464600 - Little arrow to right of Star icon is missing tooltip

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Walton]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Just to the right of the Star icon there's a little black down-arrow.  I don't know what this arrow is; hovering over it with the mouse does not reveal a tooltip.

Clicking on it brings up a seemingly random list of URLs.  These URLs are not the same as those in my "Most Visited" smart bookmark, nor my "Recently Visited".

Perhaps this is a list of URLs I visit a lot, irrespective of whether or not I've bookmarked them?  Perhaps it's a list of URLs I've visited recently, weighted by how often I've visited them?

Deciding to be clever, I right clicked on the arrow and chose "customize", figuring I could drag it out of the bar and into the pallet getting me a description, but as soon as the pallet appears, the arrow vanishes, cloaking its identity in shadow.

I even tried entering "chrome://browser/content/browser.xul" and using Firebug to inspect the arrow.  Hovering over it brings up the 'textbox id="urlbar"' element, but none of the child elements in the urlbar have IDs that seem to correspond to that little down arrow.  It is obviously not the identity-box, nor the feed-button, the star-button, the go-button...  I seriously doubt it is the safebrowsing-url-icon.  It seems it is mysteriously absent, even in the XUL code.

Going to "Help"->"Help Contents", there's a list of "Handy References" in the right hand column, none of which are "Main Firefox Window".  Searching the Firefox help for "small arrow next to star icon" and variations thereof result in 0 hits.

Perhaps it has something to do with auto-complete?  The format is the same as the awesome-bar's auto complete.  I type in "http://www.slash", click the down arrow, and my auto-complete is replaced by the strange random list of URLs.

Truly, this little arrow is a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Hover mouse over the little drop-down arrow to the right of the star control, and to the left of the search box drop-down.
Actual Results:  
Nothing happens.  The user has no idea what this control is supposed to do.  A control which could be quite useful remains unused, it's purpose unfulfilled.  The user feels depressed and confused, and takes to drinking heavily.

Expected Results:  
A tooltip appears, bringing about enlightenment and understanding in Firefox users everywhere.  This exciting and time saving drop down (whatever it is) increases the user's productivity, allowing them to get on with important matters, such as ending the energy crisis, or solving climate change.

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

The autocomplete-history-dropmarker (call me dropmarker) has never had a tooltip. Maybe it should get one, I don't know. A superficial search didn't turn up a duplicate, so confirming for now.

Comment 2

[Jason Walton]

Note also that when I asked about it in June:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=677335&p=3474715#p3474715

No one could tell me what it did.  I'm obviously not the only one who finds this confusing.