Introducing the Concept Series; Call for Participation

Chris Beard

220 responses

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.
Concept Series

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.

220 responses

  1. yerli dizi indir wrote on :

    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.

  2. kulak burun boğaz wrote on :

    That has to be the slickest thing I have ever seen. Being a tech fan myself, I am truly anticipating a browsing experience like this

  3. forex wrote on :

    I just wanted to show you a site concept I am working on. Now I will not say too much about it here but would welcome Mozilla Labs technical gurus to contact me for further information

  4. zhaopin wrote on :

    Why not get Firefox to run under linux without chewing 100% cpu usage? What a novel idea…

  5. su deposu wrote on :

    Why not get Firefox to run under linux without chewing 100% cpu usage? What a novel idea…

  6. kabin wrote on :

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

  7. konteyner wrote on :

    While I’m at it, why not branch Firefox development? There appear to be two camps — those who would prefer a simple, fast, lean browser with few features, just basic browsing; and those who want the most and latest resource-hungry features imaginable.

    For the Simple Browser crowd, get back to basics and create a Firefox Lite. For those who want a full-featured browser with full multimedia features, create a Firefox Plus. Or some such terms.

  8. Full Download wrote on :

    Please add upload and download your passwords to internet how this made on Maxthon (defolt propeties)- create profile on server mozilla and upload my settings, favorites, passwords, extensions…..

  9. Full Download wrote on :

    Please add upload and download your passwords to internet how this made on Maxthon (defolt propeties)- create profile on server mozilla and upload my settings, favorites, passwords, extensions.

  10. vural wrote on :

    So anyone who wishes to discuss this further, including those at Mozilla, please contact me so that we can sign

    http://kabinci.blogcu.com

  11. msnnicks wrote on :

    So anyone who wishes to discuss this further, including those at Mozilla, please contact me so that we can sign

  12. Richard Bland wrote on :

    Hello,

    I just wanted to show you a site concept I am working on. Now I will not say too much about it here but would welcome Mozilla Labs technical gurus to contact me for further information. This particular concept was initially being developed as a talent network but as there are so many out there we have now tweaked the design further and have begun looking for funding on a new type of internet browser, similar to what you are talking of now. Basically we want to develop a new way of interacting with the world wide web and individuals from around the globe via VOIP…

    Now yes, we are a very small company made up of two brothers, myself Richard (23) and brother, partner, Steven (28)

    This concept is huge and is already attracting attention from independent developers but they are all demanding huge sums of money. What we would love to do is find some people who could help us design and develop the concept into Beta, but for free, with the aim of striking a deal for those developers to take a cut if found to be successful.

    Mozilla Labs, we are now looking to you for some sort of communication. With no other way of getting direct contact with developers on your team, we thought by showing you the design you may be interested in what we have to say.

    So anyone who wishes to discuss this further, including those at Mozilla, please contact me so that we can sign NDA’s and release the design concept to you. (its is very rough at the moment, but you will get the idea)

  13. Şarkı Dinle wrote on :

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

  14. seo wrote on :

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

  15. katlanır cam wrote on :

    Why not get Firefox to run under linux without chewing 100% cpu usage? What a novel idea…

  16. 3ds max dersleri wrote on :

    This server would be scriptable with PHP (or whatever) and could be used to do background web searches, retrieving and filtering information requested by the client

  17. JackPotte wrote on :

    We need to search underlined or bold texts.
    Moreover, a “back” on a new tab should be customized to go to the previous one.

  18. kemal wrote on :

    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 video 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 asklip izle the light may be low if just surfing and can’t really see the keyboard, or have to use 2 hands

  19. daRaL wrote on :

    The words once decoded should be analyzed by an “assistant”. This could be a human-ish interface that you ask for things dizi izle and it does the mundane stuff. Lots of learning possibilities here; programming and teaching of what you mean and how words/facial expressions are linked together to give commands of meaning

  20. zrmbilisim katkıları ile 2009 seo yarışması wrote on :

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

  21. codeboot wrote on :

    Hey, this is just a suggestion, but it would be cool if the browser had a mute button, maybe browser wide volume controls as well. 😉

  22. oto kiralama wrote on :

    I am interested in working on a new client application I am calling a “web servant”. The idea is to put light weight web server capabilities on the client machine. This server would be scriptable with PHP (or whatever) and could be used to do background web searches, retrieving and filtering information requested by the client. Multiple sources could be searched and information integrated from those sources to produce a mash-up of value to the user.

