Closed
Bug 250637
Opened 20 years ago
Closed 20 years ago
Remove broken "Power Search" feature that was never really implemented
Categories
(SeaMonkey :: Search, defect)
SeaMonkey
Search
Tracking
(Not tracked)
RESOLVED
FIXED
mozilla1.8alpha4
People
(Reporter: Stefan.Borggraefe, Assigned: Stefan.Borggraefe)
Details
Attachments
(4 files, 1 obsolete file)
41.76 KB,
patch
|
Details | Diff | Splinter Review | |
50.19 KB,
patch
|
pkwarren
:
review+
neil
:
superreview+
|
Details | Diff | Splinter Review |
48.72 KB,
patch
|
Details | Diff | Splinter Review | |
1.25 KB,
patch
|
mscott
:
review+
|
Details | Diff | Splinter Review |
This is the central dialog of this feature: chrome://communicator/content/search/search.xul It looks like it and all associated files are not reachable from the current Mozilla UI. Noone has done work on these files for years.
Comment 1•20 years ago
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This dialog is reachable (somewhat, at least): - set user_pref("browser.search.powermode", 1) - make sure the "Search" button is displayed in the URL bar - enter a search term - click "Search" But I agree that the dialog is pretty broken (did it ever work?). So the question is, if the dialog/the feature just needs a little love or if it is abandoned/useless.
Comment 2•20 years ago
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The dialog's last useful change was over 4.5 years ago. Furthermore, some of its features no longer work. So unless you can find a victim, I'd at least stop building it.
Comment 3•20 years ago
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Well, the potential victim is me. ;-) I'll dig further into this dialog to see if it would pay to revive it.
Comment 5•20 years ago
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http://mozilla.org/projects/search/intro.html http://mozilla.org/projects/search/results.jpg Was it that results.jpg, found on intro.html?
Assignee | ||
Comment 6•20 years ago
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(In reply to comment #5) > http://mozilla.org/projects/search/intro.html > > http://mozilla.org/projects/search/results.jpg > > Was it that results.jpg, found on intro.html? No, this is the "Advanced Search" still implemented and usable in the current Mozilla. You can see it when you select Navigator|Internet Search|Advanced and then perform a search with the search sidebar. This feature still works (more or less ;-) ) and shouldn't be removed. You can see the window this bug is about when you follow the instructions in comment 1.
Comment 7•20 years ago
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I've hacked together an extremely dirty proof of concept, i.e. the patch revives the powersearch dialog and its four tabs "Search Bookmarks/History", "Search Internet", "Search Mail/News" and "Search Addresses". All these four tabs work in a basic manner so that one can get a feeling of how it should work, but there are still lots of ugly hacks and non-functional junk. (See comment #1 as how to open the dialog.) This patch is far from being actually "reviewable", but it should provide a basis for the discussion whether this feature should return or not. If it should return, I'd be willing to fix the respective bug 37875.
Assignee | ||
Comment 8•20 years ago
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(In reply to comment #7) > This patch is far from being actually "reviewable", but it should provide a > basis for the discussion whether this feature should return or not. Nice hack. :-) Here is my opinion to start the discussion. I think this could be used to have a unified search dialog for the Suite. There could be the same button to open this dialog in Navigator, MailNews and Address Book. This would make the search functionality of Mozilla more discoverable for new users and they only need to learn about one button in all these three parts of mozilla to search their data/the internet. This common UI in different areas would also help the idea of Mozilla as an internet suite. For experienced/existing users this dialog wouldn't add much. I don't see why someone searching his/her Browser History need the other search functionality near by in the same dialog (for example). While all these operations are "Search" operations they are used/needed in quite different situations in my opinion. So I wonder what the use cases are this dialog would be advantageous for. Also I wonder what should happen with the existing Search dialogs and whether it is a good idea to duplicate their functionality in another dialog. Or is the idea to replace all these dialogs with the unified dialog? E.g. would the unified search dialog be used when I select Tools|Search Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Manager? Furthermore the current Advanced Search functionality used in this dialog for Internet search really sucks. ;-) I don't think this should be promoted as Mozilla's Internet Search functionality at its current state. Ben Buksch hinted he maybe wants to do something about this.
