation into a better way of visualizing and interacting with bookmarks, your history, and the browser in general. Learn More

Mobile Concept
by Aza Raskin

An experimental UI proposal for Firefox Mobile. Learn More

How to Get Involved
Join us on the Mozilla Labs site at http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/concept-series/.

Soon we’ll have a more structured way to contribute concepts. For now, all you have to do is use your favorite method of sharing an concept with the world. If it’s an idea, blog about it. If it’s a mockup, put it on Flickr. If it’s a prototype, host it on your web site. Tag it with “mozconcept” and then let us know about it by posting to the Concept Series discussion forum.

This has probably been suggested/thought of before, but it would be awesome if there was a good voice command extension for firefox. Not only would this be great for visually impaired and those who have a basic grasp of conversational English but can’t read, it would be quicker than using a mouse/keyboard (or especially a touchpad) in many cases. For example, just say “firefox back” instead of clicking the back arrow. I feel that this would be intuitive after a moderate learning curve for the more obscure commands. While the mouse would still be used for such actions as selecting text, the voice command feature could be used more than one would think. Another example of its use is to change the search engine used. While I personally use the quick keyword bookmarks, most use the integrated search bar. It would be great if I could just say “movie Batman” and it would search Batman on IMDB, or “google firefox” and etc. In fact, my Eee PC has this functionality, so it stands to reason that Firefox could to. Anyway, those are just some of my thoughts off the top of my head. I’m sure that with some more thought a really well-built voice command extension could be built.

The implications on licences are .. ‘interesting’. It seems the aurora concepts are under cc by-nc-sa and not by-sa, since the MPL does not semm to prevent commercial distribution, could you really (legally) make an aurora prototype under the MPL, i’m not sure.
Maybe a FAQ on that could clear things up, or we could all follow the same rules.

Andrew: That’s a really cool idea. Have you checked out Ubiquity (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity)? It is similar to Enso or Quicksilver. So, you can do stuff like “google Firefox” but currently, you have to type it. I guess it would be possible to add voice-to-text layer and enable commands to be performed by speaking them.

I have posted a couple of ideas here.

@remy: Sorry for the confusion here. We’re still working out the details on licensing, and will post a FAQ shortly and an update to the policy. Generally, we’re hoping that everyone will use either open content or open source licenses as appropriate that allow for redistribution and derivatives so that there can be real collaboration. The intent is not for any of these concepts to evolve directly into new products.

Hi Chris,

I appreciate this open request from Mozilla. I’ve talked to you about ISS (Instant Syndicating Standards) support in Firefox. The idea of sharing a video to present the idea is interesting. I’ll try to build one over the week and post it!

Thanks,
Nick

I’ve posted about Metalink in the forum. It would be great to see Mozilla involved in it! :)

@Andrew:

Voice recognition always seems cooler than it is. It’s awkward to talk at a machine, especially when others are within earshot. It also can cause problems with background noise, music, etc.

Aurora concept is so complicated for average user. Minimal and simply, like a Google homepage, is right way. My idea is: Connect computer direct to brain like in Neuromancer novel.

I propose two features

1. auto hide menu bar, scroll bar, status bar, etc.

2. special modular dealing with touch screen device and touch screen computers.

- Ability to zoom the image more precisely.
- Do some basic image manipulation before saving the image.
- Create shortcuts for some mundane tasks like clicking on the next link in a 10 page site.
- View a slideshow of the tabs

@ Anonymous Coward:

Lol. Of course I am aware of this. I imagine that this would not be right for everyone, especially not in public places. However, not only would this allow disabled people who really don’t have much better options, it can help speed up browsing when alone. For example, I use “Dr. E” on my Eee to just say “google firefox” and that is a lot quicker than having to use the touchpad and then typing.

When copying text or images from a website, the browser should append a “retrieved from” notice at the end, along with a copyright notice if applicable. The website owner would have to provide the appropriate information for each page in a format the browser can read. This will make it easy for honest people to give proper attribution for what they copy.

I want to be able to easily zoom on one particular content div / container; for instance on a news site.

Scenario:
* I’ve got a content div
* Right click on it (similar to firebug’s select element)
* Everything else on the page is dimmed out, and shrunk (font-size: 0.01em!)
* That particular div becomes ever so slightly larger.

Ideally:
* Mousewheel zoom would still work; but only on the selected element.
* Up/Down buttons let you easily select the parent node/child node, so you can go from focusing on a P to a container DIV
* Back / Forth buttons easily let you navigate between the next child nodes.

Screenshots / more @ http://clockwerx.blogspot.com/2008/08/browing-concepts.html

1) Sending interactive content (changeable text, changeable images, forms, etc) to other users, websites and other applications. Like: if i want from my secretary to check some texts spelling or make some calculations in a spreadsheet live - not send a file, she saves it, makes adjustments, saves, sends me back, i replace with my copy. always isn’t it necessary to use version handling. Or to drag a object (some area) to my IM conversation such that my friend sees the content in real time and can browse further. Also the user should be able to choose the rights on sending (depending of the app - writing allowed, dynamic (changes when author changes the content or stays the same on saving, sending) etc).

2) Seamless web changing (forms are out of date). See: http://www.edicy.com/. Just take the JS part to the browsers functionality (faster, easier to develop). Also connect the last idea.

3) Updates on a web (rss - is just a simple website in my mind). Also i want to have the no of updates or last update date in my bookmarks (bookmarks toolbar).

4) Option for Automatic toolbar hiding…more room for content.

5) 3D elements implemented in HTML (or which ever language is the future). Like 3dmlw, Virtools, WireFusion or Vivaty. These should also be selectable, sendable etc.

Many more

I suggest that you give the possibility, for experienced users, to switch back to the old behaviour regarding the SSL certificates.
I really enjoy firefox, but I must say that the new SSL stuff in Firefox 3 is a pain in the ass. I understand that for a standard user, it’s better not to make this too easy, so I understand your choice of developping this, but the old message is more than enough for people who knows what they are talking of. I did the modification in the about:config that automatically downloads the certificate, but still I think there are too many clicks to do to reach the page. Just one single box is enough for some people, and since it was there before, then I suppose it’s possible to have both interfaces available, and to let the user choose between those two.

i would like to see a similar font as seen in ie7 which i think looks better. just a bit on the aesthetic side of things.

Interesting if no one in Mozilla is afraid of potential competitive browsers launched as a result of discussion around the concepts. From what I’ve seen online, good ideas rarely wait too long until they are implemented and savvy developers and VCs are constantly on the lookout for innovative ideas.

Isn’t that exactly what makes Mozilla software so great, that good ideas get implemented quickly? Besides, I don’t think Mozilla will mind too much if another browser beats it to the punch, as long as it gets incorporated into Firefox relatively soon after. Besides, if Firefox were to introduce a new concept, and it really was great, then other browsers would copy it too.

I’m not a rabid diehard Firefox fanboy, but I am one of open-source software.