  23. Kyle Kirby wrote on :

    Regarding Aurora, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?
    Aurora seems complicated enough to require a Ph.D to operate. A survey I took recently asked people what their browser Home Page was. Most said Google. Not because of Google’s search capability, but because it’s the SIMPLEST home page on the web. The time has passed when people wanted more features and complication. They are ready for simpler and easier now.

  24. juliano wrote on :

    I have a simple idea to integrate the location bar and search engine input box in a single input box so it looks better, at least for me. Instead of two input boxes only one divided in two with greyed text in each part saying something like (http:// | google) if you go with the mouse over http:// then the whole intput bar acts like a location bar, if you hover on the “google” greyed text then the whole input bar is a search engine input box.

    from:
    [http:// ] [G search ]

    To:

    [ type url here | type text to search ]

  25. freddietheone wrote on :

    I have not read a lot of the ideas before; these need filtering and sorting into the developing ideas.
    here’s mine.
    With computers now becoming normal-issue with cameras and microphones built-in, make the analysis of sounds in (speech) with lip-movement (lip reading?) into an entry method. The two could be combined for best entry of words and facial expression to add more refined meaning to the words decoded.

    The words once decoded should be analyzed by an “assistant”. This could be a human-ish interface that you ask for things and it does the mundane stuff. Lots of learning possibilities here; programming and teaching of what you mean and how words/facial expressions are linked together to give commands of meaning.

    Pointing and clicking is so crude. Develop the computer character as a front end.

    Here endeth my waffle.

  26. Sam Millar wrote on :

    This is a very good concept, nice to see you aiming high!

  27. Eddie wrote on :

    As far as firefox mobile. I understand this new innovation you are trying to achieve, but one potential flaw I see is addressing the cache issue on a mobile phone. Most phones don’t have the on board memory/HD space so if you kept pulling up tabs wouldn’t you run into an overload problem? I know my Blackberry curve slows down a lot unless I clear the cache/history a lot.

  28. Eddie wrote on :

    That has to be the slickest thing I have ever seen. Being a tech fan myself, I am truly anticipating a browsing experience like this. Would make life so much more convenient, not to mention exciting. When they talk about innovations and breakthroughs, this is what they were talking about! I want it now please 😀

    Eh…I don’t know about voice recognition…voice recognition is great in public applications like at a mall or something, but in the house the last thing you need is a family shouting at their computer all the time. I think my only suggestion is to find a way to keep the file size reasonable and create a version for atom processors since netbooks are the way to go these days :).

  29. Andreas wrote on :

    For the short term it would be nice to integrate the search bar into the awesome bar. There is no need to have both of them.

    Intermediate term would be to integrate a data manager into the browser to browse not only websites but also local dokuments etc..
    That would be the first great step towads the final purpose.

    In the long and term it will be the time to displace the conventional operating systems with the browser, because there is no need for a desktop and the taskbar can be implementet as a combiend tast/tab bar.

  30. Bryan wrote on :

    I am something of a purist.
    1. I do NOT want bars that auto-hide or auto-appear or any of that; it’s distracting to me, and it requires several extra steps to find those options again (make the bar appear, locate the button). Add it for the people who want it, but make it very easy to turn off. Auto-hide is a patch solution; instead make the UI more streamlined and concise; eliminate options that people don’t need.

    2. A button in preferences that reads as follows: “Click this to have no warnings, ever.”

    3. Automatic updating should be seamless; if I have to say “apply the update now” then it’s not automatic.

    4. Make it faster. I don’t care about the start up time, but I would love to have pages load instantly. Also (and perhaps conversely), make it take less RAM. Try loading up Google’s new Chrome and opening 8 tabs…you’ll easily break the 150MB mark.

  31. Gomi wrote on :

    I’ve got an aweome idea! Why not make a Firefox that isn’t a memory/CPU hog? Brilliant!

  32. Craig S wrote on :

    @ Andrew Lu and Anonymous Coward and whoever else mentioned voice command for Firefox, if you have Vista you’re all set. Just enable Speech Recognition, and download the extra Speech Recognition Macros from Microsoft’s website. Then, create macros to do whatever you want in Firefox. I use it to fight against carpal tunnel syndrome.

