1043932 - [User Story] Use hostname as title of browser windows

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::System::Browser Chrome, defect)

Description

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

The Rocketbar should show the origin instead of page title for browser windows. Unless the web page provides an application-title in a meta tag, which is covered by bug 961724.

Comment 1

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/23102

WIP Patch, needs tests

Comment 2

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Comment on attachment 8476063 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/23102

Alive,

I am trying to get Rocketbar titles closer to the UX spec. If you take a look at the spec you will see that document titles from the <title> element are *never* used in the Rocketbar. The requirement is that app windows should use "name" from the manifest and browser windows should use hostname (there is an exception for web sites which specify an application-name meta tag but that is bug 961724).

It seems like we can remove a bunch of code which handles titlechange events as they are no longer needed, but I would like you to take a look to make sure you agree. I believe Vivien who wrote this code is currently on PTO.

Comment 3

[(inactive after 6/18) Alive Kuo [:alive]]

Comment on attachment 8476063 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/23102

Ya, not sure if the timer removal is desired.

May I know what shall we show for popup(window.open in app)?

Comment 4

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

(In reply to Alive Kuo [:alive][NEEDINFO!] from comment #3)
> Ya, not sure if the timer removal is desired.

Me neither, but it seems a lot less useful if we don't have to choose between URL and <title>.

> May I know what shall we show for popup(window.open in app)?

That's a good question. Francis, should popup windows use the document <title> or the application name? It seems like document title might make more sense, though it is the only place we use document titles.

Also, do we display document <title>s in the task manager? If not then we could have lots of sheets in the task manager with the same title.

Comment 5

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

I'm going to move forward using hostname for the title of popupwindows for consistency, but let me know if they should use document <title>s instead.

Comment 6

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Another point is that the contents of the Rocketbar title are currently used when bookmarking a web page to homescreen. Should the hostname be used as a bookmark title for consistency, or do we need to keep track of document title for this purpose?

Comment 7

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Comment on attachment 8476063 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/23102

Kevin, do you have time to review this before Alive wakes up?

Comment 8

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

I think I'm happy about the code, but I think that overall we're losing out on a lot of the usability of the browser. If you don't show the full URL, or the title, the titlebar is not really relevant.

My use-case is that I browse the same site for a long time, visiting content, and pressing the back button. Having the titlebar not update makes it feel like something is missing, but maybe that's just because I'm trained mentally on this. My preference would be to keep the title, but maybe we could just show the full URL also.

Peter any thoughts on this? Could you give this patch a try on the device and try browsing with it for a bit? Also try landscape as it feels we're just wasting space, thanks.

Comment 9

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Hi Kevin,

I found it a bit strange at first too, but after using it for a while it actually feels quite nice. The thing is that titles don't really fit in that space properly anyway, so showing the hostname is actually a good use of the space. I do think it's odd that we're not showing web page titles *anywhere* in the OS which is why I was asking whether we will be showing them in the task manager, to help differentiate between different sheets from the same origin.

There is prior art for this btw, I believe it's what the browser in iOS does. In the absence of an application-name (which will be added in bug 961724) it is a useful short label to help identify a site, looks quite neat, and helps train the user to link the hostname with the content they are looking at, which is helpful for communicating the security model.

Anyway, these are comments on the UX spec, not the implementation, and we already discussed this at great length many months ago. How about we get it landed and live with it for a while to see how well it works?

Comment 10

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

Did you try the browser in landscape mode? I think a lot of people browse this way, and it's really a shame to waste that space IMO. It also seems that most sites do not leverage application-name, so I don't really see that helping too much.

(In reply to Ben Francis [:benfrancis] from comment #9)
> we already discussed this at great length many months ago.

Can you point me to some notes on this discussion? I don't recall this and I would like to understand why we chose to go with just the origin instead of full URL.

Comment 11

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

(In reply to Kevin Grandon :kgrandon from comment #10)
> Did you try the browser in landscape mode? I think a lot of people browse
> this way, and it's really a shame to waste that space IMO.

Yeah it can look a bit sparse for shorter hostnames, although longer hostnames won't fit in portait mode so being able to switch to landscape can be useful.

> It also seems
> that most sites do not leverage application-name, so I don't really see that
> helping too much.

That does seem to be true, though I don't have any data on it.

> Can you point me to some notes on this discussion? I don't recall this and I
> would like to understand why we chose to go with just the origin instead of
> full URL.

We've been back and forth on it several times. An example here's excerpt from my review of version 0.4 of the UX spec in December 2013 (you were on the thread but may not remember):

"Getting rid of the title bar of the browser is quite a big step as the <title> element is used by pretty much every web site and web app. I like how clean it makes the design but are we losing anything? Could the page title be considered part of the UI for some web apps? E.g. showing depth within a navigation hierarchy or showing the number of new emails.

Rocketbar results will show a title and URL for entries from the browser/app history. Should those results still show the page title, which may be different than the domain name or app name? Is that inconsistency between what you see in the Rocketbar results and what you see in the Rocketbar once you select a result OK?"

I can't find a record of a response from Francis on the first point but maybe he can chime in to explain the rationale. He did later agree to use the full title and URL for Rocketbar places results [1], but that's a bit of a moot point now :)

1. https://etherpad.mozilla.org/Rocketbar-Review-ver-point-four

Comment 12

[Ben Francis [:benfrancis]]

Looks like we re-visited the topic when reviewing v0.12 of the UX spec [1]

I said:

"We need to discuss where the title, URL and icon come from. We could have an app manifest title, W3C manifest title, application-name meta tag title or page title to choose from."

Francis said:

"For the Title, it makes sense to me to use something "app like" if possible, so the app/W3C manifest title if possible, or the app-name meta-tag if it's available."

I also said:

"We may end up with multiple cards with the same title so I feel we should consider using page titles instead of app titles in the card view."

1.https://etherpad.mozilla.org/RB-Eng-Review

Anyway, that's enough digging through the archives :)

Comment 13

[Francis Djabri [:djabber]]

Ben, regarding your questions - the Task manager spec states that browser windows should display the page title for the reasons you mentioned. As for pop-up windows, I think the page title also makes more sense.

About whether to show the title or the shortened URL in the browser, to be honest I could go either way on this. The shortened URL fits better in the space that we have. Document titles are generally so long that they don't make much sense as they're cut short. But I can see that using the title would be better for consistency with the bookmark name and the pop-up windows. I've spoken with Peter and we would be OK keeping the document title in the rocket bar. 

If the web site does specify an application-name meta tag, however, we should still use it.

Comment 14

[Kevin Grandon :kgrandon]

Comment on attachment 8476063 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/23102

It does appear that both Francis and Peter are on-board with showing the title, which is what we have implemented in master already. I do believe that this is better than showing only the origin which makes browsing the same site lack a lot of context. Clearing the review for now, sorry if causes throwaway work here - but I do think using the page title or full URL is the superior UX.

There is a question about if using the title is sufficient for a security perspective. We should chat to some security guys about this.

Comment 15

[Peter Dolanjski [:pdol]]

We should watch the feedback on this once dogfooders get a chance to play with it.  In the future, we could provide a setting that lets the user change it.