1274935 - "Bookmarks menu" is no longer selected in the Library

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[citay]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0
Build ID: 20160502172042

Steps to reproduce:

Pressing CTRL-SHIFT-B to open the Library, expecting the "Bookmarks menu" to be selected on the left, as was the case with all FF versions prior to the latest ones. This would show the bookmarks on the right pane. 


Actual results:

"Unsorted bookmarks" (at the bottom) seems to be selected now. Which of course is probably empty for most people. And i see no way to change the selection permanently.


Expected results:

"Bookmarks menu" should be selected on the left, meaning you can easily navigate via keyboard in your bookmarks on the right. Instead, it now requires an extra step of manually selecting "Bookmarks menu" until you can go back to keyboard navigation for the bookmarks list on the right.

Comment 1

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

>Which of course is probably empty for most people.

Seems questionable given that it's the default place bookmarks end up in.

Ending up at "Unsorted Bookmarks" (Other Bookmarks in my Nightly) does feel kind of random though.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Bookmarks menu has never been selected in the left pane, All bookmarks was selected instead. So there is not really any additional clicks required. Maybe an add-on could help here.
That said, the change was done on purpose, cause the default destination of bookmarks is Other bookmarks, and the Show all bookmarks button is connected to the star button. Doing otherwise, some users could end up guessing where the bookmark he just created ended.

Is this a perfect solution? no it's not clearly, but changing this requires changing how bookmarking works in Firefox in general, that is a much larger effort. I'm sure it will happen sooner or later, but there's no need for this bug to track that.
So this is a wontfix since we can't change it alone, we need to redesign bookmarking as a whole.

Comment 3

[citay]

> Bookmarks menu has never been selected in the left pane, All bookmarks was selected instead.

No, up until FF 46.0, Bookmarks menu *was* selected for me, as far back as i can remember. And the right pane was active. I only had to press "End" to get to my most recent bookmarks at the bottom of the right pane.

Now, since "Other bookmarks" is selected (but not active!), there is no quick way to navigate to Bookmarks menu. I either have to move the cursor and click on Bookmarks menu, which interrupts my workflow. Alternatively, if i don't want to take my hands off the keyboard, i have to do the following now:

CTRL-SHIFT-B
TAB TAB (making left pane selection active)
POS1 (selecting top entry, since i have many folders in the Bookmarks menu)
DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN DOWN (getting to Bookmarks menu)
TAB
END

This annoys me so much that i was compelled to finally post this bug report.

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Maybe you had an add-on selecting the menu, by default we always selected All Bookmarks, as you can see from the patch that changed behavior:
https://bug1098468.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=8707893

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Surely, from All Bookmarks, you could just move to the menu using keyboard, something you can't do now.

Comment 6

[citay]

I might have just remembered it wrong and "All Bookmarks" was selected indeed. That would mean, i had to press DOWN and ENTER to get to "Bookmarks menu", then END to get to the bottom of the list. I think those key presses might be so engrained in my mind that they became second nature. So, sorry if i remembered it incorrectly, i think the code is evidence enough.

So, to make my life easier again, can i just migrate all my hundreds of folders and bookmarks to "Other bookmarks", without changing any order or "Last visited" times and without confusing Firefox Sync? I have so many bookmarks in specific order, i don't want to cause a mess by this.

Comment 7

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #2)
> That said, the change was done on purpose, cause the default destination of
> bookmarks is Other bookmarks, and the Show all bookmarks button is connected
> to the star button.

I think I understand the problem now.

Old behavior:

Default destination of clicking star: Other/Unsorted bookmarks (memoryless)
Default destination of Ctl-D: Bookmark Menu (or last selected)
Default destination Ctl-Shift-D: All Bookmarks (from which Bookmark Menu is easily reached)

New behavior:

Default destination of clicking star: Other/Unsorted bookmarks (memoryless)
Default destination of Ctl-D: Bookmark Menu (or last selected)
Default destination Ctl-Shift-D: Other/Unsorted Bookmarks

That is, the new location matches up to people who CLICK on the star to bookmark, but it's wrong for people who used keyboard shortcuts. 