  33. Shiggs wrote on :

    Hey, this is just a suggestion, but it would be cool if the browser had a mute button, maybe browser wide volume controls as well. 😉

  34. pablo wrote on :

    here is my concept

    http://i36.tinypic.com/2wqvngy.jpg

  35. Jonathan Davies wrote on :

    Disclaimer: Haven’t read all previous posts so this may have already come up, come to think of it an extension may already exist that does this too, but anyway…

    Would be nice as standard to have a way to switch between different modes/profiles of Firefox use. For example, I’m a web developer so would be great for me to switch between Development mode (with dev extensions, search engines and bookmarks), SEO mode, Downtime mode (with all my home extensions enabled) and Speedy mode with no extensions enabled. For more regular users this could be used for say a ‘Media’ profile, a ‘Research’ profile, a ‘Shopping’ profile etc.

    Each profile could have it’s own custom search engines, extensions and bookmarks defined. You may also have a shared profile for certain key extensions/bookmarks/search engines that you wanted to appear across all the other profiles.

    As long as it was quick to switch between these it could be a great way to maintain a streamlined browsing experience for different scenarios. Context is apparently king these days after all.

  36. Aakash Goel wrote on :

    Introduce locking of tabs, hiding tabs (sort of minimizing to reduce cluttering).
    Have a button which on clicking shows the contents of all the tabs (much like in IE).
    Integrate a session manager within firefox itself.

  37. Henry wrote on :

    Your concept looks amazing. Its exactly what i want, something that lets you control the web and the content your looking at. I want to be able to create and show things, not copy and paste, hyperlink, url. I want a smart browser that allows me to start a thread on a forum and grab entire web pages that come off like lego pieces that i can put into my post, move, scale, add, edit, comment and then post. Taking multiple sources and laying them together like i was creating layers in photoshop. You do that, and the web will be yours.

  38. Vadim wrote on :

    1. Auto scrolling (mid mouse button) on minimum speed is very fast ordinarily. I would like to propose a logarithmic control of speed, and it should begin with somewhere about pixel per minute (to read small text without pauses).

    2. Switching show cached pictures likewise Opera, but only two modes enough:
    * Show all pictures
    * Show only cached

  39. mømø wrote on :

    I think a very cool feature would be a “clicktrail” in the history (especially on pages like Wikipedia where you trend to get lost following links to other articles), so that you can see where you came from or discovered this page.

    A possible implementation would be to save every element in the history with a field saying how you got to this page, like:
    – “Followed hyperlink on http://example.com/foo.html”
    – “Search for ‘foo bar’ on google.com”
    – “URL entered into Location Bar”

  40. Alan Radley wrote on :

    I have developed a new concept called a Lookable User Interface (see http://www.spectasia.com/) which would be an excellent way to browse, navigate and retrieve bookmarks in Mozilla. If someone from the Labs wants to contact me I can discuss how to proceed. Thanks. Alan.

  41. OHR wrote on :

    “For the Simple Browser crowd, get back to basics and create a Firefox Lite. For those who want a full-featured browser with full multimedia features, create a Firefox Plus. Or some such terms.”

    this is the very truth.
    although different people prefer differently,the the simplicity is a truth for ever

  42. MMcCubbing wrote on :

    “For the Simple Browser crowd, get back to basics and create a Firefox Lite. For those who want a full-featured browser with full multimedia features, create a Firefox Plus. Or some such terms.”

    Why not just during the install ask if you want the basic or full installation? That way there is still just one install file (helps reduce confusion) and people can decide what they get.

  43. Jennifer wrote on :

    My 6-year-old son — who doesn’t read much yet — uses bookmarks all the time. Now, on the one hand, having text bookmarks is a good way to teach/encourage a kid to read: I mean, he recognizes the printed phrase “pbskids.org” now. But on the other hand, I would love to have that scroll bar of thumbnails available to him, particularly with the easy enlarge function — so he could go to the pbskids.org home, or to the Caillou subsection of pbskids, etc., without having to call me.

    Another idea would be for the user to select which portion of the page he’d like to appear in the bookmark thumbnail. This would be a allow one to skip the extra step of viewing the larger version. Since, as you know, so much of a page is crap. … It would also be useful if, say, I were shopping online and bookmarking a bunch of dresses I might potentially buy — instead of having the entire jcrew.com page appear in the thumbnail, I could have just the image of the dress I like in the thumbnail.

  44. R C Primak wrote on :

    While I’m at it, why not branch Firefox development? There appear to be two camps — those who would prefer a simple, fast, lean browser with few features, just basic browsing; and those who want the most and latest resource-hungry features imaginable.