Comment 9•20 years ago
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In reply to comment #8: > I think this could be used to have a unified search dialog for the > Suite. There could be the same button to open this dialog in > Navigator, MailNews and Address Book. This would make the search > functionality of Mozilla more discoverable for new users and they > only need to learn about one button in all these three parts of > mozilla to search their data/the internet. This common UI in > different areas would also help the idea of Mozilla as an internet > suite. Agreed. > Also I wonder what should happen with the existing Search dialogs and > whether it is a good idea to duplicate their functionality in another > dialog. Ideally, all the dialogs would just be loaded into this main "Search Centre" dialog (like I did with Mail/News and Address search), but this will not work for Bookmarks and History (they have their own dialogs currently) or Internet (the sidebar-panel has other environmental needs). It should be possible to integrate most of the actual JS code into one file, though. > Or is the idea to replace all these dialogs with the unified > dialog? E.g. would the unified search dialog be used when I select > Tools|Search Bookmarks in the Bookmarks Manager? Since all the searches in their current location open up new dialogs/windows anyway, they could as well open the "Search Centre" with the respective tab selected. (The hack loads the tabpages only when needed, so this wouldn't cost much loading time.) Of course, the search dialog tabpages should get a more unified appearance then. Mail/News and Address search are quite similar looking, ditto Bookmarks and History and maybe Internet. Maybe it would even be worthwhile to implement the quicksearch feature for the results... > Furthermore the current Advanced Search functionality used in this > dialog for Internet search really sucks. ;-) I don't think this > should be promoted as Mozilla's Internet Search functionality at its > current state. Ben Buksch hinted he maybe wants to do something about > this. We should avoid double work, so BenB: do you already have concrete ideas/plans/code?
Comment 10•20 years ago
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Should we proceed with removing this functionality until a working replacement is available? I have tried Mozilla versions from 1.0 through a trunk build from today, and using the "Unified Search" feature (with the browser.search.powermode preference enabled) causes anything from a crash, a dialog which renders incorrectly, and a dialog which renders incorrectly and shows up as transparent. I have recently gotten a question from a translator regarding some of the entities in internet.dtd, and I can't really show them how the entities are displayed in Mozilla because the dialog does not come up. I would be happy to provide a patch to remove this functionality and the browser.search.powermode preference.
Comment 11•20 years ago
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Well, the attached patch *is* working, it just needs the clean-up. The real questions are: - Do we want this feature at all? - Do we want this feature in a different (and better, o'course ;-) ) way? (BenB made some dark hints, but hasn't provided real input yet.) Since these files are in the code for about five years without being really usable, I don't think we need to hurrily remove them immediately. But we should find answers better sooner than later...
Comment 12•20 years ago
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(In reply to comment #11) > Well, the attached patch *is* working, it just needs the clean-up. I think it is more than just getting it partially functioning - it also needs to be maintained if people think this is a valuable feature. > Since these files are in the code for about five years without being really > usable, I don't think we need to hurrily remove them immediately. > But we should find answers better sooner than later... I disagree. With Mozilla 1.4, 1.7, and 1.7.2 builds, we are crashing when enabling the powermode preference and searching. On current trunk builds, the dialog comes up properly but a lot of the xul is transparent and causes weird artifacts to be drawn to the screen. On builds all the way back to Mozilla 1.0 we get Javascript errors when loading the search dialog. We are still shipping the .dtd files in our jar files, which means translators are translating these dialogs but are unable to test their translations. I'd say we at least stop packaging these files in jar.mn (and stop opening the search.xul page in navigator.js) until we get a better idea of how this dialog should work and if it is worth the effort.
