Firefox 4 is right around the corner, and the Firefox’s community and team are working their butts off to make it as awesome as possible. The blocker list is going down every day, and the browser’s looking better than ever.
However, with everyone putting so much effort towards blockers, there are less people available to help with polish bugs for the add-ons manager. In particular, there’s a handful of bugs – mostly in CSS – that would take the add-ons manager from good to awesome. If you know CSS and are interested in helping with a feature used by millions, please consider taking a look at one of the remaining bugs. Not only will you be hailed as the people’s hero (by me anyway), but you’ll be helping millions of people customize their browsing experience.
Here’s a diagram of the remaining add-ons manager polish bugs:
www.donotlick.com
If you need any information or help, comment I’ll get in touch with you!
How can I get involved/started? I’d like to help out with this if I can. Most of those bugs look more like changes in JS/document order land than CSS, though… More than happy to help with them anyway, if I can!
Hey Barry –
Thanks so much for the interest!
The first step to making Firefox patches is to set up your build environment. Instructions on setting this up for various OS’s is here. Then, you’ll need to use the Mercurial version control system. You can find instructions for that here. In fact, all of the basic instructions should be on that wiki. If you need more information, I recommend asking in IRC at mozilla.org channel #developers. Or, you can ask me and I can shoot them the question.
Once you’re set up, you only need to assign the bug to yourself by adding your own email address in the assigned field on the Bugzilla bug. Once you have a patch, you add that as an attachment to the bug. Then the patch is reviewed and, if all’s good, committed to the tree.
That’s a quick summary of a whole ton of info – please let me know if you need help!
Thanks!
It’s a good set of mockups, and a good list of bugs that should be fixed, but does the webpage itself have to be so annoying? A big blob of image slices (images with text in them!) doesn’t make for a very accessible page. Worse, because the bug descriptions and statuses are loaded live from bugzilla, the first time I loaded it they were all missing entirely. That was particularly confusing. It’s also annoying that the page is twice as wide as my screen.
You should include static bug descriptions and statuses that get updated live from bugzilla, so that the page is always useful.
Still, I do hope all of these bugs get fixed. Please don’t take my criticisms as reason to stop making this information available. Instead use it to create a better presentation for the information.
Oh, and I think Barry is correct. Not many of those will really be CSS changes, in the proper sense of the word. ð
Please keep the changes to the minimum. On the Addons.mozilla blog it was promised that no more functionality changes will happen that impact extensions and themes.
A lot of effort was spent by themers to style the new addons manager and changing this just before FF4 will be released is a nightmare, and we need to change the themes again.
About half of the proposed changes are debatable, rejected, discussed, etc. So, this is just causing extra noice and stability issues just before a very major release.
Alfred, don’t be selfish.
drew – Have you notice a decline of themes as of late especially compared to Firefox 1.5 and 2?
It’s stuff like this driving themers away. All the themers want is a stable platform for developing themes and they can’t do that if the UI changes frequently.
“About half of the proposed changes are debatable, rejected, discussed, etc. So”
I agree, I’d already say things like bug623207 removing last updated text.. this dumification process of removing every last piece of useful information from the view without any options put in place to customize/toggle back are stupid.. someone can remove the last updated text with basic css display none as its easier to hide something from view, than put it back and I prefer it.
And as far as I’m concerned most my effort js/css help in the addons manager will be in polishing what hasn’t been done with Ingo’s awesome AIOS sidebar addon and his cleanup task of the addon manager:
http://firefox.exxile.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14879
The last thing that is needed is more changes to the addons manager, AIOS alone is an extension I would consider absolutely mandatory for a browser, yet fx4 in copying chrome, by chucking everything into taking up an entire tab panel was just unnecessary when a separate window (or sidebar) worked just fine, its just made more work for others to sort out that clunky mess out. While I fail to see any of the benefiting changes Mozilla aimed to provide by taking up such an unnecessary task in the first place.
