1034850 - Better back menu support for long navigation chains

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Menus, defect)

Description

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

Attachment: history-change

Suppose you're browsing a slideshow and you've clicked through many slides. Now you want to back up in the history. If you hit "Back", you'll go to the previous slide. If you right click on the "Back" button, you'll find that every menu item is for some slide. (The menu is limited to 15 entries.) So you have to go to the last item in the menu and then do more backing up from there; sometimes I have to do this several times.

I think we should fix this. I had a lot of ideas about how to do it: having submenus for each site if there are a lot of entries from that site, or only allowing a certain number of entries from each site. However, the code for doing that quickly gets pretty complex, and we don't really need all that complexity.

Most of the time, you just want one more menu entry at the end. This patch does a bit more than that: it adds one item for the initial entry from the slideshow site and another for the entry before that (the first one not from the slideshow site).

Matt, can you give me some feedback on who needs to review this? Can you?

Comment 1

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

Attachment: history-menu.png

Here's a screenshot of the back menu with the patch applied.

Comment 2

[Dão Gottwald [::dao]]

(In reply to Bill McCloskey (:billm) from comment #0)
> Matt, can you give me some feedback on who needs to review this? Can you?

You need to get ui-review from [e-mail].

Comment 3

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Comment on attachment 8451291 [details] [diff] [review]
history-change

Review of attachment 8451291 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

I definitely think there is room for improvement here. An email to firefox-dev may help get faster UX feedback.

A concern I have is that initially I thought the "More pages from bugzilla.mozilla.org…" row was a heading for the two rows below since it looks like the styling of an <optgroup> IIRC. That seemed weird since Google is not on bugzilla.mozilla.org. Now I understand that it's supposed to be a placeholder for where other entries are but I think the UI needs to be tweaked to make it look less like a heading. The ellipsis makes me think it's leading into the next line. 

Some ideas:
A) "29 more pages from bugzilla.mozilla.org[…]" – including the number makes it more clear to me that it's not referring to the two entries below.
B) Maybe make the placeholder row italic?
C) "(more pages from bugzilla.mozilla.org)" – Perhaps braces or some other styling makes it more obvious that it's not a heading or leading into the next line.

I'm not sure it's worth reviewing the patch more until UX is on board.

Comment 4

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

Attachment: history-menu-2.png

Here's a version that uses a centered ellipsis as suggested on the firefox-dev thread.

Comment 5

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

Attachment: history-menu-3.png

I implemented Jared's suggestion to have a single entry at the top for the most recent page, if that wouldn't otherwise be displayed. This screenshot shows both the top and bottom ellipses displayed (which would be pretty unusual, but it shows the whole thing).

Comment 6

[Bill McCloskey [inactive unless it's an emergency] (:billm)]

Attachment: history-change v2

The code here isn't ready--I should probably use XBL for the ellipsis. But I want to post a new patch so I can ask for UX review.

Philipp, Felipe mentioned that you might be able to help by reviewing this. Please let me know if you can't do it.

Comment 7

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Comment on attachment 8452860 [details] [diff] [review]
history-change v2

Hey Bill,
I really like the idea of making the entry point to a site more premanently visible in that menu!

When I tested your patch (prior to reading the bug description), I wasn't sure what was happening there. I think this is due to two factors:

- The "three dots" icon signaled that there was something I could expand in that menu
- The fact that there are two items at the bottom obscured the original intent of the design

So my proposal would be to:

- show only the entry point of one site
- use a regular divider instead of the three dots

Perhaps it could also work to keep the two entries and add an additional divider in between them.