    For the Simple Browser crowd, get back to basics and create a Firefox Lite. For those who want a full-featured browser with full multimedia features, create a Firefox Plus. Or some such terms.

  45. R C Primak wrote on :

    There already is a Firefox Extension to transfer and synchronize Firefox Extensions and Themes, or entire Profiles from one user to another, even one computer to another. It is called the FEBE Extension, currently in Version 6.0 Beta at the developer’s Homepage. Also very useful for backing up and restoring Firefox Profiles.

  46. frank wrote on :

    Has nobody gotten the idea that FX _can_ do everything one needs at the moment? There is no need to release a new version every now and then with even more bloat just to satisfy version number fetishists. First you should optimise and harden the current one. It’s nigh unusable on my (freshly installed) Linux due to the slow user interface. How can I sync two places databases without export/reimport of an HTML file or the use of an external server (I have a separate Win, Linux and Portable Firefox)? Make each tab use separate threads so if a tab is busy with a big or script-laden website, it doesn’t drag down the entire browser.

  47. Roger Coates wrote on :

    I am interested in working on a new client application I am calling a “web servant”. The idea is to put light weight web server capabilities on the client machine. This server would be scriptable with PHP (or whatever) and could be used to do background web searches, retrieving and filtering information requested by the client. Multiple sources could be searched and information integrated from those sources to produce a mash-up of value to the user.

    Developing a suitable integration engine becomes a second part of the project. It could be based upon current W3C standards for the semantic web or other innovative approaches which would also be “open” and thus adoptable as standards.

    A base for this project might be to take something like Apache and strip it down to provide the engine for “web servant”. Not being familiar with the code of Apache I am not sure how feasible this approach would be.

    It seems to me that adding server like services on the client system opens enormous opportunities to create sophisticated personalized services.

  48. Glen Lipka wrote on :

    Posts like this are a great way to get ideas. One suggestion is look how Salesforce is doing it with their ideaExchange. People could vote on the different ideas. It’s working out VERY well for them. (I don’t work there).
    http://ideas.salesforce.com/

    The idea I “had” but reading this post, I realize I am not the first to suggest it is to make profiles online instead of local. Cookies, bookmarks, history all should be stored remote to make the browser more portable.

    I wrote it up here: http://commadot.com/future-browsing-idea-server-accounts/

    Great work, I love Mozilla.

  49. Linux Nerd wrote on :

    Why not get Firefox to run under linux without chewing 100% cpu usage? What a novel idea…

  50. Kelly wrote on :

    The future of Internet technology and web browsers is “predicted” by the new concept series project initiated by Mozilla Labs. In this project can participate people interested in sharing ideas that will help the discovery of new development directions for Firefox, Mozilla project and other web related topics in a pure scientific atmosphere of a virtual laboratory at Mozilla Labs website.

  51. Talynn wrote on :

    Aurora is nice and innovative, but it hides the danger of getting lost in the web and it makes beginners hard to learn browsing, because this concept gets away from the interface design of the OS. It may be a problem for Apple/Mac OS X GUI Guidelines, which will be taken more serious from the developer scene than the ones for Windows, which are more inhomogeneous. So, I think Aurora should be last an optional activateable feature.

  52. Rexedead wrote on :

    Please add upload and download your passwords to internet how this made on Maxthon (defolt propeties)- create profile on server mozilla and upload my settings, favorites, passwords, extensions.
    sorry for my English
    thanks

  53. nicmcc wrote on :

    I would love to have a tool that synchronizes my Firefox add-ons & extensions on different computers. I use Firefox on 4 different computers & have to customize Firefox on each of them.

  54. bonelyfish wrote on :

    The ideas are evolutionary instead of revolutionary, least to say radical. They mostly focused on pretty and stylist interface without addressing what people wants or problems encountered. For instance bookmark is an old concept that should be reworked to ease the pain of growing amount of information.

  55. Pekka Jääskeläinen wrote on :

    Here you can find kind of 3D browsing http://taggalaxy.de/ . It’s Flash application but still.. I have nothing to do with Tag Galaxy project, so this isn’t ad. Just wanted to give a hint how it feels to browse in 3D space.

  56. Revanth Reddy wrote on :

    While a few lucky people have multi-monitor setups, most of us are stuck with just one. The one thing I find myself doing often viewing multiple pages where I would need to move back and forth. For example, if I am watching a football video stream on one tab and have realtime box score data on another tab, I would have to constantly switch between the tabs. Of course, the other alternative is to have two browser windows and resize them to fit my screen. But this does not always work as most web pages are formatted to have blank space on the margins.

