138063 - drag-n-drop of multiple bookmarks should create a tab for each

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(SeaMonkey :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[paxunix]

If I have multiple bookmarks selected in the bookmark manager, I should be able
to drag the lot of them onto the tab bar, drop them, and get a new tab for each
of them.

You can almost get this behavior using bookmark groups, but there is no UI to
recategorize an existing folder as a bookmark group.

Comment 1

[John Levon]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 145102 ***

Comment 2

[paxunix]

I took a look at 145102 and I disagree that this is a duplicate.

This bug addresses only the fact that selecting multiple bookmarks in the
bookmark manager then drag-n-drop'ng the selected set in empty space on the tab
bar only opens the final bookmark in the set into its own new tab.

Expected behavior:
A new tab should be created for each bookmark in the selected set, exactly as
would happen if I drag-n-drop'd each bookmark individually onto empty space in
the tab bar.

I would expect also that if the selected set were dropped onto an existing tab,
the behavior would be similar to that which currently happens when you open a
bookmark group into a window with existing tabs.  There are grotty corner cases,
though:  for example, what should happen if the user drops the set onto, say,
the 2nd-to-last open tab--which tabs get overwritten?  I don't have the ideal
solution to that problem, but I think this general case of behavior is something
intuitive enough to be expected.

I only mentioned the "workaround" about recategorizing the selected set as a
bookmark group because that is the only way to currently do it.  And it is an
ugly, mind-bendingly, unintuitively, horrendous way to be forced to do it--you
shouldn't have to drag-n-drop 20 bookmarks one-at-a-time onto the tab bar; nor
should you have to create a folder, drag the selected set into that folder, then
(somehow) turn the folder into a bookmark group, then open that group, then
destroy that group--oops, all those bookmarks are gone now.  And if you don't
destroy it, now you have a bookmark group with a bunch of bookmarks that you may
well have wanted to keep ungrouped in the first place and that you can no longer
access individually except through the sidebar or the bookmark manager.

Reopening.

Comment 3

[John Levon]

Sounds like a WONTFIX due to featuritis then. There's a simple workaround
when bug 145102 is fixed.

I'm sure this is already filed anyway.

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 142683, "Ctrl+Click on bookmark folders to open it as a bookmark
group".  I like these ideas, because they make it possible to get rid of the
"bookmark group" feature while keeping the ability to open a set of bookmarks
together.

"Featuritis" is less of a problem when it involves invisible UI such as
drag-and-drop.

Comment 5

[John Weinlader]

The ability to process multiple dropped URLS is very important for external 
programs to interact with Netscape 7 or Mozilla.  Although the argument can be 
made that Mozilla/Netscape 7 supports multiple URL opening by using the 
internal bookmark manager, not correctly supporting drag and drop from an 
external programs is a *BUG*. 

If you drag and drop a list of URLs into a tabbed browsers, each item in the 
drag should be opened in different tabs of the browser.  (Other tabbed browsers 
work in this fashion - see Opera).  If you have different URLs in Windows 
explorer, on your desktop, or even from IE and you drag and drop them into 
Mozilla/Netscape 7 you will only get ONE link to open.

To recreate the problem, save several links into a directory as URL files. 
Select these links and drag them into Netscape.  Only one of the dragged items 
will open.  If you run Opera and drag and drop the same set of bookmarks you 
will see all the links opened in separate tabs. 

This is a relatively simple change that would make Mozilla/Netscape 7 act 
consistent with competing tabbed browser products.  The better you can make the 
browser's external interfaces, the easier it will be for other programs to 
support/interact with the product ultimately leading to more customers.  

Comment 6

[Samir Gehani]

Nav triage team: nsbeta1-

Comment 7

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 8

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but still has no comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project 5 years ago.

Because of this, we're resolving the bug as EXPIRED.

If you still can reproduce the bug on SeaMonkey 2 or otherwise think it's still valid, please REOPEN it and if it is a platform or toolkit issue, move it to the according component.

Query tag for this change: EXPIRED-20100420