Dear Sirs,

I would like to open a web site that creates new tabs and loads the following pages into the new tabs.
Example:
Open NY times first page and see the Technology, Arts, Sports and other department pages opened in new tabs.(I know I can do it myself but I would rather prefer the site to do it.)
or
go to an article and while I am reading, the following pages of the article may be loaded to following tabs.

Wishing you all the best with your new project.

Best regards,

Kamil Sukun

i have always a problem with javascript.

Isn’t that exactly what makes Mozilla software so great, that good ideas get implemented quickly? Besides, I don’t think Mozilla will mind too much if another browser beats it to the punch, as long as it gets incorporated into Firefox relatively soon after. Besides, if Firefox were to introduce a new concept, and it really was great, then other browsers would copy it too.

I’m not a rabid diehard Firefox fanboy, but I am one of open-source software.

collapsible tabs

I think Opensimulator (the reverse engineered Second Life server) stands a very good chance of becoming the Apache of the 3D web and as such the web browser needs to evolve into the 3D web browser (as the 3D web will subsume the 2D web). Have a look at various open source version of the Second Life client, like RealXtend.

the video links seem not to work!!

During the navigation, during the researches, we often open several tabs of results, that becomes “awkward, cumbersome”, that could be nice to be able to select tabs so that they open all in a new window, to be able to transfer one or several tabs from a window to an other, to group together tabs from various pages on the same page…

WOW very cool stuff :)

I still think my idea is better……

I call it Portal…..its the bases of my web browser PLATFORM idea that I have been dreaming of developing for YEARS. A web browser platform that will facilitate the seamless transition from Computer to Mobile or Computer to Computer.

The platform is THE core of the future of web browsers, it will allow users to have single username and password for all their services and thus centralize our online lifestyles (content, services, bookmarks, data, contacts, communication mediums, ect).

FYI…if you act fast you still will be able to beat Google in this endeavor and implement a centralized portal at the BROWSER level as a PLATFORM that is a service and not just free client desktop based software.

The point of Portal’s UI is to be simple as possible its just a UI its basic and clean and I want it to stay that way. The functionality comes from applications…YES I said APPLICATIONS not add-ons, think of the Apple App Store for a Web Browser and you will get the idea :)

I want the applications to launch in a tab right along side web pages, so you can check ALL of your email with a single click seamlessly across many devices and platforms, so you can have ALL of your contacts with you where ever you go, all of your bookmarks, all of your history, and I have come up with several intriguing applications but most of the innovation will come from 3rd party developers of course.

I mean don’t get me wrong I’ am ALL about innovative GUI design and to be be on the other side of the argument I suggest we start with my PLATFORM idea first a service that can be monetized to support OPEN web standards and then go from there.

Now, browsing is not only viewing pages. Browsing is a part of our electronic life and should be integrated with all our communication tools. From this statement, i think that Firefox 999 should be a central tool, a sort of portal that gives immediate access to all that we need in our modern life. It means instant messaging, email, address book, calendar, file explorer, …, and the ability to integrate any external service/applications with simple plugins. Of course, this means you need to think about a totally new gui that can bring all this stuff to our eyes in one click.
Firefow Mobile should be able to sync anything we firefox 999.

Now, for our actual browsing experience, I can see to things to improve :
Bookmarks and tabs.

Bookmarks : there shouldn’t be any way to store bookmarks locally. They should be stored somewhere on the web so we can retrieve them from anywhere without the need of any additionnal configuration. Also, they should be automatically tagged and sorted so we don’t have to bother to sort them. A bookmark could store the words i have googled to get to the page, and some others extracted by other people who already bookmarked this page, …

I have always a lot of tabs opened and it’s always difficult to find the one i want, there is surely something better todo, like thumbnails when you move your mouse over, or better sorting them (something like a navigation tree), …

Long life to firefox !

MHTML Support would be good to save pages locally

MAF is dead

.

The videos are not working anymore.

Performace and stability by multiple threads.
Id love to have a thread for every tab, script, … and plugin applet. A bonus would be that when one thread crashes/hungs, it wouldn’t slow down or crash the browser that easy. Or would that add too much overhead?

I want widescreen browsing. Offer a view that can be toggled into that will show two or more columns to view the current webpage. Widescreen displays introduced more and more scrolling around by removing our vertical space. Let’s take that back.

Derik Your idea is similar to mine (see some post back) but the centralized data storing sounds a little bit like world domination. Also we have OpenID for cross service authentication (Ok it isn’t so comfortable as I wish but it works).
Why should content be just image, text and video. Why can’t it be an app - based on a open source scripting language (for security reasons), some markup language for GUI and dedicated servers for data storage (can be also P2P from the users machine). Browsers, IM, email clients etc are for data transfer and object embedding. Also every object on the webpage is a app and then You can drag and drop from the webpage to any other application (email, IM, calendar, desktop etc). I know that MS tried to do that with ActiveX controls but they didn’t follow the cross-platform, easiness, (no bloat) criterias.

There is one Arora browser already you idiots.

I’d like to see an end to the Mozilla Foundation and all of its products.

This is fucking shit.

We developed a Gecko-based browser for numerous hedge funds and financial services companies and released it as open source:

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/suprabrowser

The overall goal is to create a personal, private repository in “the cloud” in which an individual can store all of their digital assets, ranging from bookmarks to email and files, where the browsing experience is driven from a private data store in the cloud instead of either a private desktop or another company’s grid. The security architecture was developed in conjunction with two PhD students at MIT and Harvard in collaboration with some of the most successful fund managers in the country. It has some very innovative data management and research capabilities and we would very much appreciate the opportunity to reach out to the broader community.

We spend so much time servicing clients and customers that it’s hard to find the time and energy to reach out and create awareness, so we would appreciate any feedback as to how we can make our system more attractive beyond our own walls.

Thanks,
David Thomson

SupraSphere Founder

Arora already exists. Its a Qt4/webkit browser. Is this just an attempt to smash other open source competition?

http://code.google.com/p/arora/

I think there are a few things that we always do with “extra” steps everyday on every browser that could be automated/implemented. Here some ideas:

1. Password
I know there are some tools from third parties that enable an imbedded password-safe with auto-fill functions etc. But I think this should always be a part of a browser. At least it should have the option to create categories, fields for webside/service, username, 1st password, 2nd password, info-text and an auto-login-function

2. Intelligent address and date link
An intelligent link between the browser, address-book/email-program an calendar should implemented. This means for example: You visit the homepage of your local cinema. You like to see one movie. Moving the cursor over one “Time-set” highlights the text “before” the time and the time itself. Using a hotkey or popup moves the highlighted fields to calendar, creates a meeting and gives you the choice to add the address manual or by mark a text column on the browsers page.
Same should be possible if you get a mail which includes a date and an address. Moving the mouse (in Thunderbird) over the date should give the (explained) option to add this automatically to your calendar, adding the contact to your address book etc.

