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Progress and Future of Mozilla-the-application-suite
Seth Spitzer
(with input from various active contributors)


Here is a brief summary of what progress has been made on Mozilla-the-application-suite since Mozilla 1.0, what the active contributors plan on working on over the next few months, and what might come after that.

This document does not cover other projects like gecko, embedding (GRE), Chimera, Phoenix, Bugzilla, Chatzilla, Calendar, or Mozilla-the-platform (XUL, XBL, xptoolkit, XRE).

What is new since 1.0?

 General
  • stability improvements
  • performance improvements
  • startup speed improvements
  • accessibility and usability improvements
  • drag and drop support improvements
  • keyboard access improvements
  • UI polish
  • can show toolbars as text/icons/both
  • GRE support
  • profile switching
Navigator
  • popup blocking
  • download manager
  • type-ahead find (incremental search)
  • automatic image sizing
  • rich text editing controls for a document (the spec, the demo)
  • helper application improvements
  • tab browsing improvements
  • group of bookmarks can be your homepage
  • view source improvements
  • page info improvements
  • link prefetching
  • quick search in bookmarks
Mail/News/Addressbook
Composer
  • paste without formatting
  • Insert | Table of Contents
What is planned for the next few months (2/2003 - 6/2003)?

Many contributors plan on being in bug fix mode, working on bugs that cover regressions, stability, correctness, dataloss, performance, UI polishing, accessibility and usability.
If you are an active contributor and something you plan on doing isn't covered here, let me know.

General
  • profile backend code cleanup
  • additional changes for GRE support
  • Calendar to become part of the application-suite during 1.4
  • Copy and Paste, Drag and Drop internally and externally, internally means inside mozilla, externally means interoperation between mozilla and other applications: staroffice, evolution, gedit, nautilus, etc.
  • session awareness on linux&unix. make sure mozilla's session status can be stored when shutdown and restored when startup.
  • Java integration, (Java-On-The-Fly) mozilla works with multiple JREs convieiently, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185000
  • PS printing enhancement- embed TTF inside PS to print internalization fonts.  (95% finished, it is being polished)
Navigator
  • popup blocking improvements
  • type ahead improvements
  • more helper application improvements
Mail/News/Addressbook
  • junk mail controls improvements
  • mail views improvements
  • palm sync improvements
  • IMAP quota support
  • Location toolbar
  • Dynamic 3-pane
  • Dual menubuttons
  • improvement of the IMAP Namespace feature
  • Rot-13 extension
  • intelligent mail classification extension
Composer
  • image resizing
  • spell check selection
  • font menu

What might be after that?

There are no guarantees as contributors and priorities change. 
Here are some possibilities:
  • configurable toolbars?
  • CaScadeS (stylesheet editor)?
  • form element editing?
  • stand alone mail?
  • better altmail support?
  • breaking apart the suite into separate applications?
  • basic roaming / location independence support / Centrally managable profile roaming?
  • quick search in history?
  • More accessibility on linux phase II features. phase II means better integration with AT apps and better keyboard navigation capability.
  • OJI redesign. break happens when mozilla or Javaplugin updates, it is becasue Javaplugin is calling evolving XPCOM interface directly, OJI redesign will break the java plugin's dependency on XPCOM.