1109851 - support the "multiple searches in a row with default engine" search case (for shoppers and researchers)

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[Gregg Lind (Fx Strategy and Insights - Shield - Heartbeat )]

Use case:

- researcher wants to do 10 searches in a row with xarchiv, or metafilter, or wikiepdia
- shopper wants to do 10 searches on ebay, amazon, gilt.

In both populations, desire:
1. suggestions come from the alternate engine
2. 'default search' (general result) remains the same


Claims about this population:
1.  they are power users.  Changing the engine before was POWERFUL ENOUGH TO BE WORTH LEARNING. They know right click and long click, *or would learn it*.
2.  They are 'dependent superfans'.  They want to use Firefox, and want to stay loyal.
3.  This is a Wizard feature.  It doesn't need to be discoverable.
4.  They are more likely to be popularizers / trend-setters, and thus have high value. 

Possible solutions (given those claims):
1.  Long press or right press on tile changes it to default... temporarily (session?  restart).  The icon would have some indicator of 'tempness'.
2.  Offically supported addon that does *some* of the old behaviour?

(obviously this a dupe of MANY MANY bugs. I wanted to make a positive, expansive one, in the hope that it would lead to a solution!)

Comment 1

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

(I have enough trust in my co-workers to not follow this bug.  ;)

Also, I suggest ctrl/cmd click on the search engine as another way to set the (possibly-temporary) default.
It could even be promoted _as_ a Wizard-level feature…  "Level up your searching!" kinda thing.  :)

Comment 2

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

Gregg - that's helpful framing, thank you (i.e. advanced users who already know certain keyboard tricks... and who could learn other tricks).

Some off-the-top-of-my-head ideas that don't involve changing the whole user model or introducing more modes:

- how about at any point where the drop-down is open, the CTRL-up and CTRL-down keyboard commands cycle through the defaults as they do right now? The person mentioning this issue in IRC today mentioned that we broke the keyboard shortcut specifically.

illustrated: http://cl.ly/image/1h1w3c2s3P0t

- we could also/instead: have a right click on the "default search provider header" that lets you change the default right there. Possibly also right clicks on the one-click options below could surface a "make this default"?

illustrated: http://cl.ly/image/153M3p1M061s

Some of this could be supported by a related thought we were discussing about showing the whole UI with history search suggestions, etc., when you click on the magnifying glass with an empty field.

Comment 3

[[:Cww]]

Speaking as a non-UX expert...

I like option 1 if we kept the icon for the current default search highlighted in the list at the bottom (just so you know where you are in the list when you ctrl-up/down). It could only appear if you've used ctrl-up/down if we want to keep the clean look.

I like "right clicks on the one-click options below could surface a "make this default"?" because that feels like it's actually very discoverable (the "Yahoo search" bar doesn't have any interactivity so it's less likely to trigger the "I know this does something, let's see what happens when I right-click" curiosity.

Comment 5

[Robert (rrayborn, he/him)]

Attachment: Suggestions for the Search UI

Comment 6

[Robert (rrayborn, he/him)]

Hello Madhava et al:

Per Gregg's feedback: I agree in general but I want to point out that we had a discoverable way to change your default search engines pre-34, so it's possible that there are non-power-users using this feature.

Per Madhava's first mock:  I really like the ideas and think that it's an elegant solution, however I have a minor issue with it.  The proposed model seems to be replacing the nth search engine with the default, then moving the old default to position 1 in the "tray".  This means that as you scroll through the list you end up reversing your list.  So let's say the default is 0 and you have 1,2,3,4 in the tray.  As you Ctrl + Down you'll get 1 2 3 4 -> 0 2 3 4 -> 1 0 3 4 -> 2 1 0 4 etc.  I think that we would actually need to preserve the order of the list so what you're actually selecting is what engine you want to replace the default: 1 2 3 4 -> 0 2 3 4 -> 0 1 3 4 etc.

Per Madhava's second mock: I really like this one!  Perhaps this can be used in congunction with the first for keyboard shortcuts, or we make Ctrl + down/up open up the list iterface.


Just on a personal note I've been thinking of some minor-ish tweaks that I would enjoy (and this is just my personal opinions not the opinion of the Advocacy team).  Personally, I like that we featured the default search engine so prominantly in 34.  However, I do feel that it's taking up screen real estate in an odd place and have attached a mock of what I would like to see.  Just an idea, I'm no UX expert (I mean I made the mock in the Linux equivalent of MS Paint :) )

Thanks

Comment 7

[Robert (rrayborn, he/him)]

Attachment: corrected_search_suggestions.png

Doh, I added an earlier version of my mock.  Corrected :)

Comment 12

[msth67]

Does this proposed change (corrected_search_suggestions) also affect context searches, in the specific sense of preserving the functionality of addons such as https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/context-search ?

Comment 14

[Aleksey]

I see two additional problems here:

1. 'Ctrl' + 'Up'/'Down' is good, but to change my search engine I need to press 'Ctrl' and many 'Up' or 'Down' keys (possible more than 10 times) instead of just *one* mose click! I want switch default engine to any other in one mouse click. I have more than 20 search plugins in my Firefox, some of plugins I made myself.

2. Some search plugins can use same icons - without names in list, with only icons, it is hard to select one I need. For example if I using 2 wikipedias for 2 different languages, both with same icons. In my system I have up to 4 search plugins with same icon, but different names and different request parameters (this plugins are all for one site, but with different requests).

Comment 15

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field for this bug is relatively low, S3. However, the bug has 5 duplicates.
:standard8, could you consider increasing the bug severity?

For more information, please visit auto_nag documentation.

Comment 16

[BugBot (nomail) [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The last needinfo from me was triggered in error by recent activity on the bug. I'm clearing the needinfo since this is a very old bug and I don't know if it's still relevant.

Comment 17

[neda]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/102.0.5005.63 Safari/537.36 Edg/102.0.1245.33

Steps to reproduce:

I have Firefox both on my PC and Android Smartphone. The syncing is fine for everything except one, it seems.
https://www.drtajbakhsh.ir/
You know, there's those Google Now feed on Android. Often it's on the left side of the home screen on some phones, or they show up when you open the Google App. If I click on those news link from Google Now, they open in Firefox. But every news that's open from Google Now doesn't show up in History on my PC's Firefox, which is on Windows 11. Other sites that I visit manually shows up just fine. On my Android Firefox, everything is shown in history, but not on PC.
One thing I should add is, my Android apps are set to open links externally in Firefox. So links are not opening inside the apps. It's opening in Firefox itself. So there should be no issue.

Actual results:

Sites browsed from Google Now feed doesn't show up in Windows Firefox's history.

Expected results:

Full history should be present.