524056 - Places UI: Display thumbnail images of pages in places meta pages

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Alex Faaborg [:faaborg] (Firefox UX)]

Note: this is a meta tracking bug for UI mockups and discussion of the overall user experience.

Continuing on from the Firefox 3.7 bug 523524 (Bookmarks, tags, and history ranges should be viewable in the content area), these places meta pages should leverage thumbnail images of the bookmarks and history entries being displayed.

Users have extremely good visual memory, so displaying thumbnail images should aid the user in identifying the bookmark or history item they are looking for.  

(As a side note, many of the thumbnail interfaces currently failing on the Web are displaying thumbnails of pages that the user has never seen, either in search results or before the user clicks on a hyperlink.  These thumbnails are mostly useless, since they don't provide enough information for the user to make any reasonable determination of it they should visit the page for a first time).

A few initial thoughts about how we might want to generate the thumbnail images:

1) Focus on the upper left region of the page (right for RTL locals), eliminating any space to the left that is purely a solid color

2) Only scale the cropped are to 66% or 50%

3) Add a slight emboss and shadow effect using canvas so they thumbnails appear to be more a physical object instead of a purely 2D image

we will of course have to experiment a lot with thumbnail generation to see exactly what works best.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Bug 451915 - move Firefox/Places bugs to Firefox/Bookmarks and History. Remove all bugspam from this move by filtering for the string "places-to-b-and-h".

In Thunderbird 3.0b, you do that as follows:
Tools | Message Filters
Make sure the correct account is selected. Click "New"
Conditions: Body   contains   places-to-b-and-h
Change the action to "Delete Message".
Select "Manually Run" from the dropdown at the top.
Click OK.

Select the filter in the list, make sure "Inbox" is selected at the bottom, and click "Run Now". This should delete all the bugspam. You can then delete the filter.

Gerv

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

Per policy at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bug_Triage/Projects/Bug_Handling/Bug_Husbandry#Inactive_Bugs. If this bug is not an enhancement request or a bug not present in a supported release of Firefox, then it may be reopened.