Progress and Future of Mozilla-the-application-suite
Seth Spitzer
(with input from various active contributors)

Here is a brief summary of what progress has been made on Mozilla-the-application-suite since Mozilla 1.0, what the active contributors plan on working on over the next few months, and what might come after that.

This document does not cover other projects like gecko, embedding (GRE), Chimera, Phoenix, Bugzilla, Chatzilla, Calendar, or Mozilla-the-platform (XUL, XBL, xptoolkit, XRE).

What is new since 1.0?

General

stability improvements
performance improvements
startup speed improvements
accessibility and usability improvements
drag and drop support improvements
keyboard access improvements
UI polish
can show toolbars as text/icons/both
GRE support
profile switching

Navigator

popup blocking
download manager
type-ahead find (incremental search)
automatic image sizing
rich text editing controls for a document (the spec, the demo)
helper application improvements
tab browsing improvements
group of bookmarks can be your homepage
view source improvements
page info improvements
link prefetching
quick search in bookmarks

Mail/News/Addressbook

junk mail controls
mail views
palm sync for addressbook (Windows only)
filter improvements
able to view HTML mail messages as plain text
quote original message
image and plug-in blocking for messages

Composer

paste without formatting
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What is planned for the next few months (2/2003 - 6/2003)?

Many contributors plan on being in bug fix mode, working on bugs that cover regressions, stability, correctness, dataloss, performance, UI polishing, accessibility and usability.
If you are an active contributor and something you plan on doing isn't covered here, let me know.

General

profile backend code cleanup
additional changes for GRE support
Calendar to become part of the application-suite during 1.4
Copy and Paste, Drag and Drop internally and externally, internally means inside mozilla, externally means interoperation between mozilla and other applications: staroffice, evolution, gedit, nautilus, etc.
session awareness on linux&unix. make sure mozilla's session status can be stored when shutdown and restored when startup.
Java integration, (Java-On-The-Fly) mozilla works with multiple JREs convieiently, http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=185000
PS printing enhancement- embed TTF inside PS to print internalization fonts. (95% finished, it is being polished)

Navigator

popup blocking improvements
type ahead improvements
more helper application improvements

Mail/News/Addressbook

junk mail controls improvements
mail views improvements
palm sync improvements
IMAP quota support
Location toolbar
Dynamic 3-pane
Dual menubuttons
improvement of the IMAP Namespace feature
Rot-13 extension
intelligent mail classification extension

Composer

image resizing
spell check selection
font menu

What might be after that?

There are no guarantees as contributors and priorities change.
Here are some possibilities:

configurable toolbars?
CaScadeS (stylesheet editor)?
form element editing?
stand alone mail?
better altmail support?
breaking apart the suite into separate applications?
basic roaming / location independence support / Centrally managable profile roaming?
quick search in history?
More accessibility on linux phase II features. phase II means better integration with AT apps and better keyboard navigation capability.
OJI redesign. break happens when mozilla or Javaplugin updates, it is becasue Javaplugin is calling evolving XPCOM interface directly, OJI redesign will break the java plugin's dependency on XPCOM.