1280700 - Investigate offering an option to display URL before page title

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Address Bar, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Kostas]

After bug 1181078 was fixed, i.e. the new design of bug 959564 was implemented (http://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/mockups/AwesomeResults/AwesomeResults-02.html)
the search suggestions in awesomebar appear having the page title first and then the URL.


I'd suggest to offer the user a choice between having:
1. the page title first and then the URL (i.e. as it is), or
2. the URL first and then the page title.


In my opinion, while navigating to the internet, 
more valuable information is the URL than the page title.
Knowing the page title (or bookmark title) is comfortable,
but it's more important (for keeping your browsing safe) to easily check visually the target URL .

IMHO, the user should be offered an option to choose which of the title and URL to show first in the awesomebar search suggestions.


PS. Chrome's omnibox shows the URL first and then the page title.
I dont't say of course that this is better than Firefox's choice of implementation,
but either way, especially for a user switching from Chrome to Firefox,
I believe it would make it better having a choice.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I think this is worth a discussion, we briefly thought about it a couple days ago, and we want to provide a way to customize the results, but we don't know how we want to do that yet.

Comment 2

[PPNSteve]

Also offer a way to disable this as well.. many users want none of this awesomness and just want a simple text list of URLs / history.

Thanks.

Comment 3

[blauggaumme]

I'd prefer an option to place the URL under the title like it was before. Should I open a separate bug? Or perhaps this bug should be renamed "Investigate offering an option to change URL placement in results list"

Comment 4

[FirefoxUser99999]

With the new bar, URLs are located far to the right and not lined up so it's impossible to scan through them. It's difficult to find which item you want. 
An option to put it back on 2 rows, where every titles and also every URLs were aligned, would be a good way to either still use the new bar or be able to realign everything.

Comment 5

[nK]

Can we not have an option to have the previous version back? I'm once again gobsmacked but not surprised the style has gone from usable and easy to understand to a mess that you can't easily look at. You've got the existing code from firefox 47, just add that back separately and add an option to use the old (which should be the default) or the new design. 1 hours work at most?

Comment 6

[Snow Creative]

Yes, PLEASE have a settable option to disable page titles. One reason I use Firefox instead of all other browsers is precisely because it has, until now, just show the URLs, which is far more descriptive for me that page titles.

Comment 7

[Nathan Cahill]

Implemented this for myself as a Stylish stylesheet: https://github.com/nathancahill/prioritize-url

It's impossible to scan the URL results otherwise. There should definitely be an option to swap the two, or stack them like before. I've never submitted a patch for Firefox before, but I'd be happy to work on this.

Comment 8

[bintoro]

The biggest issue with the new layout is that the URLs are not aligned à la Safari. While I also preferred the old look, I've found that the side-by-side arrangement becomes quite tolerable once the first column (the page title) is given a fixed width.

Comment 9

[Marc]

I don't know why you always "fix" things that aren't broken.
You have so many bugs you could fix that there is no reason to fix a great working feature.

Please give us more options to set URL before title or better to go back like FF47 style.
That was much easier to read and to recognize.

Comment 10

[vlakoff]

God, yet another UI regression.

Before Firefox 48 I had to switch off "browser.urlbar.unifiedcomplete", otherwise it was sluggish as hell.

Now with Firefox 48, the location bar has become a complete Christmas tree, which is a pain to use compared to the previous bar, and there is no way to undo it.

I'm becoming more and more anxious at each Firefox release. Mainly become each time I have to review and update my "undo this UI ****" about:config settings.

Comment 11

[Gergely Zayzon]

Only registered a Bugzilla account to up-vote this request and share some thoughts on this. The latest changes in the location bar aren't welcome, sure this fits the taste/browsing behavior of many, but definitely not mine, it's counterproductive to read the (usually very similar) page titles and other "awesome" entries when I know the exact URL (or choose from the history).

Please leave the choice to the user whether he/she needs all the (popular?) whistles and bells or just something (very) simple.

Comment 12

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Please stop the "me too" comments, this is a bug tracker used for everyday work, and you are spamming all the users in the cc list.
The problem is pretty much clear already, so that's not going to add any technical value. You can vote for the bug yet, if you wish.

Comment 13

[Genya]

This is by far THE WORST USER EXPERIENCE(UE) DECISION made by Mozilla team. And I mean whole new Awesome bar functionality (or absence of it to say better). I've been Firefox user from 3.x version, overcame new 4.x design, mediocre performance, new equivocal "features" etc. But this bar change made me thinking first time to drop using Firefox for real. It seems, like person(s), responsible for this decision, personally never use URL bar, or might be not using Firefox at all. 
Or is Mozilla team trying to keep only the engine, giving all other functionality to be implemented by addons, including UI ?

Comment 14

[Matt McHenry]

(In reply to blauggaumme from comment #3)
> I'd prefer an option to place the URL under the title like it was before.
> Should I open a separate bug?

It looks like bug 1262843 is discussing this possibility.  I support it, FWIW.

Comment 16

[matsaman]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [::mak] from comment #12)
> Please stop the "me too" comments, this is a bug tracker used for everyday
> work, and you are spamming all the users in the cc list.

Not for nothing, but while you guys might be worried about your email spam, the rest of us are worried about the abandoning of the status quo to do something not even any other browser does which demonstrably is at odds with how the human eye is forced to work in a left-to-right language. I'm sure you want to get it just perfect and that's why you have bug 1262507 et al., but an 8+ month period of strange brokenness in the interim should never have been a thing in the first place. This is a non-theoretical problem right now, and for many months preceding right now, and you guys went out of your way to make it so. It'd be great if it were fixed. It'd be really great. 3¢

Comment 17

[BoMbY]

Nothing done for one year, and Firefox 57 has broken all workarounds for this unwanted behavior.

Comment 18

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

That's enough of that.

Bugzilla is our issue tracker and professional working environment, not a place to air your grievances about designs or priorities. I'm restricting this bug users with editbugs privs only. 

If you have something to add that will materially  move this bug forward, please feel free to contact me with it and I will add it to the bug. In the meantime, I encourage you to move review the Bugzilla etiquette and contributor guidelines, and take them to heart.

Comment 19

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

We don't plan to implement this, we still think the title is more understandable and easy to remember for the user.
BUT, now that the urlbar is mostly html, it should be possible to do this with a simple userChrome css rule, changing the order of elements.