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Mozilla

Features of the future

Well, I thought I’d sit down and be a visionary for a moment, and think about what it would take for Mozilla Thunderbird/Firefox to become the ultimate product for me. A few are bugs, a few are in the process, and a few are wishful thinking. Here’s what I came up with:

Firefox

  • Take Livemark’s to a new degree. I’m thinking personal portal. As users install livemarks, and visit sites, Mozilla’s internal start page puts things in priority (machine learning). Making my start page totally feel perfect for me. It learns what I visit, harvests those sites, and makes things work just like I would work.
  • WebDAV is awesome, but Mozilla doesn’t have it. We could really leverage it’s power by supporting it. Corporations love it because it uses port 80 (don’t need to ask the networking group to open some obscure port). So no open holes, just regular HTTP. Some Asset management software already supports it, other products are starting too. One thing some have done is ‘extend’ WebDAV to support their own unique filesystems (versioning etc.). So in our case, a company could write a firefox extension to add their own stuff to it, making Firefox ideal for the workplace. WebDAV is increasing in popularity, it’s a sweet solution to an old problem.
  • Patch updates – that’s right. No more ‘download the whole release’. But the ability to download what’s changed, and install through the updater UI. We need it, badly. It would save some serious bandwidth for Mozilla.org to update a .1 release without users downloading the whole client. Especially when not every file changed. Such as 0.9 to 0.9.1 would have been an ideal time for such a situation. Download in the background, and ask to install when the user quits. Simple and they didn’t even feel it.
  • ‘Add Engines’ needs to use update.mozilla.org
  • Pressing the spacebar with ‘find as you type’ enabled, shouldn’t cause the new search bar to open. It should just scroll down the page.

Thunderbird

  • Calendar Integration – This will be big. Really big
  • PalmSync in the installer
  • MAPI bugfixes (this is a long process I bet)
  • With Calendar integration needs to be some sort of ‘landing’. Similar to what Outlook does (but without the sucking). I see something a little like for Firefox (mentioned up above). But with Mail&News taking priority, as well as Calendar integration into the system. Tell me whose contacting me, what I need to do, and make it easy.
  • Bring back ‘open in new tab’ if Firefox is the default browser.

Both

  • Firefox and Thunderbird are both moving to take advantage of things like RSS, and Atom feeds. But they are separate Apps. When users use both Apps, they should be smart and keep in sync, so I can have it all available in both Apps. If I add it in Firefox, it goes to Thunderbird, and vice versa.
  • GRE

If something here isn’t a bug, feel free to file a bug, feel free to provide bug numbers, feel free to implement one of these. cc me on any bug that’s relevant to the above list. Have more things? Let it out. It’s the only way the best thigns make it into Mozilla, is when people say what they need. Support an idea? Say it, don’t like one? Say it!

4 replies on “Features of the future”

A large fraction of Firefox _is_ a single file — the layout library. If that .1 release includes layout engine changes, expect a download that’s about half the size of the total browser…

Boris: You make a good point, but you also say:
half the size of the total browser

I read that as:
“50% reduction in download time”

I would add Microsoft business contact manager type of application to Thunderbird, and also tie in with a mail server – sort of like exchange/outlook integration type situation. At least if the calendar and be nicely integrated to Thunderbird, that would be a good step to being with.

re: your information about WebDAV – actually WebDAV is not “regular HTTP”. It is a series of extensions to the protocol and is only a proposed standard. Some equipment which correctly supports HTTP cannot handle WebDAV eg. a Cisco Content Switch we have doesn’t support it at the HTTP level (layer 5) because it is not standard HTTP.

But yes, WebDAV is good, just in a pain in the *** kind of way.

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