1440875 - "Show all bookmarks" should be somewhere else in the hamburger/library bookmarks dropdown/panel/doorhanger/popup/menu

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Stephan Sokolow]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180219114835

Steps to reproduce:

1. Remove "Bookmarks Menu" from the toolbar without a second thought because it's almost never used, the overflow menu is cluttered enough as it is, and "of course it'll also be in the hamburger menu".
2. Forget that the toolbar button even exists
3. Decide that it's time to do some bookmark sorting
4. Click the hamburger menu
5. Click Library
6. Try clicking the panel header to no effect
7. Click Bookmarks
8. Try clicking the panel header to no effect
9. Click Boomarking Tools
10. Notice that there's nothing relevant
11. Close the hamburger menu in frustration


Actual results:

I wind up having to either tap Alt and pick "Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks" or choose "Show All Downloads" from the downloads panel and then choose "All Bookmarks" once the Library window appears.


Expected results:

There should be some way for people to reach the Library window from the hamburger menu.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

(In reply to Stephan Sokolow from comment #0)
> 1. Remove "Bookmarks Menu" from the toolbar

It's not there by default in the first place.

Comment 2

[Stephan Sokolow]

Ahh.

The one time I cut corners and don't delete and re-create the clean Nightly profile I use for testing these things, it bites me because I assumed that its presence in that button must be why it wasn't accessible through the hamburger menu.

Comment 3

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Stephan Sokolow from comment #0)
> User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101
> Firefox/59.0
> Build ID: 20180219114835
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
> 
> 1. Remove "Bookmarks Menu" from the toolbar without a second thought because
> it's almost never used, the overflow menu is cluttered enough as it is, and
> "of course it'll also be in the hamburger menu".
> 2. Forget that the toolbar button even exists
> 3. Decide that it's time to do some bookmark sorting
> 4. Click the hamburger menu
> 5. Click Library
> 6. Try clicking the panel header to no effect
> 7. Click Bookmarks
> 8. Try clicking the panel header to no effect
> 9. Click Boomarking Tools

... but you can just click 'show all bookmarks' here, right? :-\

TBH, I'm inclined to close as invalid, as there is clearly an option there. Moving it to the top (where it can scroll out of view) doesn't seem strictly better than having it in the footer. Marco, thoughts?

Comment 4

[Stephan Sokolow]

I actually didn't realize that was there until you came across as so certain that it WAS present in the menu somewhere.

I didn't pay it any mind when I first went looking because my brain just dismissed it as a case of peripheral vision imprecision blurring together an iconless bookmark with the "hover here to scroll an overflowing menu" widget that GTK+ inserts when menus overflow (including Firefox's Alt+B bookmarks menu).

In fact, I noticed it purely by accident while I was gearing up to take a screenshot of a fresh Nightly profile to prove that, no, it's still neither in the clump of entries at the top of "Bookmarks", nor is it in the "Bookmarking Tools" submenu.

(In other words, I *thought* I'd looked everywhere for it, but I was under the influence of the same psychological artifact which produces banner blindness.)

I think that's a UX concern that needs to be addressed and my impression is that it comes about due to the intersection of these three influences:

1. When a menu has a segment with an arbitrary number of entries, it's convention to make that segment the last thing in the menu to ensure the fixed elements remain accessible with a predictable and small amount of mouse motion and to allow muscle memory to develop. (With the exception of putting Exit below an MRU list, where a different convention for menu layout was allowed to win out because MRU lists in File menus have generally been limited to around 5 entries and quitting can also be accomplished from the titlebar.)

2. GTK+ (being one of the two toolkits which defines Linux desktop convention) implements menu overflow using a "hover to scroll" behaviour which makes it even more ill-advised to put things below an arbitrarily-growing dynamic group of entries by not having any kind of "jump to end" mechanism.

3. Aside from games, which reinvent the GUI so drastically as to relax expectations for GUI behaviour, nothing reinvents menus as completely as Firefox, so the expectations for how they will behave are generally strong.

In fact, point 1 gives another reason to not put it at the bottom. If, like me, you make use of "Bookmark All Tabs..." to keep your YouTube related sidebar binges from consuming your life, you permanently have a massive "Recently Bookmarked" section forcing the "Bookmarks" you have to click to get there and the "Show All Bookmarks" to be almost $SCREEN_HEIGHT apart.

Would you mind renaming this bug to "'Show All Bookmarks' is poorly located"?

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Stephan Sokolow from comment #4)
> Would you mind renaming this bug to "'Show All Bookmarks' is poorly located"?

Sure. Bryan, any thoughts?

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

(In reply to :Gijs from comment #3)
> TBH, I'm inclined to close as invalid, as there is clearly an option there.
> Moving it to the top (where it can scroll out of view) doesn't seem strictly
> better than having it in the footer. Marco, thoughts?

I was just guessing yesterday if we couldn't also add an option to open the Library to Bookmarking Tools, for users who shouldn't notice the footer (since it's pushed down quite a bit by the long list of bookmarks).

Comment 7

[jjj]

The "Show All Bookmarks" item should also be somewhere in the bookmarks sidebar (Ctrl-B). It is not there at all, which is very confusing.

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Clear a needinfo that is pending on an inactive user.

Inactive users most likely will not respond; if the missing information is essential and cannot be collected another way, the bug maybe should be closed as INCOMPLETE.

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.