[insky]

The problem I have with Firefox is that it just doesn't really innovate. We've had some small UI changes. But there's legacy cruft still in there that isn't addressed.

Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them either. In some ways I think they should be at the heart of the browser.

I think a lot of people use tabs because bookmark management is so crap.

The only bit I resonated with was the similar sites suggestions. But you'd need a setting to setup suggestion services. There's a privacy concern with that.

Other helper features:

Pagination buttons were built into Opera driven off the rel=prev and rel=next, link elements. Navigation could further be ripped out the page window into a browser control. Searching sites and pages could be friendlier. Better form helpers needed. A good feed reader would be good. Tools to help read web content more simply (readability style) would be nice. Plus I like personalising the look and feel of my web browser ever so slightly, and even Firefox doesn't do that particularly well (it ignores some of my desktop theming).

So I think Firefox should really be thinking how to answer the question: 'How can we make it easier for users to consume web content?'. This has to go beyond the rendering engine. So actually a fatter featureful browser I think would be better - but with some very intuitive and simple controls.

[lucb1e]

> Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them either.

And here I was thinking every browser should have such powerful tools instead of optimized-for-grandma windows.

[insky]

There's nothing wrong with optimising for Grandma. The key is to make the most useful features easy to get at, and the more powerful ones discoverable.

The bookmark/history manager could be better. It has no autocomplete/awesomeness in the search. It's actually quite an awkward UI.

It's not keyboard friendly. And their are odd inconsistancies. Should the default behaviour of clicking on a link open it in new tab?

Recent bookmarks and most visited are nice smart bookmark folder, these are useful but hard to reach in that tool. Some bookmark management feels a little like a black box.

At least you can tag bookmarks. Scrolling through a massive list of tags isn't much fun.

[riquito]

> Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them either. In some ways I think they should be at the heart of the browser.

But they are at the heart of the browser. The Awesome Bar use words and tags of your bookmarks to propose you the right url after typing some character in the url bar. In the standard usage you do not need to open the bookmark manager (which is ugly, you're right) to use the bookmarks. It's automatic. You need to open the bookmark manager only if you want to know what you looked at at a certain date or do some housekeeping.

[insky]

Well kind of. I bookmark sites and then bring them back up by focusing on the location bar (CTRL+L), then typing * (to search bookmarks), and typing a few characters to get me to sites that I visit frequently. Which is fine if you use the keyboard and know what you are looking for, and already know that shortcut.