Do you know CSS? Make a Huge Difference in Firefox 4′s Add-ons Manager
January 20, 2011
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!
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Filed in Add-ons, CSS, Firefox, Mozilla, Next Version, Technologies, usability, User Experience
Tags: add-ons manager, bugs, css, live mockups, polish
January 21, 2011 at 12:49 am
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!
January 21, 2011 at 1:08 am
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.
January 21, 2011 at 3:11 am
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January 21, 2011 at 7:43 am
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.
January 22, 2011 at 7:40 am
Alfred, don’t be selfish.
January 23, 2011 at 1:57 pm
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.
January 23, 2011 at 5:42 pm
It’s called beta for a reason…
January 23, 2011 at 6:03 pm
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.
January 23, 2011 at 8:15 pm
Ngamer01, no, and neither has anyone else.
January 24, 2011 at 6:47 pm
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!
April 24, 2011 at 7:55 am
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
June 23, 2011 at 7:26 am
The addons manager window is dog slow.