3. Where have I gone to?
The browser-chronic is not really comfortable. Imagine if u use a hotkey (for example shift+ctrl) and a “mind-map” like page pops up. This page shows all pages like icons (small pictures from the web-pages), linked to each other as you opened it before. Using the mouse-scroll-function, you go one day back (or in hour if customized this way). Clicking on one of the icons opens the page again.

4. Cached Search
Why not do a local index with links for visited web-sites, showing these results always first when looking for something?

5. Intelligent directory browsing
Not only ftp-sites have sometimes files/folders organized in numbers. To bring much more comfort to the user, a “scroll+counter” function should be implemented.
Example:
Your friend has a page with photos from holiday, sorted by month, then by number of pictures like
http://www.myphotos.net/jan/100120/
You like to move quickly through the month. Mark “feb” pops up “jan” at the upper side and “mar” at the lower side. One click and you are at “/mar/100120”.
Same with numbers: Marking the “12” from the 100120 pops up the “11” at the upper and “13” at the lower side. This would be a real time-booster!

I got some more ideas but for now this should be enough :-)

Don

Easy of Mobile (means moving from desktop to Mobile and back without things being that different)!

Key Productivity Tools are:

Browser and Mobile also = email too.
As webmail does not interact with Browse send then we Need local email client (but as follows):
IMAP storage like with Thunderbird Sync Kolab Plugin
http://www.gargan.org/extensions/synckolab.html
- need mobile contact list and mobile calendar between devices!

No Database just file Mobile Photo management with synch - also able to send compressed reduced size photo with ease like pre-KDE4x-oldGwenview with Kipi-plugins! WHERE photo manager launches email client and ready to send. Should be able to click on document and 1 or more ODF files, with ease (like the Gwenview Kipi-Plugin email photofiletool again, but more intuitive).

Next to the grey/red close button on the tabs, I would like to have a button “Close, but remember”.
Metadata about that page would then be stored
(URL, Titel, times I visited it, last visit).
I would be able then to browse, navigate and search easily through these pages, which are not deleted, when I delete my chronics.
I am often too lazy to make a bookmark and my bookmarks become too many. This would be something between a bookmark and a chronic.

agreeing with Jolle, i bookmark stuff all the time but when i try to find something that i’ve bookmarked it almost becomes a task in itself finding the bookmark. it would be useful if there was a function which would sort the bookmark according to the title so that a bookmark on a gaming article could go into the games folder and so forth. Another interesting feature would be adding a little note on the page. Like for example while your viewing a page, you wanna write stuff down or copy certain things, it becomes a hassle to open up notepad or word thus a in-browser notepad would be helpful. plus the information on the page could be in a way stored so that the next time you visit the page again, what you wrote last time is still there.

just by two cents.

the only way to get mozilla into large companies is to handle settings over Active directory policies (Registry) or find another way to handle it.
another problem is to configure ntlm autentication based on sites or urls.

I want a leaner Firefox and instead of adding every feature to it and making it fat, you should consider having all those nice features available as add-ons. Use more developer power to make Firefox even more standard-compliant.

I don’t need shiny flying things that eat my CPU. I want my browser to surf through the web and not entertain me by itself (who remembers the office assistant in MSO? ;)).

Just a small thing, but very important: Loading websites should have a higher priority than downloads. Currently Firefox is almost unusable when there are 2 or more active downloads and you want to navigate to a webpage.

Oh great it’s Mozilla Vista. Either that or it looks like an Apple Gimmick.

Just read the RFE’s in bugzilla. This will give you thousands of new ideas and thats also why your users have submitted them.

Thank you for the opportunity to share ideas. So here are some things I would change:

- Flash: Installation and update is fully automatically handled by the browser.
- Favicon on white background (like FF 2)
- For developpers: option to fully clear the cache before every page-request
- Option for disabling cookie from not visited domains (like safari)
- Option for disabling resizing of the current window for scripts. Definetly no web app need 1920×1200.
- Sometime there is the case
- Scroll speed: Possibility to hold down a key to double the scroll speed.
- Some of the CSS function which is provided by the webkit via -webkit-… e.g. dropdown shadows with gradient (not if FF3 can do this - if so: documention for all of this)
- Integration of some JS frameworks. So they must not be downloaded and rendering is faster. Example: A script that has the synthax “implemented_[frameworkname]_[version].js” will not be requested from the host if FF has this script implemented.

Why is there a small smily in left bottom corner?

How about the ability to have multiple rows of tabs?

If you have, say, 40 tabs open at once, why not have it as two rows of 20? It gets to be a pain to scroll through all those tabs. I had this issue just yesterday when trying to pick out classes for the semester. This could be an adjustable setting.

While my colleagues and I have enjoyed looking around Mozilla Labs, we couldn’t help but notice how closely the test tube image at the top of this blog post resembles a used condom. It had us all rather confused for quite a while.

Instead of searching for radical concepts why not just study the most popular plugins and focus on systematically integrating those features into the main browser distribution?

The last thing I want to do is to -ARGUE- with my browser…

Sub-Tabs. If I am reading a page and there are links within that page I can open them in another tab and adjust where it opens, but there is no association with the original tab. Some sort of tree view might be cool. I would then be able to visually determine from which tab I opened the successive links.

One thing would be nice:
A version which is really small. That means just the things like tab-browsing, history and the other basic things for small systems.
Because other gui-browser (konqueror, IE, gnome browser) are getting big.

The possibility to save whole sessions would be nice. Storing all tabs and Browserwindows of a session in a special Bookmark should be easy to realize.
So you could do some web research on a particular topic with several sites. Then you could store the session in a single session bookmark and continue later.

I also like the “sub-tabs-idea” of Jason Herbst very much. I wished to have such a gimmick often before.

Hi,

if the future version “blows up” so much. It would be fair for users with less performance to give them the possibility to change to the classic mode (”simple mode”).

My next idea would be the integration of a command line console, for configurations, for commands like ping, telnet etc….
(A little transparent console box)

A better download manager…another gui, features like multiple connections etc…

A transparent animated popup box, when new RSS feeds are available. (After updating them automatically)

Good Luck!

I hope Firefox Mobile will be available soon (for Blackberry)

I find myself doing this every day and it seems to take much more effort then necessary:

1. open a new tab
2. click the search box in upper right
3. key in a search
4. press enter

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could press CTRL+ENTER in the search box to open a search in a new window?

Or perhaps an option that allows all searches peformed from the search bar (upper right) to always open in a new window.

I am not particularly into big wild changes. I think I would like to see addon packs offered, especially for new users. I am admittedly a firefox fanboy. I would like to see continued migration to it. Having suggested packs that work together pretested as such would be so much simpler for new users. Have a new user pack, web developer pack, social networking pack and so on. Then a new user can just install a package of addons and be off to the races. Just a thought since I have to find each thing individually for each new user I convert. They would never do it for themselves. If i could just say down load firefox and pack #1 and #3 that would be so cool.

make use of multicore-cpus! multithreaded java-script rendering and website rendering (make cairo uses mulitcore-cpus..) via clutter, glitz or opencl/opengl?