Comment 13•20 years ago
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> it also needs to be maintained if people think this is a valuable feature. If we come to a sustainable solution, I'd be willing to maintain it. > I'd say we at least stop packaging these files in jar.mn (and stop opening the > search.xul page in navigator.js) until we get a better idea of how this dialog > should work and if it is worth the effort. Okay, agreed on that.
Comment 14•20 years ago
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I've put together some thoughts about how a new "Power Search" dialog could look like: <http://mozilla.tprac.de/powersearch.html>. If you have any comments or ideas on that, please use the thread "Power Search" in npm.xpfe, starting with <2ofjcbF9ikc8U1@uni-berlin.de>.
Assignee | ||
Comment 15•20 years ago
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Karsten agreed in the newsgroup thread that the old broken feature can be removed for now. So here is a patch to that effect.
Assignee: search → Stefan.Borggraefe
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Assignee | ||
Comment 16•20 years ago
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The patch I just uploaded contained some unrelated changes from another bug. Sorry for the spam... :-(
Assignee | ||
Updated•20 years ago
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Attachment #157989 -
Attachment is obsolete: true
Assignee | ||
Comment 17•20 years ago
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Assignee | ||
Comment 18•20 years ago
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Comment on attachment 157990 [details] [diff] [review] Removal Patch V2 Philip, can you review this? If you're OK with the patch, I will ask Neil for sr/moa.
Attachment #157990 -
Flags: review?(pkwarren)
Assignee | ||
Comment 19•20 years ago
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Assignee | ||
Updated•20 years ago
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Attachment #157993 -
Flags: review?(mscott)
Updated•20 years ago
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Attachment #157993 -
Flags: review?(mscott) → review+
Comment 20•20 years ago
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Comment on attachment 157990 [details] [diff] [review] Removal Patch V2 Looks good to me.
Attachment #157990 -
Flags: review?(pkwarren) → review+
Assignee | ||
Updated•20 years ago
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Attachment #157990 -
Flags: superreview?(neil.parkwaycc.co.uk)
Updated•20 years ago
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Attachment #157990 -
Flags: superreview?(neil.parkwaycc.co.uk) → superreview+
Assignee | ||
Comment 21•20 years ago
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Fix checked in (Thunderbird and Seamonkey). I'm changing the summary a bit because the pref name was "powermode" and Karsten's proposal is about "Power Search". Also the files weren't entirely unused (see comment 1).
Status: ASSIGNED → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Summary: Remove unused files for "Unified Search" feature that was never really implemented → Remove broken "Power Search" feature that was never really implemented
Target Milestone: --- → mozilla1.8alpha4
Comment 22•19 years ago
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Any plans to remove this feature/files from Mozilla 1.7.5? Just enter chrome://communicator/content/search/search.xul in the location bar and see for yourself...
Assignee | ||
Comment 23•19 years ago
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(In reply to comment #22) > Any plans to remove this feature/files from Mozilla 1.7.5? No. Why do you think this is needed for the 1.7 branch?
Comment 24•19 years ago
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Lots of people use the official builds, this instead of a nightly, so they will run into troubles one day sooner or later, like I did the other day.
Assignee | ||
Comment 25•19 years ago
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(In reply to comment #24) > Lots of people use the official builds, this instead of a nightly, so they will > run into troubles one day sooner or later, like I did the other day. I don't see how this bugfix helps users not running into troubles, because this broken feature is very well hidden. How did you run in what kind of troubles? The removal just reduces the build size a tiny bit and saves translators from doing some unnecessary work. Since the 1.7 branch is already translated the latter reason doesn't really apply to it anymore.
Comment 26•19 years ago
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> I don't see how this bugfix helps users not running into troubles
My point is a valid one, but I'm not going into another endless debate, that's
all I have to say about it.
Updated•16 years ago
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Product: Core → SeaMonkey
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Description
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