In-content preferences are now available in Firefox Nightly
10 May, 2012 § 9 Comments
Starting today, users can access in-content preferences in Firefox Nightly.
First, a big congratulations to Zuhao (Joe) Chen, Jon Rietveld, Owen Carpenter, and Devan Sayles. The four students from Michigan State University worked through their spring semester to bring in-content preferences to Firefox.
At the end of the semester, the students presented their work in front of a panel of judges. The judges evaluated their project alongside 11 projects from other software organizations. At the end of the day, the students learnt that they had won the award for the best overall Design Day performance, the Auto-Owners Exposition Award. Congratulations on reaching this point of the project, as well as all graduating college!
The students can be seen in the picture on the top-right of this post, as they receive their award from Scott Lake of Auto-Owners Insurance (left-most in the picture).
In the 16 weeks of the semester, the students got comfortable with Mercurial, Bugzilla, IRC, Google+ hangouts, crazy timezone differences (I’m 3 hours behind, and Blair is 16 hours ahead of the students), Mochitest automated tests, code reviews, and much more. The students also got really great experience with writing localization-friendly CSS, HTML5 JavaScript APIs, special JavaScript language features that haven’t made it to other browsers yet, and even more.
See the table below for the changesets that have already landed on mozilla-central:
| Changeset | Commit message |
| 8b195889f55c | Zuhao (Joe) Chen — Bug 731866 – Copy and port current preference tests to run against the in-content preferences. r=jaws |
| 9b4f86c85565 | Devan Sayles — Bug 735471 – Add a pref to switch between window’d preferences and in-content preferences. r=jaws,bmcbride |
| 0fbf6059c293 | Jon Rietveld — Bug 737177 – Port the security pane to the in-content preferences implementation. r=bmcbride |
| 29de131322c5 | Devan Sayles — Bug 735091 – Sync pane for in-content prefrences. r=jaws,bmcbride |
| 4953a39c52e6 | Devan Sayles — Bug 732125 – Content pane for in-content preferences. r=jaws,bmcbride |
| bb179b7cf722 | Jon Rietveld — Bug 733469 – Move the applications preferences to in-content UI. r=jaws r=bmcbride |
| 68e7c139e580 | Jon Rietveld — Bug 723737 – Move the advanced preferences to in-content UI. r=jaws r=bmcbride |
| d849b7493ea2 | Jon Rietveld — Bug 723328 – Move the privacy preferences to in-content UI. r=bmcbride |
| c14a9f3448da | Owen Carpenter — Bug 719717 – Move the tabs preferences to in-content UI. r=bmcbride |
| c9262b622112 | Jon Rietveld — Bug 724686 – General pane for in-content preferences. r=bmcbride |
| 4d02fc5fc5c3 | Owen Carpenter — Bug 734013 – Implement the pane-switching functionality for the in-content preferences. r=bmcbride |
| b2d23fc61c6f | Jon Rietveld — Bug 735557 – Add about:preferences to the inContentWhitelist. r=bmcbride |
| f1148c7cd5e3 | Jon Rietveld — Bug 733473 – Implement initial prerequisites for in-content preferences, and landing page. r=bmcbride |
There’s still more work to do before we enable these new preferences by default. We need to make navigating them a little easier as well as make them a little prettier, but progress is being made 🙂
Here’s the current list of the bugs that still need to be finished:
- 738797: Enable the in-content preferences by default
- 740213: cursor pointer not shown when mouse is over link (in-content preferences)
- 741047: Implement opening in-content preferences to a given view
- 744936: Security review for In-content preferences
- 752719: Interaction redesign for in-content Preferences
- 753673: In-content preferences and Add-on manager not navigable anymore after cleaning history
- 754120: unable to dismiss modal dialog for saved passwords from in-content preferences
To test out the new in-content preferences, go to about:config and enable the browser.preferences.inContent preference.
JAWS 
You might want to fix the bug links 😉
They currently point to this site’s domain instead of bugzilla.mozilla.org
Thanks for letting me know! I think I fixed all of them now.
Wow. This is… great. No, wait. It’s awesome. Fantastic. Splendid, even!
Huge kudos and thanks to the MSU team for this work, and to you and Blair for helping to guide it to such a successful outcome. I’m really excited about having this already in Firefox, and can’t wait to get it enabled by default. You should all be quite proud of the work that got done over the semester. Woot!
[…] maggio 2012 A partire dalle nightly di oggi (Firefox 15.0a1), le in-content preferences sono attivate per impostazione predefinita. In altre parole la finestra delle preferenze/opzioni […]
Wow, that’s awesome! Thanks to everyone involved.
Hi Jared,
I am a computer science student at National University of Singapore. I have previously contributed some patches to Firefox and Thunderbird and that got me excited about open source projects. Do you think it’s possible for me to do a similar project for one of my modules?
It’s great that it’s implemented now.
The layout itself needs huge amount of work to do. Currently it is far from easy to use.
Some of the major problems with current design :
– why I have to go always to first page to choose another section of settings ? Why isn’t the sections available to click at all time on the top of the page ? This is very annoying when you have to make changes to more than one section.
– The general layout needs to be changed. There is no point render buttons all the way to the right edge of the browser and have the actual settings on the very far left. For example in General -> Downloads I first click on “save files to” radio button and then I have to move 1100 pixels (on my tiny laptop screen) to on the other edge of the screent to click the “browse” button for selecting the folder.
So, the buttons and other important design elements should be easily available in the proximity of the settings itself (on the left side of the screen in this case).
This of course is just the initial work for the change, so I’m sure these things will be fixed in very near future (_has to_ be fixed before leaving beta stage).
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll make a note of the things you have mentioned 🙂
[…] project was started by a group of students at Michigan State University and was mentored by Blair McBride and myself. Since its start, it has […]