Notably, the statement "Show all bookmarks button is connected to the star button." is not true if the user just presses Ctl-Shift-D, which reaches the same place.

Marco, given that the destination of the bookmark folder differs between the keyboard shortcut and starring, shouldn't the default destination also differ between the keyboard shortcut and pressing the item in the star menu? It definitely is *not* consistent now.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp] from comment #7)
> Notably, the statement "Show all bookmarks button is connected to the star
> button." is not true if the user just presses Ctl-Shift-D, which reaches the
> same place.

Yes, the new setup is more dedicated to mouse users, that we expect being the most common group. The different destination for bookmarks is unfortunately a legacy behavior that comes from Firefox 2 -> 3 migration, yet, when we didn't want to confuse users who were used to bookmark to the menu when unsorted didn't exist yet.

> Marco, given that the destination of the bookmark folder differs between the
> keyboard shortcut and starring, shouldn't the default destination also
> differ between the keyboard shortcut and pressing the item in the star menu?
> It definitely is *not* consistent now.

Let's see if UX has some ideas in this regard, I feel like in the current situation whatever will do will be wrong, cause the general interaction is just pretty broken.
I think we also have a bug filed about this different destination between mouse and keyword interaction, maybe we should just remove it.

Comment 9

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

We could also expose a pref in General like "By default put new bookmarks in [menu/toolbar/unsorted(default)]" and then have all the creation points (mouse and keyboard) respect that, and have the library open to that destination.

Comment 10

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

I should've written Ctl-Shift-B, but I'm on Linux and the shortcuts are subtly different here.

Marco, another issue: if you hover the star, it will say "Bookmark this page  (Ctl-B)", so the same as the menu item, but if you actually use the shortcut or menu item, you get different behavior, i.e. the bookmarks by default go to another folder.

Comment 11

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #9)
> We could also expose a pref in General like "By default put new bookmarks in
> [menu/toolbar/unsorted(default)]" and then have all the creation points
> (mouse and keyboard) respect that, and have the library open to that
> destination.

I guess the issue there is that (unlike the shortcut/menu) starring is memoryless and doesn't remember the last selected folder (in its dialog). Was this intentional design?

If not you can just remember and go to the last selection.

Comment 12

[citay]

I just realized that, were i to i put all my bookmarks under "Other/Unsorted bookmarks", then clicking on the "Bookmarks menu" icon next to the star won't give me all my bookmarks in a dropdown list anymore. Yes, i could create a copy of "Other/Unsorted bookmarks" as a subfolder of "Bookmarks menu", but then it would be a nested folder and i won't see all my bookmarks when clicking on the icon from the main UI. Since that defaults to the root folder of "Bookmarks menu". So that is no solution either.

As an interim solution, i could put all loose bookmarks in "Other/Unsorted bookmarks", and keep just the already organized folders in "Bookmarks menu". That was probably how it was intended by somebody someday. It would kind of split my bookmarks in two, and complicate my CTRL-D saving place selection sometimes, but i guess i could work with that.

Comment 13

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp] from comment #11)
> I guess the issue there is that (unlike the shortcut/menu) starring is
> memoryless and doesn't remember the last selected folder (in its dialog).
> Was this intentional design?

The star always bookmarks to unsorted.

Comment 14

[citay]

All my annoyances have been solved by putting my loose bookmarks under "Other/Unsorted bookmarks", and keeping the folders under "Bookmarks menu", as mentioned.

This is definitely something i can live with. CTRL-SHIFT-B now immediately presents me with the unsorted bookmarks and the right pane is active.

I hope i haven't started a process with my bug report that complicates things again. I was simply a bit annoyed that something i've gotten so used to has been changed.

But i now have a better understanding of how hard it is for developers to keep everyone happy, especially with a product that has grown for such a long time and has so much of a "legacy" to carry around in certain areas. Then there's apparently different shortcuts for Windows vs. Linux etc...

Hopefully you guys will make the right decisions, best of luck for that from a long-time FF user.

Comment 15

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

Both the star button and ctrl-d now default to unsorted. So opening the library to unsorted bookmarks seem reasonable. Hence closing this out.