1098468 - »Show all Bookmarks« should show unsorted bookmarks by default

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect, P1)

Description

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

Currently, whenever users open the bookmarks manager, they are presented with only the top level items of the bookmarks hierarchy (which never directly includes bookmarks).

To make this slightly more useful, we should make the bookmarks manager show »Unsorted Bookmarks« by default.

Reasons:
- When inexperienced users search for their bookmarks (which go to unsorted by default), they often click Show all Bookmarks (Michael Verdi has done a user study that shows this behavior)
- More experienced users have filed a way a bookmark at some point and will probably spot the folders in the sidebar (which is a common place for folders)

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Looking at the user research, looks like users always fallback to Show all bookmarks when they can't find the starred bookmark in the menu, that issue seems to have an higher priority.

Fwiw, what is requested here should be easy to do from a code point of view, could take more time just to fix tests.

Comment 3

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

Attachment: change-library-default.png

People are often confused when they open the bookmarks menu, select "Show All Bookmarks" and then don't see their bookmarks in the Library window. To add to the confusion, people often click on the folders listed on the right side of the window which doesn't do them any good. 

We should change the default selection to be unsorted bookmarks so that the bookmarks that people have created and not filed anywhere in particular are shown when opening the Bookmarks Library window.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

So this would make "Show All Bookmarks" and "Unsorted Bookmarks" do the same thing. Should we keep both menu items?

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Unsorted Bookmarks is a submenu in the bookmarks menu button. it's just we never synced up the main menu bar structure.

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I was referring to the "Unsorted Bookmarks" menu item in the Bookmarks menu.

Comment 7

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

That said, the "Unsorted Bookmarks" menu from the menu button is also interesting. There's certainly some extra redundancy there as well if "Show All Bookmarks" goes to unsorted bookmarks.

Comment 8

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

In the bookmarks button menu, the two items are definitely different enough (one opening a menu), so let's not touch unsorted bookmarks there.

In the menu bar, I'm a bit surprised that unsorted bookmarks doesn't open a submenu as well. My initial reaction would be to make the item in the menu bar behave the same way as the item in the button menu. But let's sort out that situation in a separate bug and not block this work on it.

Comment 9

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: patch

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=7dcfd24614ee

Comment 10

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Comment on attachment 8707893 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

Review of attachment 8707893 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Unfortunately "All Bookmarks" will still have the wrong meaning since this view has no toolbar/menu... but let's see how it feels.
In the end we are not requiring more clicks than before to reach those other roots and that's positive.

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/be4d89e61e5b

Comment 12

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/be4d89e61e5b

Comment 13

[Mihai Boldan, Desktop QA [:mboldan]]

I was able to reproduce this issue on Firefox 45.0a2 (2016-01-18) and on Windows 10 x86.
The issue was verified on Firefox 46.0a2 (2016-01-27) across platforms[1] and is no longer reproducible.
[1] - Windows 10x86, Ubuntu 14.04 x86 and Mac OS X 10.9.5