This looks excellent and has quite a lot of potential to me. However, I hope development will focus on functionality and speed as this is why I choose to use firefox. If I wanted fancy graphics and stuff I would have gone for something else.

However, there is definitely some good innovation here which gives me hope that firefox to aurora will not be like XP to vista.

Je trouve que cela serait pratique de pouvoir désactiver le son d’un onglet.

Par exemple on écoute de la musique en même temps qu’on joue a un jeu en flash qui a une musique propre. Si le son de l’onglet du jeu est désactivable c’est beaucoup plus agréable.

Interesting, but I’m sure about the stuff on the Z axis. What is the point of that? If you have not used something for a while it kind of floats into the background, but other than aesthetics, is there any purpose to this?

In other words, are you going to be able to ‘move’ deep into the z-axis with the mouse? In the example I saw you could only go into the z-axis after running a search. it would be nice to be able to move through the z-axis - ’swim’ in it, so to speak - by moving the mouse (perhaps middle mouse button+forward or back). Otherwise it serves no purpose and just clutters the screen.

Sorry if you’ve already worked on this, I only watched the first vid.

When I open this browser of the future, I don’t want to see anything when I open the application (i.e., no tabs, search box, favs, etc)…nothing but the application window with a web site page loaded (the ‘home’ page). If I want anything to show up, the ESC key will bring up a semi-transparent or non-transparent floating menu from which I can tailor the application.

Opening multiple tabs with web pages should just automatically be rendered as a scaled equivalent that page and float somewhere in the application window as your standard desktop icon….then if I have a bazillion of those ‘thumb tabs’ open, I can rotate left/ right (or up/down) through those ‘thumb tabs’.

Typical bookmarks are often “out of sight, out of mind” for me.

I’d like to see an extension of the bookmarks toolbar, wherein I can group certain bookmarks and click something with a favicon, or a custom icon, that has a dropdown menu for that group of links.

This way I have a visual “bookmarks” toolbar, with more bookmarks than I can just fit across that bar. It could be organized just like the current bookmarks are, with folders and subfolders, but I’d want for the “group” placemarks to have custom icons or allow a specific favicon from a link inside the group, be the representative graphical interface.

I should be a perfect target for this sort of excercise since I am a visual person - an artist / designer - and very comfortable computer user who does some programming for fun. This is the sort of thing that looks great in a futuristic sci fi movie, but has too little connection to how people think and act in the real world.

I looked at the video of the Aurora browser. I’d be very unhappy using it. It would slow me down a lot. Aurora has wayyy too much stuff all over the place and is totally aimed at the icon oriented user. I get lost in a screen full of junk and no labelling. I need a less crowded screen and I want everything labelled since I search for applications and documents by name, not by a picture.

I also don’t want a search function that has all the stuff moving around and receding into a graphical “past”. I want stuff that I would like to find again to stay where I put it. I have enough memory issues without all my important items wandering about.

In order to preserve health, we need to customise images and sounds. For example, after 8 hours in front of a screen, we would have to be able to exchange black and white colors, or to launch a reading of the page at a selected speed, with a choice between a male and a women voice.

-I’d like to have a better printing feature…
-A integrated P2P BitTorrent Client (like in Opera)

-Intgrated Adbloc Plus ;-) (for people who don’t like to install “additional software”)

-And now one “really new idea” (or was it mentioned before - I don’t know?):
A full configurable Startpage with Gadgets like in iGoogle. But you it should be possible to dropp the widgets everywhere you like to and to lock them there. And there should be a possibility to add more widgets of course.

-A possibility to set 2 Welcome Pages (E.G. I would need it for opening the Router Webinterface to Connect it to the internet and it would be nice if I could open another page in another Tab in the Background (maybe the before mentioned “Welcome”page? ;-))

I think that was all.

This looks excellent and has quite a lot of potential to me. However, I hope development will focus on functionality and speed as this is why I choose to use firefox. If I wanted fancy graphics and stuff I would have gone for something else.

Oh I’ve forgotten the Link to a “concept image”:
http://img170.imageshack.us/my.php?image=konzeptfrstartseitefk6.jpg

More things could be a searchbar, a box with your favorites,…

What fun! Lesee, off the top on my head –

1. Tree-based History. This gives a visual indicator of where you’ve been, without having to futz with the Back button and remember all the page titles.

2. A way of resizing a column so that it will all fit on screen. I *hate* having to side-scroll to read a page that some bozo thinks just *has* to be 200 characters wide. Ditto an easy way to fix foreground/ backgrounds. No, orange text on a green background is *not* readable.

3. Better address book implementation. Idea is an LDAP-based directory that could be used by any app. See the Mac address book for an example. (The Mac address book has *a lot* of room for improvement)

4. Paranoia:
a. A way to store my keys on removable storage. While we’re at it how about preferences on removable storage? I go into an Internet cafe and have all my home browser settings.
b. Get rid of the self-sign nonsense. At least, it needs a better explanation of what you’re doing and an easier way to get around it.

5. It’s time for pixels to go away for anybody not building a rendering engine. I should no more have to futz around with pixels than I should have to code in assembly.

6. Music and math. The only way to do either of them properly now is to use an image. Yeah, I know MathML is a disaster, but how about an HTML-ized version of eqn? (voice from the distant past …)

Above all, make sure the bleepin’ thing works. This means making sure all the subsystems work (*cough* javascript *cough*). Also, I haven’t checked Firefox 3, but Firefox 2 seemed to be one big memory leak.

Anyway, thanks for listening!

looks awesome. it’s gonna use lots of RAM
and require a decent graphic card tho?

where is all the “meta” data stored? if i use
another computer at another place,
could i still get the “meta” data(:history, bookmarks)?

what i think is missing in all browsers are
some nice sounds. only IE has a oldskool “klunk” sound if you click on a link …

I would appreciate a private-mode, where I have complete control of the way firefox communicates with websites.
So there should be a built-in option to control flash-cookies and similar things, and I just want to know what there is going on e.g. with the anti-malware-application thats always contacting google… somehow I don’t feel so well about that all, I just would like to be asked and told all about that before I can agree.

Hilarious, looks like you learnt nothing from that terrible Mozilla browser that flopped

For a user interface, rather than a web of related thumnails, floating out in space, seemingly arbitrarily, I would personally prefer to have my history arranged in a helix (as if the user was looking down through the middle of a corkscrew), with a timeline along the outer ridge. The currently highlighted history item would then protrude out into the center of the ‘reticle’ with possible connections to related content now visible. The bottom-center of the screen could have an almost HUD arrangement to it, with the most pertinent information shown largest… But that’s just me…

re: Matthias Rossmy

Agreed, the Download Dialog needs a bandwidth throttler. But in the interest of “crazy ideas” — how about an add-on to tweak bandwidth rates for all sorts of things? E.g. objects like flash are loaded slowest, images next, and html/css/js is unthrottled? Perhaps background tabs (ajax or meta-refresh) is throttled so the active tab’s performance is unhindered?