    Having 3D or a feature that will square up the browser to allow multiple pages to be viewed side by side would be very appreciated for many of us. To solve the problem of the text/video being too small when viewed in squares, a simple zooming feature would suffice. Users could highlight the area of interest on each page and switch to grid mode to zoom that area maximum size of the square.

    Bittorent integration, specifically uTorrent’s client, would be awesome and more convenient.

    A more comprehensive built-in English dictionary is needed for better spelling and grammar checking. The current one in Firefox 3 still is somewhat outdated and does not include many pop culture words even official dictionaries include.

    Auto-optimization by Firefox based on internet speeds. I use my computer on several different networks and each has varying speeds. It would be a pain to constantly change the about:config settings for network.http items to assure I am getting the best webpage load times. This is why I just optimize it for the one I use most. If Firefox automatically tinked these settings upon each startup to match the appropriate bandwidth, browsing would be a lot more efficient and faster all around.

  57. Gary Yelland wrote on :

    MESH Browsing by Gary Yelland and Steve Fisher 12th Aug 2008

    The current browser technology is based on individuals viewing flat pre-prepared web pages. There is little interactivity, intelligence, and many people are performing the same searches and viewing the same information at similar times. This can be seen as a slightly improved version of newspapers, with online apps. To see the next generation of browsing, it helps to think back to basics and see the problem of information distribution from the beginning without any preconceived ideas on how we use the internet today.

    The way we would like to interact with the internet.

    We would like the internet to organise itself (or appear to do so) and present the information to us. We would like the internet to know who we are, what we are doing and in what context we want information. We want to decide how much we want to share about us with the outside world, and how much we want to keep to ourselves.

    We do not really wish to search for anything this is a waste of our time, we would like the internet to provide us with focused options and information, when we need it, where we need it. If I’m having, say, a problem getting UML profiles to work, I want the web to give me the best advice on how I can overcome this problem

    We would like the internet to help groups of people with common interests, we would like to collaborate with people on projects, activities and hobbies. We would like to co-ordinate our actions with others around the world we want for everyone to communicate.

    Can all this be delivered today without a direct link into our brains ???
    well maybe it can…..

    MESH Browsing
    The internet itself is just a world of ends, there is only content at the end of each link and network connection. It doesn’t hold any content itself as an entity. So whatever intelligence we would like on the internet we have to build it at its ends. The Browser is a perfect platform to develop for this. The key to enabling this intelligence is optimised information sharing, a browser software communication layer is one way to facilitate this.

    One idea is that all browsers (or maybe a user group or a closed user group (CUG) of browsers) communicate with each other. The browsers would utilise a lite middleware to share data and synchronise activities – for example, running MIDI distributed real time across the group. Every user can set what sorts of information the browser can share. Then the browser transparently shares information constantly with browsers of friends, information servers, and other compliant platforms.

    The browser could on-the-fly index the users activities, cache (where we have been browsing). This index (high level internet referenced pointer information) is then shared. A kind of low level browser to browser peer to peer with small amounts of reference information if you like.

    This underlying browser communication layer, enables many high level benefits to the user without moving massive amounts of data around the internet, for example:

    Links Management
    We would like automatically generated and organised links to web sites that might be interesting for us.

    Its highly likely that us and our friends have common interests, so what they are browsing is likely also to be of interest to us. So use the MESH to work this out for you and present the links that might be of interest. How many times has your friend said “I will send you a link, have a look its cool”. Let the MESH do this for you.
    Take this one stage further, why not in real time, create a “tag cloud (font size of site title is proportional to popularity)” of all our friends favourite links, so I can see popular sites and common interest activity. It doesn’t have to be our friends it could be any group of people on the internet, maybe a SIG (special interest group) for example.

    Push content
    We would like articles of interest prepared for us without having to search.

    Most people visit a few web sites on a regular basis and search for new things. Therefore our coverage of the internet and new content is very limited as we are creatures of habit. Why not let the MESH, learn about out interests from our activity, finding new content dynamically and perform the searching for us in the background. The MESH can then prepare cached content locally for us to view when we want. We would see content that perhaps we would never have thought to look for but is of interest, expanding our coverage of the internet.

    Background tasking / link preview

    We want to see a link before we actually go there.

