Mozilla Hacks

Launching Open Web Apps feedback channels – help us make the web better!

By Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]

Posted on August 20, 2014 in Apps, Featured Article, Feedback channels, and Web Developers

About three months ago we launched a feedback channel for the Firefox Developer Tools, and since it was a great success, we’re happy announce a new one for Open Web Apps!

For Developer Tools, we have, and keep on getting, excellent suggestions at http://mzl.la/devtools, which has lead to features coming from ideas there being implemented in both Firefox 32 & 33 – the first ideas shipped in Firefox only 6 weeks after we launched the feedback channels!

Your feedback as developers is crucial to building better products and a better web, so we want to take this one step further.

A channel for Open Web Apps

We have now just opened another feedback channel on UserVoice about Open Web Apps, available at http://mzl.la/openwebapps

It is a place for constructive feedback around Open Web Apps with ideas and feature suggestions for how to make them more powerful and a first-class citizen on all platforms; desktop, mobile and more.

What we cover in the feedback channel is collecting all your ideas and also updating you on the different areas we are working on. In many cases these features are non-standard, yet: we are striving to standardize Apps, APIs, and features through the W3C/WHATWG – so expect these features to change as they are transitioned to become part of the Web platform.

If you want to learn more about the current state, there’s lots of documentation for Open Web Apps and WebAPIs on MDN.

Contributing is very easy!

If you have an idea for how you believe Open Web Apps should work, simply just go to the feedback channel, enter a name and an e-mail address (no need to create an account!) and you’re good to go!

In addition to that, you have 10 votes assigned which you can use to vote for other existing ideas there.

Just make sure that you have an idea that is constructive and with a limited scope, so it’s actionable; i.e. if you have a list of 10 things you are missing, enter them as a separate ideas so we can follow up on them individually.

We don’t want to hear “the web sucks” – we want you to let us know how you believe it should be to be amazing.

What do you want the web to be like?

With all the discussions about web vs. native, developers choosing iOS, Android or the web as their main target, PhoneGap as the enabler and much more:

Let us, and other companies building for the web, know what the web needs to be your primary developer choice. We want the web to be accessible and fantastic on all platforms, by all providers.

Share your ideas and help us shape the future of the web!

About Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]

Technical Evangelist & Editor of Mozilla Hacks. Gives talks & blogs about HTML5, JavaScript & the Open Web. Robert is a strong believer in HTML5 and the Open Web and has been working since 1999 with Front End development for the web - in Sweden and in New York City. He regularly also blogs at http://robertnyman.com and loves to travel and meet people.

More articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]…

4 comments

  1. voracity

    Nice. I’m certainly going to try and contribute feedback.

    After recently creating a mobile app-like website, I found the experience OK. The biggest pain was extreme cross-browser variability, which will improve with time. But there are some aspects of the platform which just made things more difficult than they should have been.

    One example is the way the page resizes when it really, really shouldn’t — the most annoying is the virtual keyboard. When trying to use flex for layout, the virtual keyboard should just float over the top, without interfering with the page — instead, it resizes the page, which makes the app squash up and (on many devices) even puts the app into landscape mode. There’s no way to prevent this. Similarly, text selection menus in Firefox on Android cause page resizes and the scroll-away location bar can cause all sorts of problems for flex-based layouts. (Incidentally, I got around all of these issues by allowing users to go into full-screen mode – not ideal, because non-full screen would have been fine/better without these issues.)

    Anyway, I’ll be sure to add suggestions to avoid these difficulties on the new feedback site.

    August 20th, 2014 at 22:29

    1. Robert Nyman [Editor]

      Thanks! And absolutely, such challenges are great things to know about and document, so we can make it better! Please add any idea or challenge you have.

      August 20th, 2014 at 23:30

  2. Rajat Garg

    As a founder, we realize the need to be omni-present. However, that’s challenging given the distribution across mobile (different form factors), tablets and web.

    Ideally, we will like to build one app/site and deploy across all. Phonegap is a step in right direction but fails miserably in execution given the speed/limitations of what you can actually do.

    Also, it’s better to have a browser with additional capability which can provide relevant signals to the app, so that it can function better.

    e.g. the entire user permission model for each app should be built into the browser so that app can take permission from it/access apis if available vs wrapping into phonegap or build native.

    There are several other ideas on this and I will be happy to share/contribute towards it.

    August 26th, 2014 at 04:34

    1. Robert Nyman [Editor]

      Thanks for commenting. Please add each idea to the feedback channel.

      August 26th, 2014 at 09:14

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