1404817 - User has little knowledge of the current URL when copying it

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Dan Jacobson]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Android 7.0; Mobile; rv:58.0) Gecko/58.0 Firefox/58.0
Build ID: 20171001100334

Steps to reproduce:

Long press on some hyperlinked word.
Now choose Copy Link.
Throughout the entire process we are totally unsure of what in the world has been copied. If This Were a desktop browser we would have seen a link preview at the bottom of the screen and would have full confidence that we are copying the right link. However Firefox for Android even though there is ample space in the pop-up prompt does not reveal whatever the link that we are copying is to us. The only way for us to figure out what link we have just copied is to dig it out of the clipboard. And if we take it out of the clipboard and we are unhappy with what we copy then we just have to go poke around on the page again to find the right link by using the same very long process over and over. Therefore it would be a good idea to just show us the text of the link when asking us if we want to copy this link along with the other five questions in the menu. Or at least show us a little toast notification of the text that we just copy.

Comment 1

[Bogdan Surd, QA [:bsurd, NI]]

This seems unnecessary as FF copies the entire length of the hyperlink and a snackbar notification can't show in most cases the entire length of a copied hyperlink. 
Currently a simple notification is shown letting the user know that the hyperlink has been copied.

@Jan Do you have any thoughts regarding this?

Comment 2

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Bug 768291 (make the context menu title scrollable instead of truncating it) would probably help, although it doesn't cover all cases, namely image links (bug 1194269) and links with a "title" attribute.

Comment 3

[Dan Jacobson]

Now with the latest nightly, the problem has changed.

Now copying hyperlinks is great.

The problem is now copying the current link we are browsing.

The user, dealing with a crowded URL bar, might only be able to see
maybe 10 characters of the link in the URL bar.

In the Firefox drop down menu, he chooses the item to copy it (my cell
phone is not with me today, so I can't tell you the exact item.)

There is a momentary message that the URL has been copied.

Throughout the entire process he has little idea of what he is copying.

Compare this to the much better openness involved when copying hyperlinks.

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

There wasn't any significant change in our context menu behaviour as far as I'm aware - we're still showing the title of the click target if available, the URL otherwise and nothing for image links - and if the title/URL is too long, it's still cut off until somebody finally gets around implementing bug 768291. But if you're happy now then fine.

(In reply to Dan Jacobson from comment #3)
> The user, dealing with a crowded URL bar, might only be able to see
> maybe 10 characters of the link in the URL bar.
The text in the URL bar is now scrollable (bug 1271998), which should cover this use case.

Comment 5

[Dan Jacobson]

I made a big breakthrough in discovering some problems here. Okay first turn off images in the browser to save bandwidth. Then browse this.
http://www.jidanni.org/
Okay, now long press one of those image Replacements that are hyperlinked. You'll see that and no case you are allowed to know what the URL is that you are trying to copy. Okay now just long-press an ordinary hyperlink further down on the page, one that it one that does not involve a replacement image. In this case everything works beautifully you can learn all about the hyperlink that you are about to copy. What a terrible contrast in two operations that should be the same!

Comment 6

[Dan Jacobson]

In fact, the menu also allows us to open the link in a new tab excetera excetera, but does not allow us to know what the link is we're about to open. How frustrating.

Comment 7

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

As mentioned above, image links is bug 1194269.