1429142 - Remove autocomplete for the home page preference

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement, P4)

Description

[:Paolo Amadini]

While working on migrating autocomplete consumers to the richlistbox version, I came across the home page textbox in the main preferences. Typing in this textbox brings up results from past history that may be used to set the home page.

Speaking with Panos, neither him nor I knew about this feature to begin with.

In fact, I don't think this feature is indispensable, as we already have a "Use Current Pages" button that is much more useful and provides the same functionality once you've navigated to a page using the address bar. By doing this you also get a preview of the actual page, preventing users from typing "google" and accidentally setting the home page to a specific search result page instead, or to some other site that had "google" in the title.

I propose we remove this feature. This textbox is now the only other consumer of autocompletesearch="unifiedcomplete", and probably of URL autocomplete in general, so this likely opens up many opportunities to simplify the code in the future, also not having to deal with the in-content case.

Stephen, Marco, thoughts?

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

(In reply to :Paolo Amadini from comment #0)
> In fact, I don't think this feature is indispensable, as we already have a
> "Use Current Pages" button that is much more useful and provides the same
> functionality once you've navigated to a page using the address bar.

The button is pretty much useless to me thanks to session restore and the button setting all open tabs as home pages. I'd have to open a new window, navigate to the page and open preferences in that window, which isn't exactly intuitive.

Comment 2

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I think the main reason for autocomplete here is to help the user typing a valid url, I agree unifiedcomplete is a little bit too much (on the other side it's already available so didn't require lots of code). We could have a simpler component that only returns origins.
Dao's example doesn't sound great for the user, and this would increase the risk of typing an invalid url in the other cases.
Adding some input validation to the field could likely go towards the same direction as the current autocomplete, but it couldn't correct typos in host names though.
So, imo, either we leave it alone, or we add a simple ac component that just returns origins (could be easier with Drew's patch in bug 1239708)

Comment 3

[:Paolo Amadini]

I agree with Dão that the button is useless when using multiple tabs, which is something I didn't consider before. The current interface is the least worst for selecting a new home page.

I don't think autocomplete is the right solution here though. We need a simpler way to select items from open tabs and top sites without having to type part of their name. Something more similar to the search engine list.

Also, I've never been quite convinced that, apart from startup, we have a use case for opening more than one page when clicking the home page button...

Stephen, has the UX team ever considered this issue? Do we have any preliminary designs somewhere?

Comment 4

[Stephen Horlander [:shorlander]]

Aaron has been working on an update to the prefs UI for this. He might have thoughts.