“drew â Have you notice a decline of themes as of late especially compared to Firefox 1.5 and 2?”
For newbies getting help in theming firefox it just pathetic, look at the theming forum at Mozillazine, the very threads on getting started aren’t updated, and as the only users who do help are often locked out of the community that is seemingly run by dick heads.
I have a heavily themed Firefox one of the black themes looks similar to this: http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/4386/dualview.jpg
Would I ever share my polished styled themes? doubtful, though if I did it would easily put the default theme and that overrated NASA theme to shame.
MozillaZine is unfortunately moderated by what I can only guess are grudge bearing gestapo censorship cretins like that prick called ‘LoudNoise’. You get banned for merely having firefox related discussions that don’t fit in line with their opinions, and any sort of language they don’t like (even though no one else took it upon themselves to offended) is grounds for ip banning. Fuck those retarded assholes.
It is a shame its the only other place for Firefox discussion, as the tin pot dictating moderators and the old woodwork mob that crawl out, there only know how to derail topics onto other irrelevant user topic discussions. Those idiots no service for the benefit of improving firefox with their childish bully boy antics and banning of experienced theme/extension developers that just seemingly disappear from the site!!!
“Reason given for ban: Get lost” yeah that’s the language those modtarderator shit heads use outside of community over view!
It’s called beta for a reason…
Terepin – Then why does Mozilla expect add-on devs to finish their development when Firefox 4 development isn’t even finished? The problem is most prominent with themes.
Ngamer01, no, and neither has anyone else.
Hello boriss, censor much?
“About half of the proposed changes are debatable, rejected, discussed, etc. So”
I agree, I’d already say things like bug623207 removing last updated text.. this dumification process of removing every last piece of useful information from the view without any options put in place to customize/toggle back are stupid.. someone can remove the last updated text with basic css display none as its easier to hide something from view, than put it back and I prefer it.
And as far as I’m concerned most my effort js/css help in the addons manager will be in polishing what hasn’t been done with Ingo’s awesome AIOS sidebar addon and his cleanup task of the addon manager:
http://firefox.exxile.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14879
The last thing that is needed is more changes to the addons manager, AIOS alone is an extension I would consider absolutely mandatory for a browser, yet fx4 in copying chrome, by chucking everything into taking up an entire tab panel was just unnecessary when a separate window (or sidebar) worked just fine, its just made more work for others to sort out that clunky mess out. While I fail to see any of the benefiting changes Mozilla aimed to provide by taking up such an unnecessary task in the first place.
“drew â Have you notice a decline of themes as of late especially compared to Firefox 1.5 and 2?”
For newbies getting help in theming firefox it just pathetic, look at the theming forum at Mozillazine, the very threads on getting started aren’t updated, and as the only users who do help are often locked out of the community that is seemingly run by dick heads.
I have a heavily themed Firefox one of the black themes looks similar to this: http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/4386/dualview.jpg
Would I ever share my polished styled themes? doubtful, though if I did it would easily put the default theme and that overrated NASA theme to shame.
MozillaZine is unfortunately moderated by what I can only guess are grudge bearing gestapo censorship cretins like that prick called ‘LoudNoise’. You get banned for merely having firefox related discussions that don’t fit in line with their opinions, and any sort of language they don’t like (even though no one else took it upon themselves to offended) is grounds for ip banning. Fuck those retarded assholes.
It is a shame its the only other place for Firefox discussion, as the tin pot dictating moderators and the old woodwork mob that crawl out, there only know how to derail topics onto other irrelevant user topic discussions. Those idiots no service for the benefit of improving firefox with their childish bully boy antics and banning of experienced theme/extension developers that just seemingly disappear from the site!!!
“Reason given for ban: Get lost” yeah that’s the language those modtarderator shit heads use outside of community over view!
well after ur advice d blog has been updated…!! thank u for ur help!! cheers!!
http://evincingmymind.blogspot.com/2011/04/evolution-of-logos.html
The addons manager window is dog slow.