1366478 - Show thumbnails / previews of bookmarks and allow transformation of sets of bookmarks into tabs

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P5)

Description

[heri+mozilla]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0
Build ID: 20170518014040

Steps to reproduce:

1. Currently there is a bookmark manager which gives me the ability to query the bookmark database and open new tabs. Bookmarks can be categorised using tags.
2. There once was Panorama (now Tab-Groups add-on [1] by Quicksaver), which provided an overview over all open tabs with previews / thumbnails. Tabs could be grouped and each group could be made the current window's set of tabs.
3. At least in the Tab-Groups add-on, all tabs appear to be loaded, even if they are not a part of the currently active group. [2] This becomes a problem when one has hundreds of tabs open in inactive groups.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/
[2]: I see requests to choose client certificates for sites that are not among the active tabs. Also starting Firefox is utterly slow and takes a minute or two.



Expected results:

I envision a bookmark manager that works like Panorama / Tab-Groups does, just for bookmarks instead of tabs:
* Display a grid of previews / thumbnails
* Allow me to sort these using tags / groups
* Optionally limit search to the currently active tag / group
* All currently active tabs are automatically bookmarked under a common tag (effectively creating a tab group; the tag's name could "Group #" until the user chooses a name, just as in Tab-Groups)
* I can open the result of the current bookmark manager query as tabs, replacing the currently open tabs (no information is lost, since all tabs are always bookmarked)

The result of this would be a very convenient bookmark manager with previews, the ability to group tabs like in the days of Panorama, and still be performant (compared to having all tabs actually open, they would rest on disk in the form of a bookmark).

One problem would be:
* What happens when a tab is closed? Will the bookmark be deleted? If not, how should flooding the user with useless bookmarks be prevented? Could "ephemeral bookmarks" be a way to fix this? Or would that just be a new name for "tab"?

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Thank you for the suggestion, work is ongoing to create Activity Stream that will cover some of this.
Personally I don't have much trust in mostly-visual organizers, as Google demonstrated by implementing (and soon removing due to complaints) one in Chrome.
For sure we'll have to redesign the Library but the direction is not clear yet.
Unfortunately bugzilla is not a good place to provide suggestions about design, since it's likely they will be just lost in the middle of defects. Reaching our UX team may have better luck but they are currently very busy with the Photon redesign.

Comment 2

[heri+mozilla]

Thanks for your reply!

I think I found the UX team at: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/UX/Team

They mention several contacts by email, and also the #UX channel on Slack. However, I only found one Slack Team by trial and error (https://mozilla.slack.com/), for which I'd need a Mozilla corporate account or a guest account, of which I have neither. Is that the Slack instance they are talking about?

If I indeed have no access to your Slack instance, I'd start by contacting Philipp Sackl, as suggested in the Wiki for matters regarding Firefox, unless you have a better suggestion (mailing list? IRC channel?).

Comment 3

[heri+mozilla]

There is also a proposal to revive Panorama / Tab Groups (bug #1232178), which might be interesting to look at in this context.

Comment 4

[Pierre Goiffon]

Hi, 
This is indeed a lead but... The visual representation of groups in the TabGroup extension was perfect, using the bookmark panel will give a poor result. Indeed thumbnails are quite necessary as few websites really gives appropriates titles values...
And finally, beware of not clutering the real user bookmark : tab group was perfect for "read it later" use cases, and/or group tabs opened for searches on a specific subject... You don't want any of those tabs to be in the "real" bookmark...

Comment 5

[heri+mozilla]

(In reply to Pierre Goiffon from comment #4)
> This is indeed a lead but... The visual representation of groups in the
> TabGroup extension was perfect, using the bookmark panel will give a poor
> result. Indeed thumbnails are quite necessary as few websites really gives
> appropriates titles values...