Make the browser a reliable window to the net! That means:
- completely recover from crashes or other bugs (ideally, crashes would only affect a single window, and the crashed window would be fully restored immediately, including size etc.)
- offer an address bar that is always visible on the desktop, which could also be used to access Google (or other search engines) and even local files
- coupled with the global address bar, make sure the browser window launches immediately (no 2-second wait time)

I think this could make the browser really ubiquitous, and help to make the browser more useful than the desktop itself.

re: Eric’s Helix or Ring of History

Cool idea, perhaps the UI could be similar to Gnome’s Disk Usage Analyzer: Baobab

screenshot here: http://library.gnome.org/users/baobab/stable/baobab-usage.html.en

A UI like this would also be great for the Page Info dialog. The objects with their sizes would be color coded and spacially represented.

I would like the ability to “tear off” tabs into new windows, akin to what can be done with Safari.

Simple and lightweight Component that can easy include in projects. for example java, .net, c++…

Some things didn’t seem intuitive at all, like the flower shaped menu that didn’t label anything. Hope ease of use is going to be the primary concern for this. If not, people are happier with a car they can drive rather than a space ship they can’t.

I would like two features :

* The first one was suggested by cibias, is to embed a whole session in a dynamique bookmark. When I click it opens all the session qnd tqbs where I left it.

* The second is to create an password API which website could request to the browser to skip the login page. For example, I enter my master password and go to gmail where I usually get my login/password preset. With the appropriate header, gmail could know it can request automatically the login/password and bring me to my mail.

With theses two features, I could open a my webmail account in multitabs with one click.

This is amazing stuff. One thing about the Firefox Mobile concept: What would be done with pages that inevitably require horizontal scrolling? Would the panning not activate until the edge of the page is reached, similar to how the top and bottom of the browser UI can be accessed?

Two alternate suggestions, instead of requiring the user to scroll all the way through the page to get to the controls, both borrowing from the way modern laptop touchpads work:

A) Reserve a certain portion of each edge of the browser for panning. If the pointer (mouse/finger) starts at the very edge, ignore the page scrolling and activate the browser UI features on each edge.

B) Require a quick tap before panning. Similar to how a drag-drop works with the usage of only the touchpad (no external mouse buttons). In other words, you double-click the element, but hold on to the second click.

I can’t wait until these concepts meet reality!

Am always using the View/Zoom/Zoom In or Out. So instead of having to guide the mouse pointer through 3 separate clicks to zoom: how about two new icons up there next to “reload” and “home”? One icon has a plus sign on it, the other a minus, for zooming. It is also inconvenient to have to carefully place your pointer onto the View, then carefully on Zoom, etc. Control +- also inconvenient as the light may be low if just surfing and can’t really see the keyboard, or have to use 2 hands.

A Zoom-In icon, a Zoom-Out icon, both on a Toolbar would be Hot! It would also save some time… Thanks. :-)

Since using different Zoom settings for different websites, when I bookmark a website I want that Zoom Setting also saved in the Bookmarks file.

Example:
A website has tiny tiny type (almost need reading glasses) so have to hit View/Zoom/Zoom-In several times for a readable render. Now I bookmark this website. Later when I come back, the type is that same unreadable tiny type. Sure, I can just hit View/Zoom/Zoom-In every time access the website, but wouldn’t it be great if Firefox just remembered that Zoom Setting every time for me?
So maybe CNN would be at 125%, BetaNews.com at 200%, Yahoo at 95% etc stored as part of the bookmark. Thanks. :-)

.

I’d like a 3D browser space without buttons. I’d drag and drop photos, videos, web pages, music etc to my 3D space. This will be my e-world. My responsibility will be to maintain my e-world. Absolutely all drag and drop. Group content in galaxyies or drop media to black holes. My holes of worm will connect my things..

Mijn voorstel is om de “back”-knop-pijltje-naar-beneden (de back history) in een boomvorm weer te geven. Je kunt dan niet enkel de vorige pagina’s zien, maar ook de pagina’s die onder een eerdere pagina stonden.

Stel:
- Op fd.nl klik je op “KLM verhoogt winst” en daarna klik je op de link met de cijfers. Dan toch even terug naar de hoofd pagina. Als je dan weer het artikel “KLM verhoogt winst” wilt naslaan kan dat niet met de huidige “back” knop…

When a pop-up ad appears, or several unsolicited windows from out of nowhere, how about a right-click and then a choice to block this particular tab or window from ever coming back? The url domain would not be blocked, just the ads emanating from it.
Lately have been getting “Performance Optimizer” windows showing up, for this bogus product that do not want, but how did they get on my screen to begin with? If could right-click it, choose “spam”, such that it never comes back, hey thank you! The listing for all these spam windows can be somewhere in tools, re-allow if change mind…

So the “concept” is actually just a redesign of the interface of the computer, since nothing shown is impossible at current. And a redesign to what? As far as I saw that interface it was just as cryptic as the standard windows interface, if not more.

Feels alot like a concept car, It’s “pretty” but without the tech that’s already keeping billions of cars on the street, this is nothing, so it doesn’t really provide that much of a change.

These days we are strugling to cope with a huge stream of emails, twitters, rss feeds, instant messages, pokes, voip calls or whatever else is out there to catch your attention. We are overwhelmed and overfed by all these streams of information crossing the web and hitting our consiousness. How can your boss’s important email make it past the junk in your inbox? How can you tell this instant message is important and needs immediate attention? How would you know that a certain email refers to a recent blog entry? How about creating a visual interface to make sense of all these message and information streams?
Read on:
http://tinyurl.com/55ylkz

Intelligent link loading. I want to be able to click on 100 links at once and have my browser efficiently load them as fast as possible. I’d like the browser to also be programmable so that if a site snags on loading an ad, the browser would stop loading that page. The browser should also stop any automatic files from starting (embedded media, etc.).

My ideas require 2D acceleration.. Hot sides and corners (auto-hiding with fades):
- Default view would be fullscreen mode with tabs
- Navigation bar and Personnal bar with mouse hitting top side of screen
- tab navigation with mouse hitting Left or Right screen sides with customizable activation time..
- Notifications on events with customizable effects (new feeds, downloads, etc..)

Configuraiton exemple :
- top-right corner to : close, minimize, add to fav…
- bottom-right corner to : show all tabs with preview
- bottom-left corner : homepage / new tab

This web browser is what I look for since ages…

An integrated e-mail client along the lines of Opera would be ideal as would speed dial married to a host of user friendly gagets!

