1508151 - Consider removing support for multiple selections in XUL trees

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: UI Widgets, task)

Description

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

While working on bug 1508142, I noticed that we support selecting multiple items at once in trees. To my surprise, that behaviour is actually the default behaviour of XUL trees unless seltype="single" is specified.

Looking at all the different tree usages in m-c, there doesn't seem one where it makes sense to support multiple selections.

There are some places where we allow multiple selections, very likely uninentionally, like the "New Bookmark" panel, where you can actually select multiple items. I believe the other places we do support multi-selection, it's very likely unintentional and that the feature can be removed.

Comment 1

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

In Bookmark Library you can select multiple bookmarks to move them to a other place. Isn't this handy and makes sense?

Comment 2

[Tim Nguyen :ntim]

(In reply to Richard Marti (:Paenglab) from comment #1)
> In Bookmark Library you can select multiple bookmarks to move them to a
> other place. Isn't this handy and makes sense?

Ah, that totally makes sense, I totally forgot about the library.

I believe it's going away with the about:library, but yes, this bug is not actionable without taking care of the library.

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

And in Thunderbird selecting multiple messages for deletion or move - very useful, and supported by other similar programs.
I think this should be wontfix as long as we have xul:tree, and if we replace xul:tree with some html tree library, it should support multiple selections.

Comment 4

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

It also makes sense to delete multiple saved logins.

Comment 5

[Brian Grinstead [:bgrins]]

Closing based on Comments 1-4