1216490 - Rephrase the history dropdown's aria-label and use it as the tooltip too

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Address Bar, defect)

Description

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Attachment: patch

Couple of things:

- "autocomplete" and "popup" (at least in this context) are kind of tech jargon, I don't think we're using these terms elsewhere in the UI

- clicking the dropdown doesn't autocomplete anything, it just shows top sites from your history regardless of what you've typed

- the dropdown doesn't work well for /toggling/ the popup. At least over here, the popup just closes and reopens quickly when clicking it. Even if this worked, it feels strange that we'd instruct people to use the dropdown to close the popup when they can just click anywhere else or hit ESC.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 8676194 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

"autocomplete" is actually exposed through the accessibility APIs for textboxes that have autocomplete (ie NVDA actually reads that word out as part of its description of the kind of element that has focus when you focus the location bar), so I disagree that that is jargon.

As for the new suggested label - it also shows bookmarks and other open tabs, and depending on your preferences it might not show one or more of those. Therefore I don't think "Show history" makes sense (and it might be confusing to users that explicitly disabled history from showing in that popup).

How about "Show suggestions" or "Show top sites"?

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> I disagree that that is jargon.

... in context, that is. If we make it a tooltip, then I agree that a better description would be good - though I'm not entirely sure what that should be. (ie I'm not 100% convinced about my own suggestions - feel free to suggest alternatives!)

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #1)
> Comment on attachment 8676194 [details] [diff] [review]
> patch
> 
> "autocomplete" is actually exposed through the accessibility APIs for
> textboxes that have autocomplete (ie NVDA actually reads that word out as
> part of its description of the kind of element that has focus when you focus
> the location bar), so I disagree that that is jargon.

Maybe, but then this is irrelevant anyway since clicking the dropdown doesn't autocomplete.

> As for the new suggested label - it also shows bookmarks and other open
> tabs, and depending on your preferences it might not show one or more of
> those. Therefore I don't think "Show history" makes sense (and it might be
> confusing to users that explicitly disabled history from showing in that
> popup).

It's still sites you've visited (we don't put unvisited bookmarks in there), so "history" in a broader sense still seems fine to me although it might not be 100% consistent with about:preferences#privacy and with how we use the term internally. For lack of a better idea, I would still go with this. The room for confusion is also fairly small since we mark tabs and bookmarks with an extra icon.

> How about "Show suggestions" or "Show top sites"?

I was oversimplifying when I wrote comment 0, so I guess this is my fault: The entries are pages, not sites (e.g. you can have multiple entries for the same site). I would avoid "suggestions" as that's our euphemism for about:newtab ads.

Comment 4

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Maybe "Show frequently visited pages" to avoid the term "history"? To me "page" feels somewhat old-fashioned since, in wake of the AJAX and Web 2.0 hypes, some sites became more application-like without a clear page structure.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [:dao] from comment #4)
> Maybe "Show frequently visited pages" to avoid the term "history"? To me
> "page" feels somewhat old-fashioned since, in wake of the AJAX and Web 2.0
> hypes, some sites became more application-like without a clear page
> structure.

Taking this in consideration, does "sites" seem better or worse? I understand that there might be multiple entries for one "website", but if we also don't like "pages" then I don't know how else to describe the individual items in the list...

Comment 6

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Not sure which of the drawbacks of "site" and "page" are worse; I think I still prefer "Show history".

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 8676194 [details] [diff] [review]
patch

OK.

Comment 8

[Pulsebot]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/2508632f8bbb

Comment 9

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

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/2508632f8bbb