In addition to the bookmark panel, there is also a full fledged bookmark window: Hamburger menu > History ("Chronik" in German) > Show all ("Gesamte Chronik anzeigen" in German) at the bottom of the menu

> And finally, beware of not clutering the real user bookmark : tab group was
> perfect for "read it later" use cases, and/or group tabs opened for searches
> on a specific subject... You don't want any of those tabs to be in the
> "real" bookmark...

Having tabs automatically correspond with bookmarks would also easily allow to synchronise a "tab group" among multiple devices.  E.g. I group tabs by topic -- focusing on certain problems at work, certain technologies, languages and frameworks in programming, etc.  If my tabs / tab groups would automatically become bookmarks and be synchronised using Firefox Sync, this would provide me with a seamless experience when switching from my desktop machine to my laptop and back.  Currently I either need to manually "send tab to device" for a dozen or so tabs (which is a great improvement to what was previously possible, but still cumbersome if you have too many tabs you want to send), or "bookmark all tabs" and then manually turn the bookmark folder to tabs ("open all in tabs") on the other device.

Comment 6

[Pierre Goiffon]

Hi ? 

(In reply to devurandom from comment #5)
> In addition to the bookmark panel, there is also a full fledged bookmark
> window: Hamburger menu > History ("Chronik" in German) > Show all ("Gesamte
> Chronik anzeigen" in German) at the bottom of the menu

Can't find it :/
What Firefox version are you running ? Can you point to a screenshot ?

> Having tabs automatically correspond with bookmarks would also easily allow
> to synchronise a "tab group" among multiple devices.  

I would rather have the existing and perfectly made sync tab functionnality to "simply" support groups, should be simplier and won't change any habits !

Comment 7

[heri+mozilla]

(In reply to Pierre Goiffon from comment #6)
> Hi ? 
> 
> (In reply to devurandom from comment #5)
> > In addition to the bookmark panel, there is also a full fledged bookmark
> > window: Hamburger menu > History ("Chronik" in German) > Show all ("Gesamte
> > Chronik anzeigen" in German) at the bottom of the menu
> 
> Can't find it :/
> What Firefox version are you running ? Can you point to a screenshot ?

https://media.gcflearnfree.org/content/55e076cc7dd48174331f5293_01_17_2014/browse_history_show.png

> > Having tabs automatically correspond with bookmarks would also easily allow
> > to synchronise a "tab group" among multiple devices.  
> 
> I would rather have the existing and perfectly made sync tab functionnality
> to "simply" support groups, should be simplier and won't change any habits !

Firefox has a setting to automatically synchronise all tabs among all devices?  Without me having to "send tab to device" for each tab?  How do I enable that?

Comment 8

[Pierre Goiffon]

(In reply to devurandom from comment #7)
> > (In reply to devurandom from comment #5)
> > > In addition to the bookmark panel, there is also a full fledged bookmark
> > > window: Hamburger menu > History ("Chronik" in German) > Show all ("Gesamte
> > > Chronik anzeigen" in German) at the bottom of the menu
> > 
> > Can't find it :/
> 
> https://media.gcflearnfree.org/content/55e076cc7dd48174331f5293_01_17_2014/
> browse_history_show.png

Thanks !
Ok, I though you were referring to a mean to see a thunmbnail of previous visited adresses sorry. So ok this gives the title and the url, it's better than only the title, but thumbnails are still really usefull to find very quickly the tab you want to open...

> > > Having tabs automatically correspond with bookmarks would also easily allow
> > > to synchronise a "tab group" among multiple devices.  
> > 
> > I would rather have the existing and perfectly made sync tab functionnality
> > to "simply" support groups, should be simplier and won't change any habits !
> 
> Firefox has a setting to automatically synchronise all tabs among all
> devices?

No it doesn't ! But on 2 sync Fx, say Fx A and Fx B, you can open from B all of the opened tabs on A with one click ("open all tabs" at the end of each device tabs list)
Having the tabs grouped in this list, and be able to open all tabs of one group would be enough for me :)