440460 - Bookmark menu revision unmature

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Thomas Wolff]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

The following properties of the revised bookmarks menu are bothering me:

Folders in the right pane do not have the "+" handle attached anymore (which is a state-of-the-art feature of a folder icon).
So to open them, you have to double-click (which implies increased 
wrist pain; double clicks should not be enforced in frequent user interaction).

The "Bookmarks Menu" in the left pane is moved one hierarchy level down with no good reason, which means there is less space in this pane which is quite narrow anyway in default and most peoples' setting. It's just a waste of space. Bad UI design.

And finally, when revamping the bookmarks window, the feature of labelled separators (via Properties) was forgotten to be maintained.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=381767#c2, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404983#c9, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404990
It is absolutely incomprehensible that an established feature which is valuable for many users is discarded and complaints are constantly ignored with the excuse that some developers happen not to be interested in it.

I hope these deficiencies will be revised before final release; especially for the last item I consider this at least major.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
For item 1: look at bookmarks window, right pane, folders.
For item 2: look at bookmarks window, left pane, left blank gap·
For item 3: import a Firefox 2 bookmarks separator with a "Properties" name attached - information is lost!
Actual Results:  
User interface is worse than it was.

Expected Results:  
User interface should improve, not get worse.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

For item 1, "state-of-the0-art" is certainly not true.  Mac has something like that, and the left pane is flat only.  Windows does not (using Windows Explorer as the primary example of an organizer app with tree widgets).  Having expander widgets on both sides is rare and was considered a flawed implemtnation.

For item 2, the main reason was the addition of the unsorted (starred but not placed in a folder) bookmarks list, and it didn't make sense for that list to live as a child of the bookmarks menu, so we made them siblings as part of the new system.  The 15 pixels of horizontal space is not reason enough to have a logically inconsitent hierarchy.

For item 3, it was a rarely used feature, at best, which was only never well-supported, even before Firefox 1.0.  Just because a feature is used doesn't mean it must be continued forever.  Your bookmarks should be under your profile directory and named bookmarks.preplaces.html, AIUI, so the data isn't deleted, its just no longer used.

Marking this WONTFIX (though it could also be INVALID, see the guidelines about one bug per issue).

Comment 2

[Thomas Wolff]

(Sorry about my one-bug-per-issue glitch, but let me just respond shortly.)

Item 1: OK, right-pane expander widgets may not be as usual as I thought, but how can a useful implementation be considered "flawed"?

Item 2: The siblings position of the new items is OK, but why is it necessary to invent a new super-parent with the only purpose of holding the siblings; why could they not be placed just in parallel to the bookmarks, like:
-> Bookmarks
-> New category
...
I don't see good reason, from user point of view, to add the complexity of a useless parent node just for the internal structure.

Item 3: Comments to the bugs I referred to provide evidence that this feature was not as rarely used as some people @mozilla seem to be thinking. I cannot believe that you do not understand all those arguments that this feature is very valuable for those using it. Not continuing a good feature (and it's not an experimental feature, it had been working for a long time) is never a good idea. What percentage of users do you require for a feature to persist? This is a delicate way to argue to discard something, and it rebuffs a lot of users who happen to be on the loser side. Also I would hope that a community-supported project should be a little bit more graceful with its "power users".