    When we are viewing web pages, the computer is not really doing anything, why not use this CPU time for multi-threaded activities. Links on a page for example, use the cache, or caches of other browsers on the MESH to pre-load thumbnails of all links on the page, with a short text description. Therefore when I hover my mouse over the link I see a thumbnail so I can decide if I really want to jump to another page or not.

    Dynamic Page Creation
    We want to see information across multiple web pages on one page.

    Instead of viewing information that the web author has prepared, why not let the browser create the content and pages. Using the user awareness and the MESH gather relevant information across multiple pages on-the-fly, create simple web pages with all the related content on one page, this saves going to many pages and through many wasted advertising content to get the information you are interested in.

    Social networking
    We want to see and talk to our friends anytime in realtime.

    Using the MESH as the backbone, integrate messaging and video conference right into the browser. Now the MESH layer is providing the communication channels dynamically. We do not need dedicated websites to do this for us, we can do it seamlessly ourselves. The browser will let us know when our friends are online and able to talk to us. The browser can open a video or messaging windows and chat to who we want when we want.

    Interaction with Operating Systems
    We want to know when we have email when we are browsing the web.

    Assuming you do not want the browser to become heavy and act as a web operating system. It can monitor your application events locally. So while you are browsing the web, it can tell you when your other apps have finished or an email has been delivered. Using the MESH it could even tell you when they have received the email you have just sent or even if someone is about to send you a message.

    Security

    The interactivity advancement is a natural progression, but with this comes risk and exposure, so to balance this an in-built firewall into the browser would be useful. For users to set very simple policies on what they wish to share with the world, and the firewall to enforce it. To ensure the user has the control not the software.

    On another slant, the numbers of access detail sets that we have to employ in order to visit the sites we use is increasing. Coping with all this security information is a problem and one that is solved in many (usually) unsecure ways. A very useful thing to have would be some kind of Single Sign On facility where the system creates and manages account information.

    MESH Browsing, we think your are getting the idea now, browsers with intelligence, situational awareness of its users, able to provide content for you, working for you, not you working for your browser. Browsers that are the end point of connectivity, browsers that talk to browsers, sharing meta data and indexing, lite communications that points to information on the internet. Smart caching, sharing caching, opening the possibilities for groups of people with common interests. With MESH browsing the internet seems quite a different place.

    by
    Gary Yelland
    Steve Fisher
    12th Aug 2008

  58. john wrote on :

    downloaded TOR using internet explorer, but cannot launch it

    hello, i am user from China. as you know, internet are often blocked. in fact, i cannot open the ADDON page using firefox. i wonder if the firefox Chinese simplified version is already filtered by the government or not. I suspect that either the company or the government, or jointly block some of firefox function from properly running here. i was able to download TOR using internet explorer. but could not run it. i think the extension is not a normal EXE and the windows do not know what to do with it. well. in any case, can you tell me how to open TOR? i would appreciate using TOR properly to surf online comfortably and safely. Thank you

    Hello, this is another sign that China blocked mozilla. the following message returns when i tried to post this question on mozilla’s support questions. look, it said “incorrect thread”. Fuck the government in China. and Fuck those who submit to that government.

    错误

    Incorrect thread

  59. Juan M wrote on :

    I suggest you to keep in mind the low-end user, those who have computers with low system resources.

  60. jmc wrote on :

    my whish
    better translation tools

  61. jmc wrote on :

    “Aurora Concept”
    does not look very easy
    but sharing a screen or some windows is a very usefull tool and should be part of a browser (like instant chat)
    curently we have to use different tools and there are compatibility issues with different os

    “Bookmarking & History Concept”
    looks like some extension of time machine for mac os
    looks great but I’m not sure I could work with that kind of thing
    more easy will be the ability to add any number of any keywords to any document
    then search them when needed
    the only problem when having thousands of documents is just to search them
    time is one criteria but is not enough
    and when thousands of them are just looking the same … automatic tools don’t help much

    “Mobile Concept”
    ?
    i guess, the question is just
    “what we want to do with a phone?”
    remote control a car or something.!

    my guess is that a phone is just fun for teenagers
    adults use it for calling other people

    but the most fun thing young people will do will be to take a video of their party and send it on youtube

  62. tfk wrote on :

    Some small things:
    .htaccess password pop-up shouldn’t deny access to other tabs. When my password in some email (webmail) and I want to copy it.

