More details on Firefox 3 planned features
During this and last week Mozilla developers and drivers had a run of meetings to discuss Product Requirement Document (PRD, a list of what Firefox 3 should include) released some weeks ago.
Requirements have been shuffled, some added, some removed and most, better defined.
Regarding Gecko more tweaks for better standards support have been confirmed. Most notably, the option to save documents as PDFs is still present and even more, it is targeted for Firefox 3 Alpha 3 (expected for March 19). According to the meeting notes this functionality is already available in Macs, though I am not clear if it refers to Mac OS X PDF virtual printer or true Firefox provided PDF export. Windows Vista (Business Edition at least) already includes an XPS (Microsoft’s alternative to PDF) virtual printer, but PDF should remain the main document exchange format for years to come, so I am eagerly looking forward for the progress of this particular feature.
Other enhancements include a more smooth navigation when going back to a web form using the ubicuous POST method, avoiding the annoying warning about resubmitting data.Extensible archiving capabilities are also planned but it won’t be necessarilly based on Microsoft’s MHTML format.
On the add-ons department (extensions and themes), flexibility to install and use them without requiring a restart has been elevated to P2, the second highest priority level. In response to the endemic extensions obtrusiveness some alternatives are being considered including getting add-ons configuration back to the Options window (like in Firefox pre 1.0) as well as publising UI guidelines (best practices) for extensions integration into Firefox. I guess many users will appreciate developers following these. It is annoying to get status bar icons, duplcated UI, toolbar buttons and new Tools menu options for some very simple functions. Adding a new plugins manager is also being considered.
In the security front, support for EV certs (more reliable extended validation certificates) is almost sure, however it may be limited to accepting and displaying them.
Isolating plugins so they don’t crash the browser (Adobe Reader?) has been phased out for Mozilla 2 (read, Firefox 4) as it will require a deep code rewrite that would push Firefox 3 release out of its targeted Q3 2007. Pause/resume downloads stays, and the use of a separate window for Download Manager is being reconsidered (you can move it today with a simple tweak).
Airbag, the new open source crash reporting tool, is in to replace Talkback and so is an MSI version of the installer that will please many system administrators. There could also be two different themes for Windows XP and Vista environments which after the results of the last visual refresh which attempted to blend with Classic and Luna themes in a single shot, seems like a better idea.
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February 10th, 2007 at 3:40 am
Do you know if the browser will switch to using the print stylesheet (if one is specified in the webpage code) when saving as PDF? I’d think that would make sense.
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February 10th, 2007 at 6:34 am
Yeah, the tools menuitems are really annoying. Best practices would be great to minimize the clutter often created by extensions.
Statusbar icons I don’t mind so much though, but it’s good if they’re optional.
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February 11th, 2007 at 1:54 am
What about a real full page zoom? Opera AND IE7 are both ahead of Firefox in that respect. Hopefully firefox will also clear up performance problems once and for all in firefox 3. I have jumped off the firefox train for now untill they catch up with Opera and IE7 on thoes respects. Sure, I love the extentions firefox supports, but when thoes extentions lower the usability of the interface and cut down performance, firefox just isn’t worth it for me.
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February 11th, 2007 at 2:40 am
IMO, they should implement built-in adblock functionality that is more like the original adblock
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February 11th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Now if only the search function would be reverted to ctrl+f = /
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February 11th, 2007 at 9:03 am
The Firefox developers should rather get rid of the instability of their products. The Problem of FF crashing for no reason on an Intel Prescott CPU is still unsolved. Damn, Open Source sucks and blows with this one :(
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February 11th, 2007 at 9:21 am
It would be nice if they just kept it from destroying processor cycles every time there’s embedded media.
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February 12th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Does the theme will preserve the OS-native look of tabs as in 1.5 ?
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