That logo looks like a used condom

a. complete mouseless browsing out-of-the-box would be great
b. your new way accepting unknown SSL-certificates is unbelievable! sometimes, if i know that unknown certs could appear, i change to IE because the way you go is “bad” (friendly expression ;)

With the advent of cheaper monitors and digital video cards. More and more people are moving to two or more monitors for their desktops. Although there are many ways to use Firefox in multiple windows such as opening a new tab or browser and dragging it to another screen, the operate independently and there are no configurations in the browser to take advantage of the additional space. Sure, you can span you Firefox to multiple screens, but why not create an environment where you can meld the browser to multiple screens as multiple tabs do on one screen? The advantages are numerous; first an foremost, all monitors would be linked to a single browser so you could interact with multiple pages more effectively. You could drag and drop, have you email on one and reference another, etc.

Regarding the comment by “Francois Goudal”. SSL is supposed to be a “pain in the ass”.
Certificates should always be trusted and valid. The pain in the ass should be on the webserver maintenance. Unfortunately the old way made everyone sloppy.

As you probably understand I do like the increased SSL security/validation.

I saw a serious design flaw is this:
I call it the “lots of pretty pictures in a bag” paradigm.

I does look nice, but literally searching off the screen with you eyes, for a picture in a bag in reality is a UI nightmare. It’s fun, until you start to get angry that you can’t find shit and every control element needs you to hover over it before you know what it actually does.

We have enough screen space. Just label things, enable controlling the thing with the keyboard only, and allow mouse and keyboard shortcuts.

Oh, and NO “3D”, because you still an only see it from one position at a time… most of the time trough a 2D window.

I hope someone takes that idea and makes something serious out of it.

I think the feedback system would be better if we had some sort of way for people to vote (i.e. thumbs up/ thumbs down that’s spreading everywhere) on ideas everyone is throwing out in the comments here.

Even better, have the user who is voting select from a category to describe their own usage habits for a browser. Online collaboration is useless for some people and a necessity for others, for example. Let’s organize and streamline the suggestion process.

Unless I am missing something on another part of mozilla’s site… Many good ideas are kind of getting buried in all of these comments.

I think we could create an Idea Portal for Mozilla to consolidate the sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts with UserVoice.

Let me know if you think it would help.

Just to follow up. Another of these casalemedia pop up ads appeared (using Firefox 3). So ideally would like to right-click on this ad, with an option to never have any popups from http://b.casalemedia.com ever again.
How cool would that be?!
Thanks.

http://b.casalemedia.com/V2/67072/130791/index.html?www.ahwatukee.com/

Hi all,

Please check our site…

It will solve some questions :)

cheers.

Guys,

Check this!

cheers.

:)

with linux, it’s possible to make a copy/past with select-text/middle-clic, the problem is when I want to make a new search, it’s not ergonimic to erase the preview search with the del or backspace touch caracter by caracter (select all text erase the selection what I want past), I think that a no-clic solution with mouse over the bar for make an empty search bar will be a good thing.

another one : erase an adresse (in the adresse bar list) with ‘right clic -> suppr’

(sorry for my english)

Hi guys,

Aurora look SHIT and look as BABY-Playhouse, for kiddies, or for People that like a MAC Computer….

Sorry, but AURORA will never touch my PC, for what ?

Better Mozilla work on Firefox 4 and god is….

Where do I submit ideas? Just type here as comment? or anywhere else?

Mozilla Firefox is unable to give their (awesome) location bar a sort order by “last visited”.
Other browsers like IE, Mac, Opera are able to sort by last visited since many years.

This I could work with! (Use)

Ok, the frame and stacks ideas I can see promise in, and the dial is a nice evolution of the “dock” concept.

Technologies for desktop and application sharing, like NetMeeting or Shared RDP/VNC sessions have been around for years, but they are still a little cumbersome. Browser awareness of these technologies would definitely be a boon but the browser needs to be a party to the collaboration not the core of it.

That leaves the data systems - they seem pretty vague and nebulous right now…

And the z-ordered spatial storage system. Hmm. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen post-grads leap to center stage to announce their 3D indexing systems, from “Gravity” to “Looking Glass”.

They’re pretty, and that’s about it.

Take a minute to think about the ways humans store data in their existing, non-virtual, 3d spaces. The desktop and filesystem analogies have worked well because we don’t actually organize data spatially very well. We like things in piles, in rack, on shelve, in boxes, in drawers and cabinets, in trays or on rolodexes: anything to organize them into simple linear sequences.

How many humans do you know who arrange their bookcases at home in aisles? They don’t, they set their bookcases along the walls - that’s not a 3d mapping, they are organized relative to the walls making them a simple 1d line of bookcases, the brain worries about translating that into a spatial room-relative co-ordinate at a later time.

It particularly hurts and potential 3d system that you can’t readily “see” it and so people get lost, they are inconsistent about their organizational criteria and it becomes like the typical desk - a mess of data organized by chaos.

Humans tend to map things into 2d paths anyway.

I think that future browser should deal with an important number of input methods. I mean, currently, there is mouse and keyborad but others are already there like touchscreen (classic or multi-touch), voice recognition, motion detection with a webcam, …

Future browser should deal with all this inputs in a flexible and intelligent manner :
- keyboard could but used to type shortcut, commands (ie. keywords and natural language), …
- mouse can be used to point and click, to do gesture, …
- speech can be used to say commands (like keyboard, it could be keywords or natural language)
- touchscreen, and especially multi-touch screen, can be used like mouse or have more advanced behaviour
- webcam can be used to detected motion like hand moving from right to left, … to go backward, forward, scroll, go to another tab, …

I’ve no suggestion about the GUI design at the moment but I will try to post some ideas later.

Could you have a integrated shopping basket where you can put items from different web sites and pay all in one go. You could have a purchase history and manage returns or even track orders and show estimated delivery dates. There could be a default settings segment where you select best delivery times or instructions.

How about the ability to show all the links out of a web page in like a spiders web view with the ability to show 1,2,3.. etc links away to help find similar information.

(I’m french so I hope my english is good enough to explain you this concept)
What do you think about the historic of our web browser ?
I am convinced that the web navigation is more like to fumble. You click somewhere, get lost, go back and try another way. That is why the historic function is very important and need some innovation.
>> What do you think about a graphic historic that reproduce visual map of your trail on the web and use screenshots of each page visited.

To read more about this function, I have writen this article on my portfolio and create a picture to simulate this.
http://www.renofolio.com/historique-de-navigation-visuel
Leave me comments

I would like to see something like the Adblock plug-in to be built into the browser in an intelligent manner, so that only the data is left on the screen, and empty spaces are totally abolished.
For example, the elimination of unnecessary table columns and cells. By “empty” I mean that they become empty after all unwanted data is recursively deleted.
Besides the aesthetic aspects, this should be useful for reducing page size when printing, and also for better fitting web pages into mobile phone screens.

All what’s not convenient for me yet is working with tabs. I prefer to open a lot of tabs, keeping some opened for days or weeks. And that’s why I know what’s missing.

My ideas:
1. When you put your cursor between two tabs the small button appears separating them. When you click on the button you get a new tab between those two.

2. Tabs visual grouping. There are many ways to do it.
a) Automatic per-domain grouping
b) Grouping in predefined groups by keywords (for example, Study, Work, Entertainment etc).
c) Shared tab groups.