    Toolbar (File, Edit etc) isn’t used so much. Why don’t make it appear only in some action (mouse over titlebar). I have a 14″ laptop and every inch counts.

  63. Lukas wrote on :

    1. The User should be able to manually change the Browsertitle

    2. Faster and secure browsing are still the most important challenges

  64. Ronnie wrote on :

    As someone who knows a little about how links work and as someone with A LOT of web pages, what I really want is unique identifiers on web pages so you can find them when they move
    around and/or a “Hunt It Down” facility that takes the key information from a previous link (text and file name) and looks for reasonable matches on the Internet.

  65. rack88 wrote on :

    I like the mobile version of firefox. Good luck on the development for the iPhone etc.

  66. pogolino wrote on :

    What i miss in the current version of FireFox is that everyone can see your history if he wants. There should be a possibility to disable this or (even better) you should be able to protect everything with passwords.

  67. Culex wrote on :

    The flash videos presented hate the Gnash browserplugin…

  68. LechPolski wrote on :

    That idea, 3D search, is it for one or more screens ? Because proffesionals work on more monitors … thatfore an XYZ could be present on 3 screens …

  69. RobNoyes wrote on :

    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 mapping software dropping it on a map-branch where it makes sense.

    Then, I could save my mind-map/bookmarks as an idea…then, start over on a new idea…if two ideas come together I should be able to merge the two with the mapping software, tracking where similar links intersect, etc.

    I think it’s a good idea. I hope you think it is as well. Please let me know if you do.

    Rob
    http://www.LetterRep.com

  70. Jörg Liebig wrote on :

    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.

  71. Jörg Liebig wrote on :

    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

  72. walter wrote on :

    Excelent!

  73. Chamith Gunathilaka wrote on :

    Superb…

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

  74. Patrick Lafond wrote on :

    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.

  75. Bell wrote on :

    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.

  76. Fotis Evangelou wrote on :

    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

  77. Harry McKame wrote on :

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

  78. mjbjr wrote on :

    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).

  79. mjbjr wrote on :

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

  80. mjbjr wrote on :

    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.

  81. mjbjr wrote on :

    This noise needs to be organized/categorized _loosely_

  82. TG wrote on :

    I love how you have a used condom as a logo 🙂

  83. Malte wrote on :

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

  84. Tyler Dockery wrote on :

    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

  85. Name wrote on :

    Universal keyboard

    for laptops, mid, umpc, screen etc.

  86. Peter wrote on :

    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.

  87. Radomir Jordanovic wrote on :

    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.

  88. Laie Techie wrote on :

    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.

  89. Aaron wrote on :

    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.

  90. Robert Crooks wrote on :

    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….

  91. grabate wrote on :

    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.

  92. Aleksej wrote on :

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

  93. Hellcat wrote on :

    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.

  94. Roger Maris wrote on :

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

  95. Eric wrote on :

    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.

  96. Name wrote on :

    Bloating, bloating, bloating down the river…

  97. Dominik wrote on :

    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.

  98. Moby wrote on :

    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.

  99. Sean wrote on :

    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.

  100. René Peinl wrote on :

    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).

  101. swv wrote on :

    @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.

  102. Geoff wrote on :

    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.

  103. Mik wrote on :

    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)

  104. Aleksej wrote on :

    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.

  105. Susan Wong wrote on :

    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.

  106. Michael Geppert wrote on :

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

  107. Stephen wrote on :

    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

  108. Michael Hole wrote on :

    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

  109. Anton Statutov wrote on :

    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.

  110. Harry McKame wrote on :

    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.

  111. Renaud Biemans wrote on :

    (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

  112. Nathaniel Tonge wrote on :

    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.

  113. Nathaniel Tonge wrote on :

    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.

  114. Jonathan Delizy wrote on :

    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.

  115. Oliver Smith wrote on :

    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.

  116. 2cows wrote on :

    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.

  117. Wayne wrote on :

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

  118. maniwelt wrote on :

    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….

  119. yamihc wrote on :

    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)

  120. Jay Bryant wrote on :

    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/

  121. Marcus Nelson wrote on :

    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.

  122. Connor Clark wrote on :

    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.

  123. BAReFOOt wrote on :

    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.

  124. Andreas wrote on :

    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.

  125. Matt wrote on :

    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.

  126. jeans wrote on :

    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 😉

  127. Boo Urns wrote on :

    That logo looks like a used condom

  128. Danny wrote on :

    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!

  129. x4hu wrote on :

    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…

  130. Mark Gisleson wrote on :

    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.).

