About 3 months ago, I took a walk around a park near my parent’s house with my handy Nokia N900 in hand. During the walk, I remembered that I needed to find movie times for Avatar that night. So, during a quick check on Fandango, I noticed a problem with the Form Fill Helper. Well, I was in the middle of a walk on a weekend afternoon and filing a bug on Bugzilla via a mobile device really didn’t tickle me anything fancy. It sucked that there wasn’t a method for users to report problems easily within the browser without jumping through hoops.
So, I undertook a little initiative to port and morph the “Report Broken Website” Feature from Firefox into Fennec. From that initiative, I’m happy to introduce the Website Problem Reporter! It’s a feedback mechanism which allows anyone, using Fennec, the capability to submit problems they find during their browsing session without having to leave the website where the problem was found.
How Does it Work?
When you find an issue with Fennec or a website you’re viewing using it, click on the favicon and click on the “Website Problem?” button.
Once the dialog pops up, select a category that relates to the problem you see, add a comment if you’d like and submit the report!
Where can you Get It?
Download it from its addons.mozilla.org page!
Features
* Portrait/Landscape Modes
* URL Sanitization
* Optional Comments Box
* URL, Problem Category and Comments Submission to reporter.mozilla.org
I’d like to thank Mario Alvarado for creating a great extension and getting it done in a such short amount of time. Also, I’d like to give a shout out to the Mobile Team, Asa Dotzler, Robert Accettura, Nick Nguyen, Elizabeth Compton and Julie Martin for their help throughout this process.
For those that are interested in learning about Mario’s experience with coding an extension on Fennec, take a look at his nifty blog post about some of the problems he encountered while coding it.
This is awesome. Great work Mario and Aakash!
Where did the idea with the tagging (i.e., non-categorical limitation) run off to?
- Aaron
Congrats on the great work!
Hey Aaron, thanks! Mario and I talked about it and the idea was just too difficult to implement when incorporating time, resources and usability. We might look into it in the future if there’s enough demand for it, but right now we’re very happy with the current implementation. Spread the word!
Thanks, Robert! I appreciate your steady-hand in a answering all the questions I raised throughout the process.
This is great, thanks for making it easy to report problems!
But I have two issues with it. First: I found this extension in the list of recommended extensions, and I installed it. But after restarting I couldn’t figure out how to use it, so I had to search for it and find this blog post. I’m thinking less tech savvy people might never find out how to use it. After installing it you should be presented with instructions somehow.
Secondly: Why is it called “Reporter for Fennec”? You really have to chose one name for this browser and stick with it! Please see http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/topics/firefox_for_mobile_has_too_many_names
Thanks for the feedback forteller! What do you think it should be called?
Well, first you have to decide what the browser should be called. If it’s Fennec, then you have to mention that name on the official website. As it is now, there’s no reason to believe that the official name of the browser is Fennec, except for this extension. Just pick one name and stick with it. Then use the chosen name in the name of this extension, ie. “Reporter for Fennec”, “Reporter for Firefox for mobile”, or whatever.
Oh, and btw: It should also be made more clear that you can use this tool to report problems with the browser itself, not just websites. If I hadn’t read this blog post I wouldn’t have known that.