1375252 - Opt-in way for omnibox API to offer more than 6 suggestions

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1814980

(WebExtensions :: General, enhancement, P5)

Description

[bucklereed]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0
Build ID: 20170613225334




Expected results:

In https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1166831, the decision was made to limit omnibox suggestions to 6 entries, for various good reasons. This is a very sane default, but it would be nice for the user to be able to opt in to displaying more, or even an arbitrary amount. This could be, e.g., a toggle between some/many/all in the extension's section about:addons under 'more', along with the existing 'Automatic Updates' toggle.

There might be need for the extension to discover how many suggestions it can usefully show if that number can change, but there's no penalty for trying to show more suggestions than that, so the degradation is very graceful indeed--the only benefits would be to reduce useless work, and possibly to make sure the most important suggestions aren't dropped (where 'important' might mean, e.g., 'different from the other ones to be shown').

Comment 1

[bucklereed]

I'm sorry, Bugzilla has decided that this is an ActivityStreams bug and WebExtensions doesn't appear in the drop-down. I would be much obliged to anyone who could fix it.

Comment 2

[Caitlin Neiman [:caitmuenster]]

Hi bucklereed, this has been added to the agenda for the July 25 WebExtensions APIs triage meeting. Would you be able to join us? 

Wiki: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Contribute/Triage#Next_Meeting

Agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BBIZhiHG1zlQiu6744jiAYyWJLa-B0iRu9vzWypkvF4/edit#

Comment 3

[Luca Greco [:rpl] [:luca] [:lgreco]]

We discussed about this during the last WebExtensions APIs triage meeting and based on the previous discussions about this topic (e.g. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1166831#c4) we agreed that any change around this "6 suggestions" limitation has to be evaluated with who is working on the awesomebar (and also based on the ongoing changes to the Firefox UI).

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Currently we have a user settable pref that only allows to set the number of results shown in the Location Bar.

I must note our current default (10) is not carved in stone, we will experiment in the next months with different values. Based on some studies the perfect compromise seems to be around 6-8 results, so the 6 results we picked for extensions should work for the most cases, if the extension does a good filtering and prioritizing job.

Taking a decision here requires understanding how compelling are the reasons for which we may want to show some local results in addition to the extension results. The original decision was overzealous, obviously, since we were introducing something new and outcomes were unclear.
I think we should involve both UX (maybe :phlsa?) and Product Management (:javaun?), to check if there are compelling reasons to keep local results in addition to add-on results and act based on that insight.

If UX and PM are fine only showing the add-on results, then we can lift the 6 results limit and we already have a pref (browser.urlbar.maxRichResults).
Otherwise, we could define the extension results limit as a percentage of the whole results, so that changing browser.urlbar.maxRichResults will also increase the number of add-on results.

Comment 5

[Brett Zamir]

In my add-ons just created, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enumerate/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/enumerate-site/ , I am showing scraped Google results (title and URL) within the URL bar.

6 is pretty sparse to my personal taste, and I'd hope the omnibox limit could be optionally raised to even 20 or so.

(If Bug 1361327 is implemented, allowing for overriding the URL bar entirely, it would seem that working as the default search engine would erase the distinction between local and extension anyways, though if there is some need to force it, a percentage does sound helpful for expanding the add-on-supplied choices at least.)

Comment 6

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk move of bugs per https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1483958

Comment 7

[Teal Dulcet [:tdulcet] (TB Council)]

This was potenchally fixed by bug 1814980.

Comment 8

[Marco Bonardo [:mak] (Away Apr 25 - May 5)]

Agree.