  131. Igor Asselbergs wrote on :

    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

  132. RasmusKanse wrote on :

    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.

  133. Jay Bryant wrote on :

    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…

  134. Gosse AdB wrote on :

    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…

  135. Paul wrote on :

    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..

  136. Jay Bryant wrote on :

    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. 🙂

    .

  137. Jay Bryant wrote on :

    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. 🙂

  138. Christopher Parker wrote on :

    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!

  139. Phil wrote on :

    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.

  140. Trilok wrote on :

    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.

  141. Reisacher wrote on :

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

  142. Jason wrote on :

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

  143. nullchar wrote on :

    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.

  144. Oliver wrote on :

    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.

  145. nullchar wrote on :

    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?

  146. Eric wrote on :

    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…

  147. Larry wrote on :

    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.

  148. freeside wrote on :

    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 …

  149. sgs wrote on :

    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!

  150. katze_sonne wrote on :

    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,…

  151. 工控展览网 wrote on :

    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.

  152. katze_sonne wrote on :

    -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.

  153. JackPotte wrote on :

    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.

  154. Chaka wrote on :

    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.

  155. Seven Bates wrote on :

    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.

  156. Twinkies wrote on :

    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’.

  157. Daniel Polwarth wrote on :

    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.

  158. insecable wrote on :

    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.

  159. goparkyourcar wrote on :

    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.

  160. darwine wrote on :

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

  161. Eric wrote on :

    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.

  162. Alex Glass wrote on :

    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.

  163. Ferhat wrote on :

    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)

  164. cybias wrote on :

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

  165. cybias wrote on :

    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.

  166. David Daester wrote on :

    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.

  167. Jason Herbst wrote on :

    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.

  168. ray wrote on :

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

  169. Anthony wrote on :

    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?

  170. Kirsty wrote on :

    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.

  171. David wrote on :

    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.

  172. Bernd wrote on :

    Why is there a small smily in left bottom corner?

  173. Bernd wrote on :

    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.

  174. reader wrote on :

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

  175. Blades wrote on :

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

  176. Matthias Rossmy wrote on :

    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.

  177. Steven Koenig wrote on :

    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? ;)).

  178. martin holzer wrote on :

    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.

  179. Zach wrote on :

    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.

  180. Jolle wrote on :

    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.

  181. Anony Reader wrote on :

    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).

  182. Don Camillo wrote on :

    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

  183. Tom Bruno wrote on :

    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/

  184. David Thomson wrote on :

    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

  185. Gary Niger wrote on :

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

  186. AG wrote on :

    There is one Arora browser already you idiots.

  187. tfk wrote on :

    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.

  188. Josh Logan wrote on :

    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.

  189. Alex wrote on :

    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?

  190. Anonymous Coward wrote on :

    The videos are not working anymore.

  191. Jach Framer wrote on :

    MHTML Support would be good to save pages locally

    MAF is dead

    .

  192. JB Robert wrote on :

    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 !

  193. Derik wrote on :

    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.

  194. frag wrote on :

    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…

  195. noj wrote on :

    the video links seem not to work!!

  196. James Corbett wrote on :

    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.

  197. kanan wrote on :

    collapsible tabs

  198. Amin wrote on :

    i have always a problem with javascript.

  199. Kamil Sukun wrote on :

    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

  200. Andrew Lu wrote on :

    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.

    1. Estetik Güzellik wrote on :

      I've posted about Metalink in the forum. It would be great to see Mozilla involved in it! 🙂

  201. Svetlana Gladkova wrote on :

    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.

  202. lloyd wrote on :

    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.

  203. Francois Goudal wrote on :

    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.

  204. tfk wrote on :

    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

  205. Daniel O’Connor wrote on :

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

  206. Daniel O’Connor wrote on :

    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.

  207. John Josephs wrote on :

    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.

  208. Andrew Lu wrote on :

    @ 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.

  209. sriranjan wrote on :

    – 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

  210. cris wrote on :

    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.

  211. albeli wrote on :

    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.

  212. Anonymous Coward wrote on :

    @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.

  213. Ant Bryan wrote on :

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

  214. Nick Vidal wrote on :

    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

  215. cbeard wrote on :

    @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.

  216. Dave Gray wrote on :

    I have posted a couple of ideas here.

  217. Abi wrote on :

    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.

  218. remy wrote on :

    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.

  219. Andrew Lu wrote on :

    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.