On Mozilla Firefox

I do not understand why Mozilla Firefox developers are so slow to fixing some usability bugs like:

• Bug 249338 – progressbar doesn't indicate upload progress
• Bug 123913 - [RFE] tab-specific alerts are window-modal and should be tab-modal (need "sheets" widgets on non-MacOSX).

I am trying to fix some critical bugs related to saved files corruption like Bug 226970 – lost of all stored passwords if out of disk space file truncated to zero length but it is a tough endeavor since the OS abstraction library of Mozilla NSPR seems to be unmaintained as nobody replied to my email offering my help to fix these bugs.

Mozilla has also do some changes like unverified SSL-Certificate management UI that may not be in the users interests but in the CA industry ones. That UI has been thought to make users life much difficult when using non CA signed SSL-Certificates thus having websites pay for CA certificates. They could have just issued a big warning every time the user browses a non CA signed website instead of the ugly UI that may have been paid by the CA industry.

Mozilla has historically not collaborated with the libre opensource community, making Mozilla code huge, thus needing many developers to properly maintaining it. Until Firefox3 it had an in house graphics renderer but switched to the powerful cairo. Same with data storage where it used the braindamaged Mork file format (as Jamie Zawinski rightfully calls it) but switched to the powerful SQLite.

If Mozilla wants to succeed in the long run, they must collaborate with the libre opensource community by depending on other projects (and supporting them) instead of developing all their software in-house.

Mozilla Firefox now also has to compete with Google Chrome as it seems like Google, that pays up to 80% of Mozilla Firefox development, will cut the funding when Google Chrome surpasses in users to Firefox. Google would not have started Google Chrome development if they thought Mozilla developers would be good enough to deliver a quality browser and Google will not backup their plans since Google Chrome is already out of beta and bundled with other Google tools.

With all these problems Mozilla Firefox future seems to be quite unclear. I think Firefox will start losing all the users when Google Chrome has all the features that Firefox users currently have and a Linux and Mac OS X port is released.

This is the list of add-ons I consider a must have for Firefox:

• Adblock Plus prevents advertisements
• Tabberwocky opens new tabs just next to the current one.
  
• FlashBlock only runs flash content when clicked on it
• livehttpheaders see HTTP headers of all the requests. This is for developers mainly
• Firebug is the best companion to help develop web pages. It lets you see the DOM, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP requests. This is also for developers mainly