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)

defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED
mozilla1.8alpha4

People

(Reporter: Stefan.Borggraefe, Assigned: Stefan.Borggraefe)

Details

Attachments

(4 files, 1 obsolete file)

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.
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.
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.
Well, the potential victim is me. ;-)
I'll dig further into this dialog to see if it would pay to revive it.
CCing Ben after reading the discussion in Bug 37875.
(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.
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.
(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.
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?
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.
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...
(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.
> 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.
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>.
Attached patch Removal patch (obsolete) — Splinter Review
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
Attached patch Removal Patch V2Splinter Review
The patch I just uploaded contained some unrelated changes from another bug.
Sorry for the spam... :-(
Attachment #157989 - Attachment is obsolete: true
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)
Attachment #157993 - Flags: review?(mscott)
Attachment #157993 - Flags: review?(mscott) → review+
Comment on attachment 157990 [details] [diff] [review]
Removal Patch V2

Looks good to me.
Attachment #157990 - Flags: review?(pkwarren) → review+
Attachment #157990 - Flags: superreview?(neil.parkwaycc.co.uk)
Attachment #157990 - Flags: superreview?(neil.parkwaycc.co.uk) → superreview+
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
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...
(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?
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.
(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.
> 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.
Product: Core → SeaMonkey
You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.

Attachment

General

Created:
Updated:
Size: