171330 - redesign of how we expose bookmark groups / launching multiple tabs from bookmarks

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, defect)

Description

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Blake and I had a design meeting today and I'm capturing our notes here for
discussion with the rest of the Phoenix team and implementation if pch and hyatt
agree. 

Problems with bookmarks groups:
1. no obvious and clearly discoverable way to create and use groups.
2. unclear how to represent them consistently in different locations (prefs, bm
manager, bm menu, bm toolbar).

solution: get rid of bookmark groups. simplify the metaphor. go back to
something most users understand - folders.

implementations: for the bookmarks menu, folders on the bookmarks toolbar and
the new preferences (start page) bookmarks menu, we add a "open all in tabs" or
similarly named item at the bottom of each folder menu (probably put a separator
below the last bookmark). 

This gives us a simpler, more discoverable mechanism for loading multiple pages
into tabs. It also eliminates the need to implement much more complicated and
less discoverable features like "make this folder a bookmark group" and "open
one of the bookmarks in this group". 

downside: 
this adds an extra click to launching a group of tabs. this is a negative for
the handful of people that already understand how bmgroups work but we believe
this is a reasonable trade-off to expose the feature to the masses.

Comment 1

[terry]

Middle-click on a folder to launch all of its top-level bookmarks would be nice.

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

More discussion. New plan:

1) Eliminate groups
2) Change the add bookmarks dialog to this:

Title:     [      ]
Create in: [ menulist of folders ]
[X] Bookmark all tabs    [Ok][Cancel]

(the language of "Bookmark all tabs" needs to be determined)

3) Add an Open in Tabs item to the context menu for all folders everywhere in the UI

4)Should we put commands in the folder's submenu list? is still an open issue.
(probably not)

Comment 3

[Pierre Chanial]

-> 0.3

Comment 4

[Pierre Chanial]

I added an item in context menu to open the bookmarks contained in a folder.
and dropped support for folder group in the xul/css files
in menus, toolbar buttons and trees we can open a folder with middle click and
ctrl-click also.

I opened bug 172275 (add bookmark dialog) and bug 172276 (cm on menupopups) for
the remaining issues.

Comment 5

[Pierre Chanial]

-> fixed

Comment 6

[Prognathous]

> this adds an extra click to launching a group of tabs. this is a negative for
> the handful of people that already understand how bmgroups work but we believe
> this is a reasonable trade-off to expose the feature to the masses.

How about allowing users to ctrl+click or middle-click a bookmark folder when
they want to open all tabs immediately? this would provide power users with a
quick way to open all tabs, but won't not compromise simplicity.

Prog.

Comment 7

[Brant Gurganus]

VERIFIED Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030714
Mozilla Firebird/0.6

Comment 8

[Don Erway]

This design desision, makes me not use firefox, and continue with mozilla.

Using a wheelmouse, the center button is not really easily used.

Is it possible to make left clicking on a folder, open the bookmarks as tabs?

Is there or could there be an extension, to put back the mozilla behavior?