zarro boogs found

We’re close to shipping Gran Paradiso Alpha 8, and we have a handful of features that still have yet to see the light of day.  These will for the most part come into the M9 release, but as we were technically feature frozen we’re going to declare them up front as exceptions.

In no particular order, here are the things we’re still working on, and what we’re getting out of them:

• New notification system (aka “door hanger” notifications)
  • This is designed to improve upon the longstanding “infobar” UI by moving it mostly out of content, and providing a way to revisit or easily ignore decisions.
• Add-ons Manager rework
  • This will likely land after M9, but it is well isolated and mostly front end display refactoring.  This will bring integration with AMO, unified display of add-ons, and a cleaner interaction model than we have had previously

• Remaining Places UI work
  • There’s a lot to do here, primarily around making the search and organization tasks easier and more obvious.  The link has far more details than I can provide without overwhelming.
• Offline Apps
  • Dave Camp has been doing some fantastic work on supporting WHATWG-style offline web apps, and we’re ready to hook up UI to allow “installing” webapps and boosting their ability to store data via DOMStorage.
• Full page zoom
  • One of the biggest unexpected bonuses  from one of our interns this past summer, we now have the ability to do full page zoom instead of just text zoom.  We expect to make this the primary zoom UI.
• Search in the password manager
  
  • This does what you think it does.
• Cross Session Resumable Downloads
  • Another awesome intern/SoC success story, a big thanks to brahmana (original SoC student), sdwilsh, Mardak, and biesi (MoCo interns this summer).  We’ve wanted this for a really long time, and now we’re going to get it.
• Places integration for Download Manager
  • As we were reworking the new and improved download manager for Firefox 3, it became apparent that integrating downloads into the global history of where you’ve been  is a major win, and it will help users to have access to those items via autocomplete and other searches.  It also allows us to have a much greater amount of data linked to the  download for better searching/sorting.
• Error pages for SSL
  • It’s been an article of faith for many that SSL dialogs are at best an annoyance, or  at worst a giant hole that one can drive a social engineering truck through.  This aims to make SSL dialogs that shouldn’t be ignored full on error pages, as many SSL errors are ignorable

One more thing… we’re still working on fixing usability bugs and adding “delight” to the product.  Beltzner will have more details on what we’re doing later today.