I’v had this idea for quite some time now.
wouldn’t it be great if, after setting up your browser for the first time (e.g. downloading all your usual plugins and extensions, and setting up your proxy settings and personal preferences) you could then “repack” Firefox into an installer.

This new installer could perhaps be given a custom name, and even details of what settings are allowed to be changed once its been installed on another computer.

The benefits of this feature would be huge for people with multiple computers at home or for big offices and the like, where the computer admin could simply set up a firefox installer, and install it amongst all the computers on the network. This would really help offices make the switch over to firefox.

I hope you guys consider this idea, because I think it would definitely have its uses.

Just my 2 cents :p

Please implement something similar to IE’s filter:flipv and filter:fliph CSS attributes. Just something enable vertical scripting.

http://www.ssi-developer.net/css/visual-filters.shtml

Please develop a Tool Tip, that you can see a small picture from the linked side, if you press shift over a locigal link.

I would my phone to listen in to all my conversations even when I am not on a call and always have relevant searches already searched when I pick it up.

Then I can point to it and choose what interests me.

Jach Framer:

There is also .war, which is a tar+bzip2 or tar+gzip archive with index.html and other files.

Konqueror supports that, but not ZIP-compressed .war files.

Firefox currently supports ZIP and gzip compression, but only ZIP-compressed .jar files.

Interessting would be an addon that allows you to have floating webpages on the desktop. Tabs are a good start to manage several webpages at the same time, but sometimes that is just not enough to work proper. I suggest that it would be helpful to be able to arrange webpages free on the desk in the size the page is needed.(Variable Zoom and size of the windows)

Hmmm - personally, given the increasing prevalance of widescreen monitors, I’d like to see the interface make better use of screen space.

for example, the tab bar could be moved to left side of the screen, with tabs stacked vertically. As well as increasing the amount of vertical screen space available to rendering the actual web page, it would also avoid the need to squash tabs down so far you can’t read the names (when you have lots open). Better yet, make the tab bar a draggable pane, that snaps into position, so users could have it at the top, sides, bottom, or just free-floating (resizable).

Second idea would be to merge the menu bar, control bar (including the address line), button bar, and so-on into a single row - by default, each item would be shown as just a label, with one ’section’ being fully expanded to display all its controls (default: control bar + adress). If you mouse over the label for another section (or use a keyboard shortcut for a hidden control) the appropriate section expands, and the current section collapses. an optional time out could control whether (and how long) before the default re-asserts itself (re-expands).

These ideas are intended to reduce the amount of screen space taken up by ‘chrome’. Whilst it is not a major issue on larger desktop screens, it is on smaller laptops (eg Asus eee pc) which have significantly reduced vertical resolution. even if you only open one window, you currently still need to show two bars (menu + controls / address) - add a second page, and you get a third row (tabs) - resulting in a large amount of ‘wasted’ screen estate.

@remy said: Generally, we’re hoping that everyone will use either open content or open source licenses as appropriate that allow for redistribution and derivatives so that there can be real collaboration.

Look, get real. It doesn’t matter what the license the person who wrote the code “released” it under. If there’s a software patent floating around out there, and there assuredly is, citing anything like the technology, no matter how vaguely related it may be, rest assured the patent-holder’s lawyers will be knocking on Mozilla’s door, and getting paid $1,000.00 an hour to do so.

There is no licensing around a patent infringement claim. There is no way to be “safe” . The only “real” way out is for the developer community to wake the f* up and start lobbying their congressmen to abolish software patents as hard as IBM and Microsoft do to permit them.

We dont’ have a technical problem here folks, it’s a political one. You congressman needs to here from you loud and clear that software patents will destroy this industry in America.

1) I aggree with Don Camillo (idea #2) and suggest a system similar to Microsoft’s smart tags in Office. It’s a kind of specialized plug-in system that enables developers to hook in their detection engines to identify special types of contents like cities, addresses, stock numbers, people’s names or whatever and offer a context menu with things to do with this “information object”. This could be “add to Thunderbird contacts”, lookup in Google Maps or whatever. Simple Web-based actions could be defined using a simple XML file. More complex options require registering a full-blown event handler.

2) Moreover I also often have the problem described by Don Camillo (idea #5) to easily move to previous or next page based on some URL manipulation (when the page is not providing such a navigation on its own). I imagine marking part of the URL that should be incremented or decremented and the browser should than react on a keyboard shortcut (e.g. and ) to go the previous or next page by changing the marked part of the url. Once this is done during a session, the setting should be remembered.

3) Finally I’m wandering that nobody talks about implementing other HTML5 features like offline capabilities or caching, since I read several times that this should be the next big thing in the WWW (besides all kind of multimedia) and Google is working hard to develop a cross-browser plugin (similar to Adobe AIR).

Funny how quickly people try to fit this concept into what they currently know about computers and the web. I think the point was to discuss how we could better communicate and share data.

I think it would be really amazing to have the ability to search relatively. For example, you have some list of contacts of your friends and family, info on where you live, your favorite hobbies, sites, etc. Now instead of having a centralized web where search engines bring you popular sites, you could search through things that are popular with your friends or important in your geographic region. I think social networks have a great potential to extend into more general web browsing and also into regional browsing.

I think a number of technologies been centralized for convenience and now the world is seeing how this causes dependencies. I think things like the web, energy sources, and other technologies should be going in a decentralized direction.

Folders:
I would like to have an integrated folder structure for e-mail, web bookmarks and documents (offline files). I have 200+ folders in Thunderbird, 50+ folders in my bookmarks, and 1000+ folders on my HD. Often when I am looking for certain information, I have to search in all three data pools. What I want is to be able to store and browse e-mails, documents, and bookmarks which belong to the same project in the same folder structure on my hard disk.

Saving web pages:
Saving web pages should be as easy as saving text documents. Stored webpage should be always readable, also when the system is offline (pdf alike). Updating a stored webpage should cost not more than one click, without having to go through endless “Save As”/”Confirm overwrite” loops (and with the possibility to go back to an older version).

File handling / interaction:
Please remove “File”->”Open”, “File”->”Save As”, “Bookmark”->”Add” etc. or make it unnecessary to use them. In particular I want two access and save/copy modes:
- drag&drop via folder structure, e. g. by tiny handles attached to each open document
- auto completion via folder structure, just like Google Desktop, iTunes or Thunderbird Nostalgy (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/thunderbird/addon/2487)

I know that many of these issues need deep OS integration, but I wouldn’t hesitate to use a Mozilla Explorer instead of the pre-installed one.

Something which really is very useful would be the possibility in Firefox to save form-fields such as first name, last name, address etc.
accessible with the context menu or a shortcut to fill in forms on websites automatically.

there exists some extensions for Firefox but so far there was not really a satisfactory plug in and I think a built-in functionality in Firefox would be very handy.

Bloating, bloating, bloating down the river…

Idea: Anthropomorphize Data Objects in the Aurora Cluster Screen.

