225944 - bookmarks manager should have two-pane interface for easier filing of bookmarks into folders

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Bookmarks & History, enhancement, P4)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Sufficiently large bookmark lists are hard to organize because of the scrolling
required to move each bookmark into the appropriate folder.  For a bookmark list
like mine, with a bunch of folders at the top and a bunch of uncategorized
bookmarks underneath them, organizing my list requires:

1. clicking on a bookmark;
2. drag-scrolling it up to the top of the list;
3. dropping it into the appropriate folder;
4. scrolling back down to the next uncategorized bookmark.

This chore would be much easier if there were a second pane in the manager which
displayed just the hierarchy of folders.  Then, bookmarks from the list could be
dragged over to the folder tree and into the appropriate folders without the
need for any scrolling, requiring only:

1. clicking on a bookmark;
2. dragging it over to the appropriate folder;
3. dropping it.

Comment 1

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: implementation of feature

The implementation turned out to be pretty simple; it just required adding
another bookmarks-tree to the manager with type="folder", plus the required
containing box and splitter.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 198420, same bug for Seamonkey.

Comment 3

[Pierre Chanial]

Comment on attachment 135702 [details] [diff] [review]
implementation of feature

that's been a long time I want to implement a two pane	bookmarks manager. But
imo, the right panel should not be a tree, it should display the children of
the selected folder on the left.

Comment 4

[Pierre Chanial]

-> moving to 0.9, where we will review all our UI.

Comment 5

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

It's worth noting we want to do a fairly major review of Bookmarks UI after 1.0.
This is likely going to be a part of that (look at the bookmark managers used by
Safari, OmniWeb and Camino for example that do thigns similar to what pierre
talks about) but if this is easy to do then great we can get it sooner. 

Comment 6

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Myk, does your implementation support D&D into the folders on the left?

Comment 7

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Yes, in my implementation if you drag and drop a bookmark to a folder in the
left-hand pane it gets moved into that folder, and the change shows up in the
right-hand pane.

Comment 8

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

I think if myk can get his patch to work without issues then having this
represents a usabililty win that makes it worth having as a stepping stone to
any grander visions of bookmarks after 1.0. 

Comment 9

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

I haven't found any issues in testing.  Checking in per conversation with Ben:

/bookmarks/content/bookmarksManager.xul
Checking in browser/components/bookmarks/content/bookmarksManager.xul;
/cvsroot/mozilla/browser/components/bookmarks/content/bookmarksManager.xul,v 
<--  bookmarksManager.xul
new revision: 1.20; previous revision: 1.19
done

Comment 10

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

myk, can you also land this on the aviary branch so it makes 1.0?

Comment 11

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Yes, checked in:

Checking in browser/components/bookmarks/content/bookmarksManager.xul;
/cvsroot/mozilla/browser/components/bookmarks/content/bookmarksManager.xul,v 
<--  bookmarksManager.xul
new revision: 1.19.10.1; previous revision: 1.19
done

Comment 12

[Hiro]

I cannot understand...
What meaning does a left panel have?
Movement of a folder cannot be performed in D&D, either.

Usability is bad although movement is possible in "move" of a tool bar.
I think that an old tree display(right panel) is enough.

Mac OS X 10.3.4
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; ja-JP; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040620
Firefox/0.9.0+(AVIARY_1_0_20040515_BRANCH build)

Comment 13

[Dimitrios]

(In reply to comment #12)
> I cannot understand...
> What meaning does a left panel have?

E.g.: one has a long list of folders and screen resolution is not sufficient for
showing all of them (especially when one of the folders is expanded, thus
increasing the vertical length of the tree). Then bookmark movement becomes
painful without a compacted tree on the left.

Comment 14

[Hiro]

Thank you for a comment, Dimitrios-san.
I try a new bookmark manager variously.:-)

Comment 15

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change