Where To Focus?

November 5th, 2007

I think there’s a pretty wide range of ideas on how to best finish Firefox 3. Here’s my take on the the list:

  1. Focus heavily on the new Places infrastructure, polishing and tweaking the “awesome bar” and other UI improvements making it easier to search your local history and bookmarks, as well as pounding performance into submission.
  2. Focus on improvements to the existing Add-ons manager to make it easier to discover and install Add-ons from addons.mozilla.org.
  3. Focus on completing the changes to Stop changing and start testing the new Download Manager.
  4. Focus on evaluating and polishing the security UI enhancements that allow users to focus on website identity instead of the far-less-comprehensible SSL-encryption layer.
  5. Focus on memory leaks, web compatibility, and performance.
  6. Focus on any major regressions from Firefox 2.
  7. Focus on a selection of enhancements (such as tab preview, and native theming) that add fit and finish to Firefox, making it a more comfortable and enjoyable product to use.

A lot shorter, and surely cutting some nice things.

Posted by rsayre Filed in Uncategorized

8 Responses to “Where To Focus?”

  1. Mike V Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 11:44 pm

    No offense but that list sounds like a Firefox 2.1 rather than a Firefox 3. We can still have a keen eye on performance and yet add a lot of nice new features.

  2. rsayre Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 11:48 pm

    We’ve added lots of features. Time to stop. Don’t care what the version number is.

  3. Peter Kasting Says:
    November 5th, 2007 at 11:51 pm

    Thank you for being a voice of sanity; were I still working on Firefox I’d advocate for the same things you’ve said (and perhaps even drop the “native theming” bit). Just fixing items 5 and 6 properly could easily eat the rest of the time until Fx3 final ships. I’m still cringing from the horror that was the Fx2 theme change.

  4. Ran Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 12:09 am

    Good call, Rob.

  5. cbarrett Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 12:20 am

    Rob, you forgot to add #0: Ship, dammit.

  6. Mike Beltzner Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 6:40 am

    What makes you think we haven’t been testing the download manager? As far as I understand things, testing’s been ongoing since the feature landed back in the summer, bugs are being filed, and things are being fixed.

    The download manager represented almost an entire rewrite of the code, and I’m pretty amazed at how few regressions have popped up.

  7. DigDug Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 6:57 am

    As much as I would love to see more focus on performance, memory usage, and stability, I do have to say that the new Download Manager kinda sucks and really doesn’t add all that much new helpful UI. I really don’t understand what testing there is to do, when it doesn’t even really work yet.

    Same goes for a lot of the Places UI. Theres a place for screenshots to appear, and no screenshots to put there. There’s no way to access starred pages in there, making the whole star UI kinda pointless. etc. etc.

    Maybe you guys bit off more than you could chew in just a year here. I applaud the push to get this thing out, but its impossible to think about just focusing on performance at this point. Theres too much thats just half done.

  8. Shawn Wilsher Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 12:05 pm

    Hey now - most of the download manager checkins have had tests land with the features (or have litmus tests shortly thereafter for things difficult to test automatically)…

Leave a Reply