In-Content Preferences for Firefox may be here in 16 weeks
9 January, 2012 § 23 Comments
Today is the first day of the semester for students at Michigan State University. A group of 4 to 5 students from Michigan State’s CSE Capstone course will be working with Mozilla to move the preferences from a dialog window to within the content area of the browser.
This work is done as part of a course at Michigan State that computer science students take before they graduate. The students work with companies within industry to get some more real-world experience and build their professional network. The course is officially called “CSE 498: Collaborative Design”, but the informal and popular name is “the Capstone course”.
Stephen Horlander has put together some fantastic designs for the students to reference and build towards. Blair McBride and I will be helping to mentor the students throughout the semester.
Here’s to a great semester!
Update: The students working on the project are Devan Sayles, Jon Rietveld, Owen Carpenter, and Zuhao (Joe) Chen. Welcome aboard!
JAWS 
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One of the areas that continues to lack enough features is the Add-ons Manager (AM). Where AM was lacking before other add-ons filled in. Unfortunately since FF 4, many of those add-ons have not been updated and so AM lacks some keys features to help those that do install many add-ons. What I would like to see are the following simple changes:
More information: Add-on version, compatibility info, date installed/updated (maybe create preference to choose what info is visible)
Add filtering: display only enabled, only disabled, or all add-ons
more advanced filtering: display only incompatible add-ons, those needing a restart, show only just enabled, or just disabled
More sorting capabilities: enabled vs disabled
Grouping: ability to create groups of add-ons (e.g. to identify add-ons with similar, related, or complementary functionality), then the ability to enable/disable groups of add-ons.
Those are some good ideas. Is there anything I can do to get your help in implementing them?
Other than feedback, not really. I am not a developer, if that is what you are asking. But I am glad to review.
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