“Very fast to load compared to previous version, tabs load faster as well.” – Windows XP user at Jan 3, 2011
Neat…and, might I add, accurate!
On that note, please continue to send your praise, issues and suggestions for Firefox 4. Your feedback has been extremely useful in fixing bugs and making improvements to the best open browser on the planet!
Dynamic things are fun. They add spice to life. People are more likely to pay attention to them. When looking at QMO, “dynamic” certainly didn’t come to mind. Most of the content is static. Of the static content there, it’s kinda dull. We have feeds, but they’re sparsely updated. So, QMO 3.0 is a take at that dullness with its latest release.
The two biggest features are the addition of User Accounts and Team Members and Forums. Users can join their favorite teams and communicate within them with employees as well as like-minded Mozilla testers! Another great thing about this release is that it sets a strong base for some bigger and better things in QMO’s future. So, take a look at it and join in on the conversations. A big thanks to Craig Cook for developing the theme and and structure, Shyam Mani for his IT guru-ism and Al Billings for his WP Community coordination and UX work for this release!
New Major Features:
List of Plugins Added:
Ever have one of those times when a product look great at first and second glance, but as you look into its details nits start rolling into other nits to the point that its this minefield of things that you wish the product would be? Well, that’s what Input 1.x felt like. Sure we were adding new features, but it didn’t match the depth and variability of our now 700,000 pieces of feedback in Firefox and Mobile Firefox betas. This release takes a stab at that by offering a time-based line graph, getting rid of the 1000-max-match limit, Sites data from older versions and much more. Take a look below and, of course, at the results. This wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of Dave Dash, Frederic Wenzel, Chris Howse, Ryan Snyder, Michael Kurze, Stephen Donner and Justin Lazaro. Amazing people, all of them.
List of Major Features
Oh, and here’s a list of bugs fixed in this release.
I’ve been itching to try my hand at writing an extension as well as finding a way to get a suite of tools for nightly testers onto Fennec. So, when word got around that Dave Townsend was going to transition development and maintenance of Nightly Tester Tools over to Heather Arthur and Jeff Hammel, it sounded like a perfect opportunity to catch onto the train. With a now bug-free and actively maintained NTT, it was pretty easy to make Nightly Tester Tools for Mobile. I simply re-used a bunch of NTT code (as well as mbrubeck’s Quit Fennec add-on) and mixed it with the UI of the current Beta Tester Tools Add-on. The source code is available in a GitHub repo too. Here’s the list of features on the first-ish revision:
There’s more coming, but feel free to comment in this blogpost with new ideas or features you’d like. Otherwise, Enjoy!
For those that have used the Firefox Betas (Desktop and Mobile), you’ll have noticed a set of smiley faces that allow you to tell Mozilla if you’re happy or sad and why. What we’ve seen is that our beta userbase is a whole lot more talkative than we initially thought (at the time of this post, we’re at 597,438 pieces of feedback received). In order to deal with the scale, we’ve had to furiously develop features that help siphon through the masses of messages received. Those features have led triagers to identify over 50 bugs, help get a great feedback loop into our weekly meetings and even change the displays in our offices to see the constant feedback coming in from our users.
It’s been a pretty good success so far. Though, in my opinion, we’re only a fraction of where we want to get to as a product and initiative. There are still two major channels of Firefox (i.e. Nightlies and Major Releases) with very large, under-represented user bases who would love to give feedback on how to shape their Internet. Mozilla’s communities could be doing a whole lot more with this mass of information in terms of localizers, testers and promoters performing constructive actions within their spheres of work. Also, the gap between the future potential usage and actualized potential usage of our data is far too large.
So over the next 9 months, the team is going to be looking into all of these issues and trying our hand at solving them. What we plan to do are the following:
There are finer grain details here that are not really appropriate in the scope of this blogpost, so if you’re interested in helping out on anything I’ve talked about here or want to know more details, please head over to #input on irc.mozilla.org and ask away!
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