In the object cluster screen, which was demonstrated in the aurora concept video, I would like to see the data objects autonomously move around in space attempting to self organize into “social” groups based on common criteria. Each object would locate themselves in an attempt to establish their “social” identity with other objects. Objects could then exhibit social behavior such as forcibly excluding less relevant objects to the periphery of the group, or switching groups if they have been forcibly excluded, etc.

Why? you might ask:

People are very good at and greatly enjoy observing social dynamics. Its one of our primary evolved traits. By socially anthropomorphizing data objects, we put them in a context which is easy to understand, enjoyable to watch, and abstracted from the minutiae of their content. It would allow the objects to be expressive of their multiplicitous contexts without relying on a difficult-to-view network map. But most of all, it would be a new way of looking at data objects. New is very good. It changes the way we think about our world. I will post a demonstration when the contribution format is better developed.

Linux/X based implementations of Firefox should not depend on GNOME libraries.

I’d like to see a combination of voice and touch screen technology used. For instance you can say “firefox go to betanews” and it’ll go there, but when you want to read an article or download a file you just touch on it. Now you can either point to the article or just read the first word or two of it to go to it. You can just lay back and relax in your chair and browse the web without using the mouse and keyboard, plus it could get rid of the physical interface until you move the mouse giving you more real estate. Ultimately I think Windows should be all done with voice.

I know Opera does something like this but its not as well done as I think it can be done. Instead of having to press a button you should just be able to say something to activate the voice command system.

It would be nice to see a ZUI that is comfortable to control with a graphics tablet, too.

Quite often I want to go back to a site I have visited during the day or in the past but can’t remember it’s name but can remember when I visited it. Having the history viewable by order visited along with the alphabetical listing would be useful. Having an image preview of the site drawn from the cache when we hover over the link would be handy.

I think what you’re after is to align the functions of browser memory and history with the human mind’s memory and history better, which is a great objective.
Some observations:
-People remember in many different ways, but memory is generally a web of associations
-Speaking for myself, I can associate actions (like looking at a document) pretty precisely with times in the recent past — in the past week or so, I can recall with a high degree of confidence that I looked at such and such late Tuesday afternoon
-As I go further back in time, the reliability of associations with clock/calendar time falls off exponentially, and I have to rely on other kinds of associations (just after I got back from India, the day of the big snowstorm, while I was listening to some jazz album, etc. etc.)
-These latter kinds of associations are much harder to simulate, but if the clustering of events wasn’t confined to a single browser, but worked across my whole system you could do a lot more by correlating pages/applications I looked at with events in my calendar, documents I had open, email I sent or received, events reported in news sites or feeds that I looked at, what I was playing on iTunes, etc. — all kinds of thorny privacy issues there, of course, but I’m just trying to think about the cognitive problem here….

I think you really need to consider how simplistic design is very beneficial. You’ve made the interface extremely complex and cumbersome by making a radial menu that you have to manually bring up, and then the way all the previously used elements are cluttered EVERYWHERE. It is painful to look at and looks like even more painful to use.

If this were a video game or something, then perhaps it would serve to give character to the game. If you are trying to achieve the best web browsing experience possible, I think you need to consider making the interface much easier to use.

Keep the UI simple. Most functions should require no more than 3 mouse clicks, or be accessible via keyboard shortcuts.

Implement the rendering engine according to W3C recommendations. W3C compliance has always been one of Fx’s greatest strengths against IE.

I really thought this would be a good idea. I started reading, and then I got to the first video. If you can’t make a good video, just stick to text. I don’t need 1/2 fps and a disinterested woman showing me some concept technology. I skipped everything else to leave a comment about how horrible this video is. Now I’m leaving this site. Good luck with the project, but this presentation is bad.

Is it possible to have all the add-ons activated only when a site requires them (e.g. java etc.) or when you go over with the mouse? In this way it should be possible to benefit from a lean browser with full capability.

Universal keyboard

for laptops, mid, umpc, screen etc.

http://klawiatura.wordpress.com/

I would love to see support for vector-only web pages.

I would also like to see a secure database of font families which could be available to designers and bloggers. If the database could then be called to display text in a certain font without the materials being installed, that would really add some dimension to web design

Moving Tabs to other (maybe new) Windows without loosing form and dynamic Content (created from JavaScript or else)

I love how you have a used condom as a logo :)

This noise needs to be organized/categorized _loosely_

I’ve always wanted a text edit widget/app where I could
select an irregularly shaped “block(s)” of text and move it/them over to the side, then grab them later to
insert them somewhere else.

text entry widgets should turn off the mouse/text cursor
when the user starts typing, turn back on when the mouse moves

I’ve never understood why ff has all the user command
input bars at the top, yet, shows the resulting status
at the bottom… dumb.

At least offer the ability to position the status bar
(all bars) to the top (wherever).

Speed up the starting time : With several dozens of add-ons installed, the start-up time of ff is a problem.

Great concept to add to Firefox! Sort the damn bookmarks by clicking a single button. In the era of social networking, you can’t expect people to just have 10 websites added on their bookmarks.

Firefox needs to provide this feature natively and not depend on third party extensions that never get updated to support the latest Firefox release.

I’m sure it’s not difficult to add bookmark sorting on Firefox…

Thanks for a great browser,

Fotis
Athens, Greece

I don’t have any big ideas from a user experience point of view. Keeping it simple would be wonderful, but I suspect I’m in the minority there.

What I’d most like to see on the technical front is script only cookies (the inverse of the HttpOnly flag) and site security policies baked in rather than as a plugin. I’ve had a more verbose go at the topic on my blog.

Ok, this is pretty simple - I think this could probably be done as a plugin but… the ability to ‘pane’ your tabs so that you can see multiple different sites on a single tab. There’d be a variety of different setups which would go as large as a 2×2 or even maybe 3×3 grid.

Superb…

Great concepts. Cant wait to experience.
This is like something i have seen in a sci-fi film. Great work guys,

Excelent!

Excellent project. I can’t wait to test it. Congratulations!

Hi,
my wish: all browser frames are organized in static tabs. From time to
time I’d like to see more than one tab at a time. In eclipse (version 3.4) it’s possible to drag editor windows and separate them from the rest of the tab-bar. I’d like to have this as well. By doing this I get a new perspective, which I can store and load afterwards. Multiple separations are possible.

thx in advance

Hi,
another wish. For each tab the go back go forward functionality exist. Usually when You surf on a website, You click on a lot of links, that open in the same tab. So a long go-back-one-page history exist (about 20 pages are quite normal for me). When I want to go back to a specific site within this history it’s quite hard to find the right one, because the title usually is the same. I’d like to have a preview of all sites (go-back) and (go-forward) and pick the site from the preview.

Hi,

Here’s what I would like…

Mind-mapping software on a blank ‘backpage’ (as opposed to a separate tab). I could open any number of tabs on top of it and somehow drag my existing tab onto the map