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duke9509352 karma

Hey! Glad you guys are doing this! This actually caused me to join Reddit! XD

Anyway, I am currently a junior in highschool with a passing (read: unexplored, as I sadly have yet to have the opportunity for really learning techniques or other common practices) interest in graphic design and UX design (If I ever get such an opportunity, and decide that it's something I'd like to pursue, I will say that Mozilla would be one of my dream "whom to work for/with"s just because of how pioneering you guys are and how willing you are to experiment and take risks rather than just do what everyone else is doing. The web is the center of modern life and we need some less stagnant ideas to get the waters moving. So bravo!).

Anyway, I am also a very detail-minded person and can be bugged by little details that I'm probably one of the few people who notices but that I'm sure enough do to make them matter. DEFINITELY "paper-cuts." They're not particularly important, but they do add up in their effect on the user's impression of the product quality.

A few such things I've found in Firefox (some of which have been around for a while, some not):

  • This has been around the longest: The prelight button style that is used on the tab and add-on bars has no corresponding "pressed" state. This is inconsistent with all the other button styles used which do animate when pressed. (http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/7431/pressed.png) Likewise, the buttons used in the add-on manager press but have no prelight.
  • Pop-up windows have no top window border! (http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/8056/linesj.png)
  • On Windows 8, the highlights in the Firefox Menu for regular items use the new, flatter Win8 styling, where as the hybrid submenus still use the more 3D Win7 styling: (http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/7312/highlightf.png)
  • This has been fixed in OSX, but not in Windows. The ugly corner you see here: http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/410/notrounded.png
  • This would be almost impossible to screenshot (plus I don't feel like rebooting, haha), but with the new doorhanger download UI in OSX, on the "download complete" animation, when the expanding arrow hits the invisible border between the window's contents and the titlebar proper, it disappears behind it.
  • Another OSX one: If the forward button is caused to appear by any action other than pressing the physical back button (say swiping with two fingers to the right), it appears half grayed-out and ugly looking. This can be corrected by clicking it.

Now, I have seen the interactive Australis mockup and other design docs for it, and I can't WAIT! Great job! (Insert very small and subtle request for a Windows Phone Firefox here ;) )

And then I was wondering if any of you guys would be at all interested in hearing the silly feature ideas of one highschool kid who likes to play around with reworking programs and interfaces in his daydreams, haha. The idea I'm most proud of at this point is one of abandoning linear history in favor of "Threads" grouped by tab (Because, if you open an article in one tab, do something in another, and then go back to the first and click on a link, the original article and its child webpage are separated in the History view by the other tab's unrelated URLs, because those URLs were opened chronologically between them, even though, logically, a history should allow you to retrace your thought processes). Oops. I think that was a pretty big "snippet," haha. Anyway, if there's somewhere where idle ideas like that wouldn't fall on deaf ears (knowing you guys, I'm sure there is), I'd love to know about it because I love coming up with stuff like that! And if there's any other way an eager but unfortunately inexperienced tech-savvy teenager could help out, I'd love to hear about that too! :D

Sorry for the long message, I get carried away sometimes, haha. Hope you guys are still there by the time I'm done typing this! Cheers and thanks for all the awesome! :D <3

duke950996 karma

Whoa! I've always wanted to do that but in the past Bugzilla has been really confusing and I haven't been able to make heads or tails of it (I've missed the going bye-bye of the "Feedback" button in Nightly for that reason). I just looked again and WOW is it more user-friendly than it was a few years ago (or has my mind just had a wake-up call?)! I'll definitely do more to report stuff now. :)

duke950911 karma

Thanks! :D I'm glad to hear my ideas aren't crazy! XD

And actually, by "Thread," I was just giving the concept a name: each "Thread" would be the history for one tab. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "indented," actually. Care to elaborate? :)

I was thinking that "Threads" could be used as a kind pf "task-based" organizational system to supplement Bookmarking. Threads could be named and sorted by a number of different properties (like the last time you "touched" them) and could even be further grouped into "Workspaces," like persistent saved sessions. It's major, and I wasn't really expecting to just jump out of the blue with a big idea and have the devs jump on it, it was just something I was playing around with and wanted to throw out there because: who knows?

And I just noticed the "one idea per post" guideline in the main post. I'd forgotten that when I wrote my reply. Sorry for breaking the rules!